Commercial fusion power companies moving toward test systems

A tokamak moves forward as two companies advance plans for stellarators.

See full article...

 

[JAlfredPrufrock]

Also worth keeping an eye on Fuse. Different mechanism (z-pinch), but has attracted some talent.

 

[proxima]

I still don't see any plan to convert the extremely impractical energy output to electricity. Isn't it mostly high energy neutrons and gamma rays?

 

[LibraryCommoner]

chosen o be both capable of handling temperatures in the area of 20 Kelvin, and be able to tolerate neutron exposure. Fortunately, stainless still is up

I know I'm being pedantic about spelling but shouldn't it be "chosen to" and "stainless steel" ?

edit: the typos have been corrected! much appreciation!

 

[Fatesrider]

I still don't see any plan to convert the extremely impractical energy output to electricity. Isn't it mostly high energy neutrons and gamma rays?

Steam is most likely the output. It's basically supposed to be a heat source, like a coal fired plant or, well, anything other than wind or solar. Water (or some fluid) put into motion (by heat or gravity) turning a turbine.

At least that's my understanding of it. If that's not the case, I'd be wondering how they're going to do it as well.

On the other end of the spectrum are a handful of companies that are trying to commercialize designs that have been extensively studied in the academic world. And there have been some interesting signs of progress here.

Maybe my comprehension is a bit off here, but isn't this like selling aircraft designs a decade before the Wright Brothers figured out how to do it?

 

[Photon_plumber]

Please don’t allow the retrograde current administration to mess with this, as they are tied at the hip with the oil and gas industry. Any advancement or knowledge gained here is valuable.

 

[thrillgore]

I still don't see any plan to convert the extremely impractical energy output to electricity. Isn't it mostly high energy neutrons and gamma rays?

There's a design proposal in the DEMO tokamak.

 

[Veritas super omens]

I know I'm being pedantic about spelling but shouldn't it be "chosen to" and "stainless steel" ?

They will use it to distill investor dollars into bitcoin?

 

[MilesArcher]

While we've been waiting for 60+ years for a fusion power breakthrough, solar + batteries have been incrementally improving over the decades, to the point where when fusion becomes available, it will be more expensive than solar.

Don't get me wrong, R&D in this direction is fantastic. Heck with science budgets rapidly disintegrating, this kind of research is more necessary than ever. I just think I'm going to see solar plants in orbit before there's commercially viable fusion power.

 

[Uncivil Servant]

I wonder, the mention of academic papers and designs based on proving that those concepts were viable rather than a finished commercial product...

I couldn't help but think of the early reduced instruction set chips. I'm not sure if there's any real analogy there or not.

 

[Uncivil Servant]

I still don't see any plan to convert the extremely impractical energy output to electricity. Isn't it mostly high energy neutrons and gamma rays?

I'd assumed the plan would be to use high-pressure water or other coolants to produce steam to drive a turbine, just like everything else we've done since the Industrial Revolution?

 

[Lexus Lunar Lorry]

While we've been waiting for 60+ years for a fusion power breakthrough, solar + batteries have been incrementally improving over the decades, to the point where when fusion becomes available, it will be more expensive than solar.

Don't get me wrong, R&D in this direction is fantastic. Heck with science budgets rapidly disintegrating, this kind of research is more necessary than ever. I just think I'm going to see solar plants in orbit before there's commercially viable fusion power.

I once recall hearing about a sci-fi setting where the inner and outer solar systems have vastly different economies: fusion plants are heavy and primitive, so everything inside Mars relies on solar power while everything outside relies on fusion.

 

[Veritas super omens]

Steam is most likely the output. It's basically supposed to be a heat source, like a coal fired plant or, well, anything other than wind or solar. Water (or some fluid) put into motion (by heat or gravity) turning a turbine.

At least that's my understanding of it. If that's not the case, I'd be wondering how they're going to do it as well.


Maybe my comprehension is a bit off here, but isn't this like selling aircraft designs a decade before the Wright Brothers figured out how to do it?

Bolding mine.

Yeah... aircraft designs before the Wright brothers but antigrav tech was already available and cheaper...


My prediction for fusion is that eventually (assuming the impendng crash of civilization doesn't actually make humans extinct) our understanding of plasma physics will advance to the point where cheaper alternatives like PV's and wind will be be inappropriate or unavailable (eg moons of Jupiter, Saturn or deep subsurface installations it will make financial sense. These investors will have been dead for many, many generations. I contend that the technology is unproven, there is no reasonable path to less expensive delivered electrons in at least the next 25 years.

 

[Uncivil Servant]

Maybe my comprehension is a bit off here, but isn't this like selling aircraft designs a decade before the Wright Brothers figured out how to do it?

And? You think airworthiness or lack thereof stopped anyone in the late-19th century?

(I mean, aside from the obvious Darwinian mechanisms)

 

[hive]

@ John Timmer: you missed another Start Up working on a stellarator: Proxima Fusion from Germany, home of the winding Wendelstein 7-X ^^

https://www.mpg.de/24360302/proxima-fusion

 

[Octavus]

I always think that it is good to remember that the Sun's H-H fusion rate is extremely slow. Even the core of the Sun has a power density lower than a human. Any practical power plant needs to be many orders of magnitude more power dense. They aren't just trying to make a star in a jar, but a plasma with a much much greater power density.

 

[Chuckstar]

I always think that it is good to remember that the Sun's H-H fusion rate is extremely slow. Even the core of the Sun has a power density lower than a human. Any practical power plant needs to be many orders of magnitude more power dense. They aren't just trying to make a star in a jar, but a plasma with a much much greater power density.

I’ve seen the Sun’s power density likened to that of a compost pile.

 

[Ozy]

In the article title 'commercial fusion plant' suggests that the purpose of this facility is to sell electricity to the grid, and I don't think that's true. That's supposed to be the next gen plant ARC. This is still a research facility, but mostly privately funded.

This is their webpage
https://cfs.energy/technology/
which notes that ARC is commercialization.

 

[nicholas.lecompte]

Maybe my comprehension is a bit off here, but isn't this like selling aircraft designs a decade before the Wright Brothers figured out how to do it?

I would argue it's even worse than that! By 1860 the basic physics of flight in birds was well understood and people were building heavier-than-air gliders. The only thing missing was a sufficiently light and powerful engine.

I think the 2022 successful fusion ignition should be seen like George Cayley's 1850s gliders using cambered airfoils - a demonstration that bird-like flying machines possible, but with decades of truly enormous engineering challenges ahead.

 

[Dr. Jay]

@ John Timmer: you missed another Start Up working on a stellarator: Proxima Fusion from Germany, home of the winding Wendelstein 7-X ^^

https://www.mpg.de/24360302/proxima-fusion

I missed a LOT of startups. There is no way for me to give a comprehensive overview; just by setting the cutoff at "using well understood tech" I eliminated the vast majority.

 

[piotrek54321]

While we've been waiting for 60+ years for a fusion power breakthrough, solar + batteries have been incrementally improving over the decades, to the point where when fusion becomes available, it will be more expensive than solar.

Don't get me wrong, R&D in this direction is fantastic. Heck with science budgets rapidly disintegrating, this kind of research is more necessary than ever. I just think I'm going to see solar plants in orbit before there's commercially viable fusion power.

Solar is still somewhat difficult for interstellar travel. Fusion would be much better.

 

[Chuckstar]

I would argue it's even worse than that! By 1860 the basic physics of flight in birds was well understood and people were building heavier-than-air gliders. The only thing missing was a sufficiently light and powerful engine.

I think the 2022 successful fusion ignition should be seen like George Cayley's 1850s gliders using cambered airfoils - a demonstration that bird-like flying machines possible, but with decades of truly enormous engineering challenges ahead.

Yeah. A kite is also a heavier-than-air device that flies based on airflow interacting with a surface. The difference is that you hold the kite's ground speed at zero and use the wind speed for air flow.

At the same time the Wright brothers were working, Alexander Graham Bell had a team working on flying machines at the same time, but they were focused on designs evolved from kites, since kites are fully stable. Their conceptual problem (near as I can tell not being an aeronautics guy) is that kite stability is dependent on being tethered to the ground.

One of the Wright brothers' key conceptual breakthroughs was an understanding that a flying machine didn't have to be 100% stable in flight, as long as any instability evolved slowly enough for a pilot to react to it. No accident that two guys that ran a bicycle shop were the ones to have that conceptual breakthrough.

 

[Lord Bayaz]

Great article! I found the part about the tritium-generating capabilities of the test stellarator to be especially interesting. I wonder if they can produce tritium for less than the $30,000 a gram market price?

 

[DrewW]

I still don't see any plan to convert the extremely impractical energy output to electricity. Isn't it mostly high energy neutrons and gamma rays?

There is a sort of Operation Paperclip at work where very ethical scientists are bombarded with gamma rays to unlock their potential.

 

[Apostolos]

I hope some of these fusion startups succeed. In the very long term, I expect fusion to be the power source of civilization. It is a higher density power source that will work anywhere and requires less raw materials and real estate than solar plus batteries. It doesn't have the proliferation issues of fission and the fuel is abundant in the solar system. In the meantime, however, we will have a mix of different energy sources.

 

[studenteternal]

I still don't see any plan to convert the extremely impractical energy output to electricity. Isn't it mostly high energy neutrons and gamma rays?

This! I came here to ask the same thing, last time I looked a year or so ago I didn't see that any of the test reactors had an even preliminary design as to how a reactor was going to be supplied with fuel for continuous operation or to turn the thermal energy into useful electricity. I assume it will boil water at some point but I don't think you can just run a heat exchanger through the plasma.

Seems a little premature to call it a "commercial" fusion reactor if you can't run it outside of short bursts or get energy to sell from it.

 

[YetAnotherBoris]

As long as wind and solar are Earth bound and are intermittent with no way to know how long the intermittence will last we will need alternative energy generation. Currently that's natural gas and fission both preferred over coal but fusion would be superior to either.

The answer to the intermittency of renewables is twofold: multiply redundant long-range grid interconnections (including HVDC transmission lines) with flexible on-demand switching and routing, and grid-scale storage (anything from grid-scale batteries of all sorts, not just chemical - to pumped hydro or analogous). Both are cheaper, more scalable, and less hazardous when proliferated at scale and across the world, than either fission or fusion (and natural gas is at best only a stopgap measure, as it's both a finite commodity and a greenhouse gas contributor.)

 

[YetAnotherBoris]

I'm a fan of General Fusion. It's a completely different design vs. all the plasma-confinement schemes, not to mention its peak steampunk concept.

 

[YetAnotherBoris]

This! I came here to ask the same thing, last time I looked a year or so ago I didn't see that any of the test reactors had an even preliminary design as to how a reactor was going to be supplied with fuel for continuous operation or to turn the thermal energy into useful electricity. I assume it will boil water at some point but I don't think you can just run a heat exchanger through the plasma.

Seems a little premature to call it a "commercial" fusion reactor if you can't run it outside of short bursts or get energy to sell from it.

As mentioned in TFA, the walls of the reactor get heated to 1000°C temperatures. They need to be cooled; circulating water as coolant would both keep the walls from melting and generate superheated water that can then be fed into a turbine to generate electricity.

 

[iollmann]

I still don't see any plan to convert the extremely impractical energy output to electricity. Isn't it mostly high energy neutrons and gamma rays?

Well, depends on how you set it up. Obviously if you are using high energy super conducting magnets at near absolute zero to compress the fusion mixture to incredible pressures and millions of degrees, all separated by a few feet, there are engineering problems.

On the other hand, if you just make it bigger to the point that mere gravitation is sufficient to replace the magnets — this thing is going to release hella big energy so you’ll want to keep it 1 AU or so away — then the gamma radiation and neutrons will be more manageable and mostly we have a black box radiator. At that point, the thermals are not a big issue and we can use silicon or perovskite flat panels to simply convert the visible light to electricity.

All we need now is a ball of hydrogen gas a 1/3 million times the size of the earth, and we can collect free energy on roof tops and mountain sides and skip the transmission headaches! As a bonus, we won’t need to burn fossil fuel frostpunk style to avoid freezing to death any longer. It’s a good plan! Much more convenient than burning stuff all the time.

Expect taxes to go up to pay for it.

 

[TerberculosisRobocop]

I read Thea’s paper. They shaped a planar magnetic field to within 1 percent of predicted values with a planar 3x3 magnet array. Cool.

Then they hand wave in the discussion that this means they can scale it up to a 3D array of hundreds of magnets to generate complex 3D magnetic fields in a couple of years?

Cool science, but… it’s like they made a paper airplane, the said they can step it up to an F-35 in a few years.

 

[wirrbeltier]

Well, depends on how you set it up. Obviously if you are using high energy super conducting magnets at near absolute zero to compress the fusion mixture to incredible pressures and millions of degrees, all separated by a few feet, there are engineering problems.

On the other hand, if you just make it bigger to the point that mere gravitation is sufficient to replace the magnets — this thing is going to release hella big energy so you’ll want to keep it 1 AU or so away — then the gamma radiation and neutrons will be more manageable and mostly we have a black box radiator. At that point, the thermals are not a big issue and we can use silicon or perovskite flat panels to simply convert the visible light to electricity.

All we need now is a ball of hydrogen gas a 1/3 million times the size of the earth, and we can collect free energy on roof tops and mountain sides and skip the transmission headaches! As a bonus, we won’t need to burn fossil fuel frostpunk style to avoid freezing to death any longer. It’s a good plan! Much more convenient than burning stuff all the time.

Expect taxes to go up to pay for it.

Great concept! Maybe you can call it something like "Self-contained Ultra-long distance fusioN" and see if you can sell some investors on it.

 

[Raspberry]

Yay.

I wish this was happening in Europe.

 

[kaleberg]

Well, depends on how you set it up. Obviously if you are using high energy super conducting magnets at near absolute zero to compress the fusion mixture to incredible pressures and millions of degrees, all separated by a few feet, there are engineering problems.

On the other hand, if you just make it bigger to the point that mere gravitation is sufficient to replace the magnets — this thing is going to release hella big energy so you’ll want to keep it 1 AU or so away — then the gamma radiation and neutrons will be more manageable and mostly we have a black box radiator. At that point, the thermals are not a big issue and we can use silicon or perovskite flat panels to simply convert the visible light to electricity.

All we need now is a ball of hydrogen gas a 1/3 million times the size of the earth, and we can collect free energy on roof tops and mountain sides and skip the transmission headaches! As a bonus, we won’t need to burn fossil fuel frostpunk style to avoid freezing to death any longer. It’s a good plan! Much more convenient than burning stuff all the time.

Expect taxes to go up to pay for it.

At Lawrence Livermore Labs they used to joke that passive solar power used the existing sun, but active solar power required confined nuclear fusion to make your own sun.

 

[Lexus Lunar Lorry]

Solar is still somewhat difficult for interstellar travel. Fusion would be much better.

Sure, but you can use space based solar power to make antimatter. That's even better than fusion for interstellar travel!

 

[AndrewMack]

Fusion has always been 10 years away, but I wonder with all the start ups working on it now, outside of academia, it becomes one of those things that reach a critical mass of tech that suddenly breaks out.

I wish them all luck.

 

[Chuckstar]

FTA:


Helion disagrees. They're on target for 2028.

Even in a best-case scenario, Helion is unlikely to still be on target for 2028. They've only just fired up Polaris, late, and they are rumored to be having teething problems with it. It's far from dead-in-the-water or anything. Just that 2028 seems extremely optimistic for a net-positive-energy power plant from them.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Interesting research and I'm glad it's happening, but it looks like commercial fusion power generation remains, as always, 20 years away.