Fusion Breakthrough to Create Computing Boom

NIF researchers achieved a nuclear fusion reaction that created more energy output than input, a historic first in energy research.

Peer review confirms the breakthrough, opening the door for developing practical fusion reactors capable of providing near-unlimited energy.

The availability of fusion energy could significantly accelerate progress in energy-intensive technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, potentially overcoming current energy bottlenecks.

A recent physics breakthrough that could serve as a proof-of-concept for the development of nuclear fusion reactors capable of producing near-unlimited energy has finally passed its official peer-review successfully.

On Dec. 5, 2022, a team of researchers at the United States National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California recorded data indicating that it had achieved a nuclear fusion reaction that created more energy than it took to produce. The reported results were the first of their kind.

In physics, this is sometimes colloquially referred to as a “free lunch,” meaning a nuclear fusion reactor could one day be scaled to the point where it is capable of producing near-unlimited energy.   READ MORE...

Pioneerng Nuclear Fusion

To achieve fusion, the U.S. National Ignition Facility focuses its lasers onto a gold cylinder containing a diamond capsule filled with hydrogen isotopes. NIF could need safety upgrades, if its energy yields continue to climb. Credit: UPI/Alamy Stock Photo




Last month, the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) fired its lasers up to full power for the first time since December, when it achieved its decades-long goal of ‘ignition’ by producing more energy during a nuclear reaction than it consumed. The latest run didn’t come close to matching up: NIF achieved only 4% of the output it did late last year. But scientists didn’t expect it to.

Building on NIF’s success, they are now flexing the programme’s experimental muscles, trying to better understand the nuclear-fusion facility’s capabilities. Here, Nature looks at what’s to come for NIF, and whether it will propel global efforts to create a vast supply of clean energy for the planet.

WHAT WAS THE GOAL OF THE LATEST EXPERIMENT?
NIF, based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, is a stadium-sized facility that fires 192 lasers at a tiny gold cylinder containing a diamond capsule. Inside the capsule sits a frozen pellet of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The lasers trigger an implosion, creating extreme heat and pressure that drive the hydrogen isotopes to fuse into helium, releasing additional energy.

One of the main challenges in getting this scheme to work is fabricating the diamond capsule. Even the smallest defects — bacterium-sized pockmarks, metal contamination or variations in shape and thickness — affect the implosion, and thus the pressure and heat that drive the fusion reactions.

Record-breaking experiments in 2021 and 2022 used the best capsules available, but in March, while waiting for a new batch, NIF scientists ran an experiment with a capsule that was thicker on one side than the other. Modelling suggested that they could offset this imperfection by adjusting the beams coming from the lasers, to produce a more uniform implosion. This was a test of their theoretical predictions, says Richard Town, a physicist who heads the lab’s inertial-confinement fusion science programme at the LLNL.

The results fell short of their predictions, and researchers are now working to understand why. But if this line of investigation pays off, Town says, “it opens up more capsules for us to use and will improve our understanding of implosion”.  READ MORE...

Stellarator Reactor

1. With the promise of fusion on full display after a U.S. lab achieved “ignition” late last year, fusion companies are raising capital to bring this next-gen green energy to life.
2. Magnetic confinement reactors, such as tokamaks and stellarators, are the leading fusion concept, and are designed to contain super-hot plasma long enough to sustain fusion reactions.
3. Although tokamaks are more abundant and easier to build, the company Type One Fusion just received millions to bring its stellarator reactor to market.

Fusion reactors come in all shapes and sizes, but can mostly be separated into three groups, defined by how they contain the super-hot plasma needed to combine lighter nuclei into heavier ones.

The first is gravitational reactors (a.k.a. stars), which are impossible to recreate on Earth. The second group is inertial reactors, which essentially fire a bunch of lasers at a small pellet and contain the resulting fusion reaction by sheer inertia for only 100 trillionths of a second. This is the concept that finally achieved ignition last December. But it’s the third group—magnetic reactors—that’s arguably the most promising.

Magnetic confinement fusion uses superconducting magnets to contain hot plasma long enough for a fusion reaction to take place. These magnets are absolutely critical, as they keep the plasma from touching any of the other materials in the reactor, and no known material can withstand the over-100-million-degrees-Celsius temperatures required for fusion. But even this kind of fusion divides into a further two camps: tokamaks and stellarators.   READ MORE...

Fusion's Future in USA

Fusion energy is often hailed as a limitless source of clean energy, but new research from Princeton University suggests that may only be true if the price is right.

In a study led by fusion expert Egemen Kolemen, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and energy systems expert Jesse Jenkins, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton researchers modeled the cost targets that a fusion reactor might have to meet to gain traction in a future U.S. energy grid.

The findings, published in Joule on Mar. 16, illustrated that the engineering challenges of fusion energy are only part of the problem—the other part lies in economics.

"People will not pay an unlimited amount of money for fusion energy if they could spend that money to generate clean energy more cost-effectively," said Jacob Schwartz, a former postdoc with Kolemen and Jenkins who led the modeling for the study and currently works as a research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. "Above a certain cost, even if we can engineer them, not many developers will want to build them."

The model results demonstrated that the niche for fusion in the U.S. depends not only on the price of building a reactor but hinges greatly on the energy mix of the future grid and the cost of competing technologies like nuclear fission.

If the market for fusion is favorable, then even with capital costs as high as around $7,000 per kilowatt, fusion could still reach 100 GW capacity—about the current capacity of U.S. nuclear power plants, which supply about a fifth of today's electricity needs. But supposing alternative technologies like nuclear fission, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, or long-duration battery storage successfully take root, capital costs might have to be less than half that price for fusion to reach the same 100 GW capacity.

"Fusion developers need to keep an eye on the competition," Jenkins explained. "If successfully commercialized, fusion power plants are likely to look a lot like classic nuclear fission plants from the perspective of electricity markets and grids. Both resources are complex technologies with tight engineering margins for safety reasons, which translates to high upfront investment costs. If the variable costs of fusion power plants end up low, fusion plants will likely compete head-to-head with new fission power plants."  READ MORE...

Ignition in a Fusion Experiment

A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion has been confirmed a year after it was achieved at a laboratory in California.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL's) National Ignition Facility (NIF) recorded the first case of ignition on August 8, 2021, the results of which have now been published in three peer-reviewed papers.

Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the Sun and other stars: heavy hydrogen atoms collide with enough force that they fuse together to form a helium atom, releasing large amounts of energy as a by-product. Once the hydrogen plasma "ignites", the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining, with the fusions themselves producing enough power to maintain the temperature without external heating.

Ignition during a fusion reaction essentially means that the reaction itself produced enough energy to be self-sustaining, which would be necessary in the use of fusion to generate electricity.

If we could harness this reaction to generate electricity, it would be one of the most efficient and least polluting sources of energy possible. No fossil fuels would be required as the only fuel would be hydrogen, and the only by-product would be helium, which we use in industry and are actually in short supply of.  READ MORE...

World's Largest Fusion Device

 

New Fusion Energy Website Launched

Credit: U.S. Fusion Energy

The new community-wide outreach, education, and workforce development website provides centralized resources for all audiences.

The U.S. Fusion Outreach Team, a grassroots organization in the fusion community focused on reducing barriers to outreach efforts, has launched a new centralized website to engage an expanding workforce, media, educators, and the public in the journey toward a world powered by fusion energy.

The U.S. fusion community has just completed a two year strategic planning process to focus on a bold new direction: the construction of a prototype fusion power plant by 2035 (NAS report). Following a recommendation from the consensus reports created by researchers (Community Planning Process and Powering the Future reports), a diverse committee of stakeholders from the U.S. fusion energy community has collaborated to build usfusionenergy.org. The website will feature the latest fusion news and informative articles, events, and resources that will help anyone, anywhere, understand the promise of fusion energy.

The timing of this website launch could not be more relevant. The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, is underway in Glasgow as world leaders decide how to tackle climate change. Additionally, the U.S. Congress is currently debating policy on transitioning the country to clean energy. The development of fusion energy as a new power source will be revolutionary to both initiatives.

Furthermore, fusion energy is building momentum in the United States and around the world. The National Ignition Facility in California announced a significant step forward for laser-driven fusion this August. Additionally, Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Massachusetts recently leaped forward in magnet-driven fusion technology. Worldwide, the international ITER project in France reports steady progress with the first plasma scheduled for 2025.

With such advancements, there has never been a better time to get involved in fusion energy! The United States is teeming with private companies seeking to commercialize fusion, and the industry will need talent of all backgrounds. To meet the moment, the new website, usfusionenergy.org, prioritizes featuring jobs and opportunities across the United States to expand the definition of “Fusioneer,” one who is involved in the fusion energy community.  READ MORE...

Fusion Energy

Fusion has an amazing future as a source of energy. Which is to say, in space craft beyond the orbit of Jupiter, sometime in the next two centuries. Here on Earth? Not so much. At least, that’s my opinion.

Nuclear electrical generation has 2.5 paths. The first is nuclear fission, the part that is the major electrical generation source that provides about 10% of the electricity in the world today. The 0.5 is radioisotope thermoelectric generator, where a tiny chunk of decaying radioactive material is used with a thermocouple to provide electricity to space probes. If you read or saw The Martian, that’s what he dug out of the pit and put in his jury-rigged long-distance Mars buggy.

And then there’s fusion. Where fission splits atoms, fusion merges them. Instead of radioactive fuel, there’s a lot of radioactive emissions from the merging of things like hydrogen-3, deuterium, and tritium that irradiates the containment structures. Lower radioactive waste that doesn’t last as long, but still radioactive waste for those who think that’s a concern.

Compared to CO2e emissions causing global warming, I don’t consider a few thousand tons of radioactive waste to be significant. Among other things, I spent enough time with epidemiologists building the world’s most sophisticated communicable disease and pandemic management solution that I ended up with a much better appreciation of the statistics of radiation and health. It’s not a big concern compared to coal or global warming.

But fusion generation of electricity, as opposed to big honking nuclear weapons using fusion, is a perpetual source of interest. When Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, talked about nuclear being “too cheap to meter” in 1954, he was talking about fusion, not fission. Like everyone since the mid-1950s, he assumed that fusion would be generating power in 20 years.

And so here we are, 67 years later. How is fusion doing?  To read more about the future of fusion, CLICK HERE...