From: meekerdb <[email protected]>
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
Essentially yes, it has NOT been built. What I found interesting was their
claim that they could do away with all those bulky massively expensive
superconducting magnetic coils that characterize current reactor designs --
including ITER. Quoting from the article "a spheromak, generates the majority
of [its] magnetic fields by driving electrical currents into the plasma itself."
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
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| UW fusion reactor concept could be cheaper than coal Fusion energy almost
sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived
radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply. |
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| View on phys.org | Preview by Yahoo |
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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 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 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 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 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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