Fusion - decades old clean power dream (WSJ,Daniel Michaels) USofA

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fusion-startups-step-in-to-realize-decades-oldclean-power-dream-11581001383 Please see link above for complete original text, embedded hotlinks and comments. This is excerpts only.

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FUSION STARTUPS STEP IN TO REALIZE DECADES-OLD CLEAN POWER DREAM Governments have spent billions of dollars studying the emissions-free energy source. Now, private ventures are building smaller, faster, cheaper reactors.

AUTHOR DANIEL MICHAELS PUBLISHED FEB. 6, 2020 If Nick Hawker’s computer models are right, the snap of a pistol shrimp’s claw holds the secret to boundless clean energy.

Mr. Hawker’s company, First Light Fusion, is one of around two dozen startups chasing the dream of generating electricity by squeezing atoms together.

Fusion, first theorized a century ago and shown to be possible decades later, is the same power that lights the sun and every other star, as well as hydrogen bombs. All it requires is the force to press small atoms together to build bigger ones—a process that releases huge amounts of energy, no greenhouse emissions and limited radioactivity.

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The hitch is that these atoms repel each other, and overcoming that resistance requires enormous strength. In stars, gravity does the job, but on Earth we must find other methods. Scientists now are building systems that squeeze, pummel and bombard atoms into submission. Their challenge is to get far more energy out of a reaction than they put in, a feat nobody has yet accomplished.

Concerns about global warming have brought fresh intensity to a field that languished for years. In December, Congress boosted research spending on fusion, recognizing it as a promising clean energy source to reliably power big economies. “If we can make fusion work, it really would be the perfect way to generate energy,” says Steven Cowley, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a pioneer in the field run by Princeton University for the Energy Department.

Princeton and many other advanced labs are trying to fuse hydrogen isotopes by enveloping them in an intense magnetic field that traps and squeezes the atoms, heating them to temperatures 10 times the sun’s core. Physicists generate the field with electromagnets demanding so much current that they must be superconductive, which has required cooling to near absolute zero—the point where all motion stops. ………

Oxford, England-based First Light Fusion co-founders Yiannis Ventikos, left, and Nick Hawkerstand atop a machine they’ve developed that can discharge up to 200,000 volts and more than 14 million amperes of power within two microseconds.

Technological breakthroughs have upended those assumptions. Advances in computing, precision machinery and synthetic materials have allowed scientists to design reactors a fraction of the size and cost of those just a few years ago. Lower price tags have put fusion within reach of private investors, allowing ventures to sprout. ………

Scientists in 2001 had shown that the implosions produced not just noise but also extreme pressure, a flash of light—dubbed shrimpoluminescense—and temperatures exceeding 5,000 degrees Kelvin.

Physicists decades earlier had considered bubble collapse to trigger fusion but lacked the computing power or math to model it, so looked elsewhere. Revisiting the question with advanced algorithms and powerful processors, Mr. Hawker and Mr. Ventikos showed the potential to generate million-degree conditions needed for fusion.

Today, First Light has raised £25 million (US$32.8 million) to build machines for testing its computer models. If the shock waves deliver, the next step is to build a prototype generator, potentially as soon as 2025.

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“Things that were unthinkable 10 or 20 years ago are now fairly straightforward,” says Jonathan Carling, chief executive of Tokamak Energy, another startup based near Oxford, England, a fusion hub.

Tokamak Energy, which recently raised £67 million (US$ 87.3 million), and at least two North American startups also aim around 2025 to fire up prototype fusion reactors, each roughly the size of turbines inside traditional power plants.

If any of the upstarts succeed, it will mark a scientific leapfrog for the record books.

Until recently, the unquestioned leader on the path to achieving a self-sustaining fusion reaction—a crucial hurdle before developing power plants—was a 35-country consortium based in southern France called ITER. First proposed at a summit in 1985 between then-President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the project today is a sprawling construction site of more than a dozen buildings. Coming together at its core is the world’s biggest fusion system, a 98-foot-tall drum housing a 37-foot-high doughnut-shaped reactor core. ………

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Comment by Kenneth Kok, nuclear engineer, Editor of the Nuclear Engineering Handbook: I received a copy of the attached file of a WSJ article from the IEEE Energy Policy Committee. I find it interesting the there is so much money being poured into this technology. The primary energy carrier from a D-T fusion reaction is a 14+MEV neutron. To extract this kinetic energy and convert it to something that can be used to generate electricity it must be captured and slowed down. In a fission reactor the primary energy, almost 200MEV is carried by the fission products which is captured in the fuel matrix and transferred as heat to the reactor coolant. Note that there is no discussion in the article about how these devises will convert the fusion energy to a practical use.

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