| Fusion (25) |  |
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| Nuclear fusion (1) | |
| Fusion (25) | |
| Fusion reaction (1) | |
| Nuclear fusion (1) | |
Fusion power designs aren t cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.
and will present results this week at the International atomic energy agency s Fusion energy Conference in St petersburg Russia. ight now this design has the greatest potential of producing economical fusion power of any current conceptsays Thomas Jarboe a professor
The design builds on existing technology and creates a magnetic field within a closed space to hold plasma in place long enough for fusion to occur allowing the hot plasma to react and burn.
which you generate fusion is the medium in which you re also driving all the current required to confine itsutherland says.
A fusion power plant producing 1 gigawatt (1 billion watts) of power would cost $2. 7 billion
while a coal plant of the same output would cost $2. 8 billion according to their analysis. f we do invest in this type of fusion we could be rewarded
and get significant fusion power output. The team has filed patents on the reactor concept and plans to continue developing
#Finally, Fusion Takes Small Steps Toward Reality After three decades of expensive government-funded research that has failed to produce tangible breakthroughs,
Commercial power generation from fusion is still a long way off but the outlines of such a reactor can now be perceived.
Traditional fusion research has centered on large, doughnut-shaped machines called tokamaks, which exert powerful magnetic fields to compress high-temperature plasmaoiling balls of charged particles that fuse to form helium, releasing large amounts of energy in the process.
have galvanized the fusion community. Tri Alpha Energy based in Foothill Ranch, California, said in early August that it has succeeded in keeping a high-energy plasma stable for five millisecondsuch less than the blink of an eye,
keeping the plasma stable at a high-enough temperature to achieve energy-positive fusion. The recent experiment indicated that the companyhich has attracted millions of dollars in funding from investors including Goldman sachs and Vulcan Inc,
At MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, a group headed by Dennis Whyte a professor of nuclear science and engineering and the center director, published a conceptual design in July for a machine called the ARC reactor (ffordable, robust, compact.
Increasing the amplitude of the surrounding magnetic field raises the amount of fusion power produced in the plasma to the fourth power dramatic increase that could lead to a commercial prototype in a matter of years,
Now the advent of advanced superconductor tapes could enable a compact reactor that produces fusion continuously.
Published in Fusion Engineering and Design, the ARC reactor paper stresses that, for the moment, it a conceptual design only.
and Vancouver-based General Fusion, are working on related -but-different designs to bring fusion to the prototype stage (see New Approach to Fusion. e are getting closer to working machines,
says Michel Laberge, the founder and chief scientist at General Fusion. or many years, fusion research was the realm of big government labs that did great work
and established the basis for fusion to work. But there was not a great sense of urgency. ow the urgency has risen,
and these companies are testing new ideas and new approachesnd attracting the investment to do so.
General Fusion recently landed $27 million in new funding from a group of investors led by the sovereign wealth fund of Malaysia. ight now
what happening is a rethinking, says Burton Richter, who won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1976
Companies like Tri Alpha offer a path to fusion paved not with taxpayer dollars but with private-sector moneyhich ultimately is the only way to actually get something built.
With the wariness of a veteran fusion scientist, though, he advises caution: ill you build it, you don know for sure. g
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