So they have a design which doesn't produce any net energy, but if it's just scaled up
it'll be a winner?
Brent
On 10/8/2014 3:19 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
Would like to see how this particular technology develops (that is if there are no
unreported or unforeseen problems roadblocking it) The explanation made sense to me, but
then I do not know enough about this field to have a firm opinion.
Hope it pans out, because the world is racing towards the energy cliff at
breakneck speed
UW fusion reactor concept could be cheaper than coal
<http://phys.org/news/2014-10-uw-fusion-reactor-concept-cheaper.html>
image <http://phys.org/news/2014-10-uw-fusion-reactor-concept-cheaper.html>
UW fusion reactor concept could be cheaper than coal
<http://phys.org/news/2014-10-uw-fusion-reactor-concept-cheaper.html>
Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no
long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply.
View on phys.org
<http://phys.org/news/2014-10-uw-fusion-reactor-concept-cheaper.html>
Preview by Yahoo
Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no
long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply.
Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy
<http://phys.org/tags/fusion+energy/> is that the economics haven't penciled out. Fusion
power designs aren't cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as
coal and natural gas.
University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for
a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant,
would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output.
The team published its reactor design and cost-analysis findings last spring and will
present results Oct. 17 at the International Atomic Energy Agency's Fusion Energy
Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.
"Right now, this design has the greatest potential of producing economical fusion power
of any current concept," said Thomas Jarboe, a UW professor of aeronautics and
astronautics and an adjunct professor in physics.
The UW's reactor, called the dynomak, started as a class project taught by Jarboe two
years ago. After the class ended, Jarboe and doctoral student Derek Sutherland – who
previously worked on a reactor design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology –
continued to develop and refine the concept.
The design builds on existing technology and creates a magnetic field
<http://phys.org/tags/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. The reactor
itself would be largely self-sustaining, meaning it would continuously heat the plasma
to maintain thermonuclear conditions. Heat generated from the reactor would heat up a
coolant that is used to spin a turbine and generate electricity, similar to how a
typical power reactor works.
"This is a much more elegant solution because the medium in which you generate fusion is
the medium in which you're also driving all the current required to confine it,"
Sutherland said.
There are several ways to create a magnetic field, which is crucial to keeping a fusion
reactor going. The UW's design is known as a spheromak, meaning it generates the
majority of magnetic fields by driving electrical currents into the plasma itself. This
reduces the amount of required materials and actually allows researchers to shrink the
overall size of the reactor.
Other designs, such as the experimental fusion reactor project that's currently being
built in France – called Iter – have to be much larger than the UW's because they rely
on superconducting coils that circle around the outside of the device to provide a
similar magnetic field.When compared with the fusion reactor concept in France, the UW's
is much less expensive – roughly one-tenth the cost of Iter – while producing five times
the amount of energy.
The UW researchers factored the cost of building a fusion reactor
<http://phys.org/tags/fusion+reactor/> power plant using their design and compared that
with building a coal power plant. They used a metric called "overnight capital costs,"
which includes all costs, particularly startup infrastructure fees. 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.
"If we do invest in this type of fusion, we could be rewarded because the commercial
reactor unit already looks economical," Sutherland said. "It's very exciting."
Right now, the UW's concept is about one-tenth the size and power output of a final
product, which is still years away. The researchers have successfully tested the
prototype's ability to sustain a plasma efficiently, and as they further develop and
expand the size of the device they can ramp up to higher-temperature plasma and get
significant fusion power <http://phys.org/tags/fusion+power/> output.
The team has filed patents on the reactor concept with the UW's Center for
Commercialization and plans to continue developing and scaling up its prototypes.
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