Nuclear Fusion News & Discussions

[Time_Traveller]

Nuclear fusion scheme in Gloucestershire loses out to competitor but hope remains for former plant

4 OCT 2022

Leaders of the Western Gateway Partnership bid to bring the UK’s STEP programme to Severn Edge say "this is not the end of the road” for the site despite the Government deciding that the UK’s first fusion plant will be built in Nottinghamshire.

The Severn Edge bid received support from the wide South West region, industry, four of the most research intensive universities in the UK, businesses, political leaders and the community. During the process the profile of both Oldbury and Berkeley sites in Gloucestershire have boosted into the spotlight, gaining a wide range of interest within Westminster, across the Western Gateway, and the wider UK.

Despite being shortlisted as one of the last five sites being considered to be home to the £220 million programme and receiving positive feedback in assessments, the government has announced today that will be developed at the West Burton A site in Nottinghamshire.

The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production programme (STEP) is the national project to develop a prototype energy plant to prove the commercial viability of the futuristic energy source. Fusion has been described as having the potential to become the “ultimate low carbon energy” source, recreating the reaction that takes place within the sun.

Following the decision the UK Atomic Energy Authority, who are responsible for delivering the programme, said that “the site has many attractive features and would likely be an outstanding candidate for a wide range of developments”, adding that the decision was “testimony to the highly competitive nature of the process”.

https://www.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/n ... es-7663750

[weatheriscool]

A new solution to one of the major problems of fusion research
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-solution- ... usion.html
by Frank Fleschner, Max Planck Society

Type-I ELM plasma instabilities can melt the walls of fusion devices. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) and the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) found a way to get them under control. Their work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Nuclear fusion power plants could one day provide a sustainable solution to our energy problems. That is why research is being carried out worldwide on this method of energy generation, which imitates processes on the sun. For the principle to work on Earth, plasmas must be heated to at least 100 million degrees Celsius in reactors. Magnetic fields enclose the plasma so that the wall of the reactor does not melt. This only works because the outermost centimeters in the magnetically formed plasma edge are extremely well insulated. In this region, however, plasma instabilities, so-called edge localized modes (ELMs), occur frequently. During such an event, energetic particles from the plasma may hit the wall of the reactor, potentially damaging it.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Garching and from the Vienna University of Technology have now been able to show: There is an operating mode for fusion reactors that avoids this problem. Instead of large, potentially destructive instabilities, one intentionally accepts many small instabilities that do not pose a problem for the reactor's wall.

"Our work represents a breakthrough in understanding the occurrence and prevention of large Type I ELMs," says Elisabeth Wolfrum, research group leader at IPP in Garching, Germany, and professor at TU Wien. "The operation regime we propose is probably the most promising scenario for future fusion power plant plasmas." The results have now been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

[Doozer]

I think graphene would do wonders for nuclear fusion.

[caltrek]

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Awarded More than $12 Million to Speed Development of a Fusion Pilot Plant
November 15, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) funding of more than $12 million to work with laboratories around the world to accelerate the development of a pilot plant powered by the carbon-free fusion energy that drives the sun and stars and can counter climate change.

The three-year PPPL awards — with several more pending — cover research to speed the development of both doughnut-shaped tokamak fusion facilities and compact cored apple-shaped spherical tokamaks akin to the flagship National Spherical Tokamak Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U) at the DOE national Laboratory. The work is managed in the new Tokamak Experimental Sciences Department led by Rajesh Maingi and Joseph Snipes and may be subject to revision in future years as federal budgets evolve.

Fusion combines light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei, or ions, that makes up 99 percent of the visible universe — to release vast amounts of energy. PPPL and scientists around the world are seeking to reproduce and control fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of safe and clean power to generate electricity.

The PPPL awards are part of the $47 million of DOE funding to speed closing the remaining science and technology gaps to enable the construction of a power plant to produce net electricity from fusion at low capital cost. “We must continue to provide innovative solutions to the most urgent challenges facing fusion energy and advance the state of the art across fusion and plasma sciences,” said Harriet Kung, acting associate director of science for fusion energy sciences. The $47 million, she said, will empower “moving us closer to fusion energy as a clean and abundant energy source.”

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/971409

[weatheriscool]

Covering a cylinder with a magnetic coil triples its energy output in nuclear fusion test
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-cylinder- ... utput.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A team of researchers working at the National Ignition Facility, part of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has found that covering a cylinder containing a small amount of hydrogen fuel with a magnetic coil and firing lasers at it triples its energy output—another step toward the development of nuclear fusion as a power source.

In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team, which has members from several facilities in the U.S., one in the U.K. and one in Japan, describes upgrading their setup to allow for the introduction of the magnetic coil.

Last year, a team working at the same facility announced that they had come closer to achieving ignition in a nuclear fusion test than anyone has so far. Unfortunately, the were unable to repeat their results. Since that time, the team has been reviewing their original design, looking for ways to make it better.

The original design involved firing 192 laser beams at a tiny cylinder containing a tiny sphere of hydrogen at its center. This created X-rays that heated the sphere until its atoms began to fuse. Some of the design improvements have involved changing the size of the holes through which the lasers pass, but they have only led to minor changes.

Looking for a better solution, the team studied prior research and found several studies that had shown, via simulation, that encasing a cylinder in a magnetic field should significantly increase the energy output.

[Time_Traveller]

Defects found in two key components of ITER's tokamak

22 November 2022

The director general of ITER, Pietro Barabaschi, said: "If there is one good thing about this situation, it is that it is happening at a moment we can fix it. The know-how we are acquiring in dealing with ITER's first-of-a-kind components will serve others when they launch their own fusion ventures. It is in ITER's nature and mission, as a unique and ambitious research infrastructure, to go through a whole range of challenges and setbacks during construction. And it is therefore our task and duty to promptly inform the engaged scientific community so that they will take precautions when dealing with the same type of assemblies."

ITER is a major international project to build a tokamak fusion device in Cadarache, France, designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy. The goal of ITER is to operate at 500 MW (for at least 400 seconds continuously) with 50 MW of plasma heating power input. It appears that an additional 300 MWe of electricity input may be required in operation. No electricity will be generated at ITER.

Thirty-five nations are collaborating to build ITER - the European Union is contributing almost half of the cost of its construction, while the other six members (China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the USA) are contributing equally to the rest. Construction began in 2010 and the original 2018 first plasma target date was put back to 2025 by the ITER council in 2016.

The vacuum vessel thermal shields are about 20 mm thick and contribute to insulating the superconducting magnet system operating at 4K, or minus 269°C. ITER said that in November 2021 helium tests detected a leak on an element of the vacuum vessel thermal shield that had been delivered in 2020. The cause was found to be stress caused by the bending and welding of the cooling fluid pipes to the thermal shield panels "compounded by a slow chemical reaction due to the presence of chlorine residues in some small areas near the pipe welds".

This had caused "stress corrosion cracking", ITER said, "and over time, cracks up to 2.2 mm deep had developed in the pipes".

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Arti ... ?feed=feed

[weatheriscool]

US scientists boost clean power hopes with fusion energy breakthrough
Net energy gain indicates technology could provide an abundant zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels
https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66e ... c345589dc7

US government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless, zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment.

Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes — a milestone known as net energy gain or target gain, which would help prove the process could provide a reliable, abundant alternative to fossil fuels and conventional nuclear energy.

The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses a process called inertial confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks, the people said.

Wow!

[weatheriscool]

Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers
Source: New York Times

Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that they had crossed a major milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory.

Scientists for decades have said that fusion, the nuclear reaction that makes stars shine, could provide a future source of bountiful energy.

The result announced on Tuesday is the first fusion reaction in a laboratory setting that actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction.

“This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” Arati Prabhakar, the White House science adviser, said during a news conference on Tuesday morning at the Department of Energy’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “And even deeper understanding of the scientific principles that are applied here.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/scie ... rough.html

[Vector]

[funkervogt]

The U.S. government has exaggerated the importance of the recent advance in fusion power. Commercial fusion reactors remain many decades distant, and in fact, may never be possible to build.

The strong force is attractive, not repulsive. So it pulls the protons and neutrons of the parent nuclei together to form a new, heavier, daughter nucleus. And because that daughter requires less energy to bind it than do the parents, the surplus is released—80% of it as kinetic energy of the departing neutron and 20% as kinetic energy of the helium. With appropriate engineering, this kinetic energy might be captured and used to generate electricity.

What the researchers at NIF have done is to release more energy from the imploded pellet than was inserted by the incident laser beams. They have, in other words, lit a nuclear spark that has burned for a while through the pellet in a self-sustaining way—something never before achieved, and which might be scaled up to release a far bigger fraction of the potential energy in the pellet’s contents.

Neat, in principle. And important for understanding hydrogen bombs. But this approach can be a power source only if the energy released exceeds that employed to generate the laser beams, rather than merely exceeding that incident upon the pellet. Unfortunately, the huge inefficiencies involved in creating those beams mean that only a tiny fraction of that generative energy does arrive at the pellet. Not really the basis for a workable reactor.

It thus seems unlikely that the future of civil fusion power (if it has one) lies with inertial-confinement by laser. The technology is fiddly. And even with lasers more modern than that used by NIF (which opened in 2009) the process of “pumping” the device to create the beam is inherently inefficient. None of the increasingly numerous attempts to commercialise fusion employs inertial-confinement by laser. Most are based on tokamaks, which heat the deuterium-tritium mixture into a plasma, rather than freezing it into a pellet, and do the compressing magnetically.

https://news.yahoo.com/controlled-fusio ... 42667.html

[erowind]

.

[wjfox]

Due to these inefficiences, and the large upfront capital costs, I doubt fusion will play a significant role in the world's energy needs, although it may start to be deployed in various places from 2050-2070.

This is much like the debate with fission. Renewables will be cheaper, quicker to construct, and with further advantages such as decentralisation.

Rather than generating electricity here on Earth, a better long-term use might be in remote locations on moons of the Solar System. Or perhaps even large, crewed spacecraft on deep space missions (post-2100), far from sunlight.

[caltrek]

Maybe I am missing something, but it almost seems to be that fusion will have the advantage of being a centralized energy source, whereas solar and electric have the advantage of being decentralized sources. Solar and wind require a lot of land and/or space. If fusion is like fission, it will be able to generate proportionately quite a bit more power where land and/or space are at a premium. It can thus more easily replace large scale fission and carbon-based fuel plants. Replacement is also of high importance in order to take maximum advantage of distribution networks. Something that is more difficult for solar and wind. A lot depends on how much further the development of solar and wind, including battery technology, progresses.

Eventually, it will become more of an economic and political question, as opposed to a technical engineering question. The technological feasibility of fusion will mean little if its perceived relative cost is prohibitive. The potential flexibility of incentive structures through the tax and subsidy system means it is even harder to predict. One of the things that was said to slow the initial development of solar was that it was decentralized, and therefore not favored politically by elites who desired greater monopoly, and thus market, control. These sorts of considerations and the struggles they entail are thus a source of greater complexity for futurists to consider.

[Xyls]

Interesting:

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Britain ‘only 15 years away’ from world-first nuclear fusion plant
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/0 ... ion-plant/
Science minister claims that investors and engineering companies are now ready to accelerate pace of UK’s ambitious energy plan
By Joe Pinkstone, Science Correspondent 6 February 2023 • 8:00pm
George Freeman

Nuclear fusion could be powering British homes in just 15 years, making it the first country in the world to make energy from the process, ministers have said.

Currently, nuclear fusion has only been achieved in labs and requires far more energy to make it happen than it produces.

However, George Freeman, the science minister, believes the 15-year timeline could be enough to solve fusion and make a plant capable of working at a large scale and making more power for the grid that it needs to be operational.

Speaking on Monday at the West Burton power station in Nottinghamshire, Mr Freeman unveiled a new company which will be in charge of the nation’s drive to build the world’s first functioning nuclear fusion power station.

UK Industrial Fusion Solutions Ltd (UKIFS) will sit inside the Government’s UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and be tasked with supercharging the creation of Britain’s, and the world’s, first and only commercially-viable fusion plant.

[weatheriscool]

Wendelstein-7X fusion reactor reaches milestone
https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nac ... n-13377133
February 23, 2023 5:17 pm Robert Klatt
Fusion test reactor Wendelstein-7X

Germany's Wendelstein-7X fusion reactor has reached a milestone in fusion plasma energy turnover. Wendelstein-7X ran at 1.3 gigajoules for eight minutes. This is a new record for discharge duration and heating capacity.

Greifswald (Germany). Various nuclear fusion reactors are currently being tested, including a laser fusion system from the National Ignition Facility (NIF), with whose laser-induced nuclear fusion the burning plasma state was recently achieved for the first time. In addition, laser-induced nuclear fusion resulted in an unexpected excess of energy in the fusion plasma, which according to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution should not exist. Other institutes are also testing fusion reactors in which the plasma is confined by strong magnetic fields. These are divided into tokamak plants, such as the ITER large reactor, and stellarator reactors, such as the Wendelstein 7-X.

The Wendelstein 7-X fusion reactor in Greifswald is the world's largest stellarator reactor. A study by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) recently showed that his concept is suitable for the construction of power plants. In the Wendelstein-7X, a ring of 50 superconducting magnetic coils forms a complex magnetic field that keeps the ultra-hot fusion plasma in place. In contrast to tokamak systems, in which plasma can only be fused for a short time, a stellarator reactor can theoretically run continuously. Wendelstein-7X should prove this in reality.
Modification of the Wendelstein-7X fusion reactor

The first experiments with the Wendelstein fusion reactor started in 2015. In 2016 Wendelstein-7X generated its first hydrogen plasma and in 2018 the

[wjfox]

UKAEA awards £3.1 million of contracts to accelerate the growth of UK’s fusion industry

February 28, 2023

Eighteen organisations have secured contracts with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) to demonstrate how their innovative technologies and proposed solutions can help make fusion energy a commercial reality. The organisations will focus on overcoming specific technical and physical challenges.

The contracts – feasibility studies from £50,000 up to £200,000 – are funded by the UKAEA’s ‘Fusion Industry Programme’ and awarded through the UK Government platform ‘Small Business Research Initiative’. The latest contracts are the second part of the Fusion Industry Programme, following the first cycle of the Fusion Industry Programme in 2021.

The projects aim to tackle specific challenges linked to the commercialisation of fusion energy, from novel fusion materials and manufacturing techniques through to innovative heating and cooling systems, all needed for future fusion powerplants.

Tim Bestwick, UKAEA’s Chief Technology Officer, said: “In the past 12 months we have seen significant advances both in the UK and globally that demonstrate the potential for fusion energy to be a safe, low-carbon and sustainable part of the world’s future energy supply. However, there are a number of significant technical challenges to address for fusion energy to realise its potential. The Fusion Industry Programme is helping engage organisations and industrial partners to stimulate innovation and address these important challenges.”

The Fusion Industry Programme is part of the Government’s £484 million support package for UK research, announced last year. The Programme was allocated £42.1 million as part of this package to stimulate innovation and to accelerate the development of the fusion industry.

https://ccfe.ukaea.uk/ukaea-awards-3-1m ... -industry/

[weatheriscool]

New discovery points the way to more compact fusion power plants
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-discovery ... power.html
by Max Planck Society

A magnetic cage keeps the more than 100 million degree Celsius hot plasmas in nuclear fusion devices at a distance from the vessel wall so that they do not melt. Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) have found a way to significantly reduce this distance. This could make it possible to build smaller and cheaper fusion reactors for energy production. The work was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The international experimental reactor ITER, which is currently being built in southern France, represents the most advanced way to generate energy in a fusion power plant. The design follows the tokamak principle, i.e., a fusion plasma at more than 100 million degrees is confined in a magnetic field shaped like a donut. This concept prevents the hot plasma from coming into contact with the enclosing wall and damaging it. The ASDEX Upgrade tokamak experiment at IPP in Garching near Munich serves as a blueprint for ITER and later fusion power plants. Important elements for ITER were developed here. And plasma operating conditions and components for later power plants can already be tested today.

[weatheriscool]

Tokamak Energy unveils images of fusion power plant slated for 2030s
By Paul McClure
April 11, 2023

https://newatlas.com/energy/commercial- ... sil-fuels/

Tokamak Energy has released the first images of what its commercial fusion power plant, which it says would safely generate enough electricity to power 50,000 homes in the 2030s, would look like.

The company, based near Oxford in the UK, plans to build a fusion pilot plant around its upcoming ST-E1 tokamak, which it says will be ready for rollout in the early 2030s to demonstrate the ability to deliver electricity to the grid, opening the potential for 500-megawatt commercial plants to be deployed worldwide.

When a mix of deuterium and tritium, two forms of hydrogen, is heated at temperatures hotter than the sun’s core, they fuse to create helium and release energy that can be harnessed to produce electricity and heat. The plasma created by the heating process is confined using strong magnets arranged in a ring-shaped device called a tokamak.

Fusion is extremely efficient, creating far more energy per kilogram of fuel than the burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, or gas produces. One kilogram (2.2 lb) of fusion fuel releases the same energy as burning about 10,000 tonnes (11,023 ton) of coal. Tokamak Energy says that fusion offers other advantages that other renewable energy sources lack.