On 09 Oct 2014, at 01:46, meekerdb wrote:
So they have a design which doesn't produce any net energy, but if
it's just scaled up it'll be a winner?
We should at least try, I think. It is nice that research go on in
that direction, but the energy problem is global, and finding an easy
source is not the whole problem.
Bruno
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
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.
View on phys.org
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 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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