Clean Fusion Energy

A stellarator may sound like something cooked up in the laboratory of a supervillain, but a breakthrough with this device may help bring us clean fusion energy at an affordable price.

As detailed by Interesting Engineering, a team at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) developed the first stellarator with permanent magnets rather than electromagnets.

In other words, scientists created a device that generates a fusion reaction — the process that powers the sun and other stars — with refrigerator magnets.

"Using permanent magnets is a completely new way to design stellarators," graduate student Tony Qian explained to the online platform. "This technique allows us to test new plasma confinement ideas quickly and build new devices easily."  READ MORE...

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion Energy

European scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion - the energy process that powers the stars.

The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen.

If nuclear fusion can be successfully recreated on Earth it holds out the potential of virtually unlimited supplies of low-carbon, low-radiation energy.

The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power).  READ MORE...

Fusion Energy is Really Possible

As Earth’s inhabitants suffer through what may wind up being the hottest year on record, there’s a Promethean spark of hope. Virtually unlimited fusion energy appears to be, if not right around the corner, at least within hailing distance.

Last December, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility finally succeeded in forcing the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium to undergo a self-sustained fusion reaction. It was an encouraging advancement, though not exactly a breakthrough. 

NIF’s small net energy gain didn’t factor in the energy it took to fire up the 192 ultraviolet lasers that initiated the reaction, which lasted “for the briefest blink of a moment,” as Dina Genkina reported for IEEE Spectrum. While there are lessons to be learned from NIF’s successes and failures, laser-based inertial confinement fusion doesn’t yet provide a practical path to commercial-scale power generation.

There’s also a lot to learn from Iter, the world’s largest fusion experiment, which is now being built in southern France. Since 1985, the project has brought together 35 countries and thousands of scientists and engineers. 

ITER’s magnetic-confinement fusion experiments will happen inside a giant doughnut-shaped device called a tokamak, where powerful superconducting magnets will force hydrogen isotopes to fuse.

Even if Iter succeeds in touching off a sustained fusion reaction, though, it will never harness the energy produced. That crucial engineering step will be accomplished by some other group. 

One team vying to take fusion energy to market is Commonwealth Fusion Systems, in Devens, Mass., whose six founders all did research at Iter. In “Tale of the Tape,” page 30, writer Tom Clynes takes us inside CFS’s Sparc pilot project to create a new kind of commercially viable, compact fusion reactor.  READ MORE...

Breakthrough in Fusion Energy

After generations of trying to produce the power of a star on Earth, a successful nuclear fusion ignition happened in the middle of a December night and was over in 20-billionths of a second.

That’s more than 100 billion times shorter than the Wright Brothers’ first, 12-second flight — but a brief, shining moment that could have even bigger implications for humanity.

But while the science teams at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are still buzzing over their Wright-Brothers moment, we only remember that name because their third flight stayed in the sky for 39 minutes.

The nuclear fusion reaction must be repeated, extended and scaled before the comparison sticks. And the race is on to make it work.

“But that’s what makes it so exciting, right?” lead scientist Tammy Ma told CNN. “The potential is so great for clean, abundant, limitless, affordable energy. It will be tough. It won’t be easy. But it’s worth doing.”

Ma’s office is a giant box of lasers the size of three football fields in the corner of a 7,000-acre lab in Livermore. Running across the soaring white ceilings are miles of square tubes holding 192 of the most energetic lasers in the world, all snaking toward a round room at the center.

The very middle of this target chamber becomes the hottest place in the solar system every time they run a fusion experiment, and it is covered with enough gleaming machinery that J.J. Abrams used it to portray the warp core of the USS Enterprise in “Stark Trek Into Darkness.”

With a legacy of delays and cost overruns, the National Ignition Facility was wryly nicknamed the “National Almost Ignition Facility,” or “NAIF,” by critics in Congress. If not for its work studying nuclear weaponry without the need for test explosions, the program might have lost funding years ago.

But now, for the first time since breaking ground in 1997, the National Ignition Facility can finally live up to its name. In December, 192 of the most energetic lasers in the world heated up a tiny pellet of hydrogen atoms with such force, they fused together to create helium and — most importantly — excess energy.

A little more than 2 megajoules of energy going into the target chamber became 3.15 megajoules coming out — a modest gain of around 50%, but enough to make history and allow scientists to call the experiment a true success.

The five attempts since have all failed to repeat it.  READ MORE...

World's Largest Fusion Device

 

Commercial Fusion Energy

A British Columbia-based company has announced a major breakthrough that it believes could lead to the world’s first commercial fusion energy plant.

General Fusion in Burnaby says it has achieved milestone targets for the prototype of its fusion demonstration plant, which can accommodate the extreme conditions of fusion, such as temperatures up to 150 million C.

“When you’re trying to contain a plasma, which is a super-heated form of hydrogen, at conditions and temperatures at the centre of the sun … it’s very hard to think of putting it inside a machine and that machine lasting the lifetime of a power plant,” explained CEO Chris Mowry.

“General Fusion is driving on a path where we could be putting a shovel in the ground on the first commercial plant before the end of the decade.”

Fusion power is a proposed form of clean energy generation that involves heating up two substances — deuterium and tritium — until their atoms collide and fuse into helium and a neutron, which contain a substantial amount of energy.

That energy can be harnessed and used to create electricity.

General Fusion’s Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology uses a swirling cylinder of liquid metal to safely compress and heat the required plasma to the right conditions. The concept itself isn’t new, but the company believes it has matured the technology.  READ MORE...

Fusion Reaction Creates More Energy Than It Absorbs

A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy.

For the first time, a fusion reaction has achieved a record 1.3 megajoule energy output – and for the first time, exceeding energy absorbed by the fuel used to trigger it.

Although there's still some way to go, the result represents a significant improvement on previous yields: eight times greater than experiments conducted just a few months prior, and 25 times greater than experiments conducted in 2018. It's a huge achievement.

Physicists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will be submitting a paper for peer review.

"This result is a historic step forward for inertial confinement fusion research, opening a fundamentally new regime for exploration and the advancement of our critical national security missions. It is also a testament to the innovation, ingenuity, commitment and grit of this team and the many researchers in this field over the decades who have steadfastly pursued this goal," said Kim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"For me, it demonstrates one of the most important roles of the national labs – our relentless commitment to tackling the biggest and most important scientific grand challenges and finding solutions where others might be dissuaded by the obstacles."

Inertial confinement fusion involves creating something like a tiny star. It starts with a capsule of fuel, consisting of deuterium and tritium – heavier isotopes of hydrogen. This fuel capsule is placed in a hollow gold chamber about the size of a pencil eraser called a hohlraum.  READ MORE...

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...

Practical Fusion Reactors

Matthew Wolford inspects the Electra argon- fluoride (ArF) laser US Navy/Jonathan Steffen


The US Naval Research Laboratory (AFL) is developing an Argon Fluoride (ArF) laser that may one day make fusion power a practical commercial technology. The wide-bandwidth ultraviolet laser is designed to have the shortest laser wavelength that can scale up to power a self-sustaining fusion reaction.


To call fusion energy a game changing technology is like saying that fire might one day find a practical application. In fact, the ability to generate clean energy from hydrogen in any desired quantity over any foreseeable timescale would fundamentally alter civilization in ways we can't imagine.

The problem is fusion power is like the proverbial rabbit pie recipe that begins with, "First, catch your rabbit." Though we can recreate the conditions found inside the Sun to produce fusion reactions on Earth, these are relegated to hydrogen bombs and laboratory experiments where it takes more energy to create the fusion reaction than we can get out of it – though recent experiments are getting much closer to turning that around.

The Nike laser lens array focusing 44 krypton-fluoride (KrF) laser beams onto targets NRL

The goal for the past 75 years has been to produce temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees C (180 million degrees F) and the pressure needed to ignite the fusion reaction and generate enough surplus energy to sustain it. That in itself would be a major achievement, but the technology also has to be able to sustain the reaction indefinitely, while also being cheap enough and the reactor small enough for it to be practical.  READ MORE...