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New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality

phys.org

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Re: New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality

#3

Post by DennisP »

Meanwhile, MIT's fusion program is likely to be shut down soon. Their Alcator C-Mod has the strongest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, and made a serious breakthrough in tokamak physics several years ago.

I had a chance to visit a couple years ago. A grad student showed us a metal tie, about a meter long, and said they'd calculated that two of them could hold down the Space Shuttle during launch. To hold the reactor together when they switched it on, they needed 38 of them.

They hadn't run the reactor for a year due to funding issues.

Re: New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality

#4

Post by Someone »

"The design could produce a reactor that would provide electricity to about 100,000 people, they say."

It would be a huge step forward if this can be built, but there still would be a long way to go. To scale that to "electricity for everyone in the USA", you would need to build about 3,000 of these (or build much bigger ones). And that's for _current_ electricity use, not if everybody starts driving an electric car.

For comparison, a 1000MW nuclear reactor produces electricity for 690,000 _households_ (http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/US-Nu...), and US nuclear electricity generation is about a honderd times that (same page)

Re: New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality

#5

Post by mikeash »

Someone wrote: post #4

"The design could produce a reactor that would provide electricity to about 100,000 people, they say." It would be a huge step forward if this can be built, but there still would be a long way to go. To scale that to "electricity for everyone in the USA", you would need to build about 3,000 of these (or build much bigger ones). And that's for _current_ electricity use, not if everybody starts driving an electric car.…

A fusion reactor able to produce net electricity at all would be a massive breakthrough. I don't think the size matters much at all. Once anything is working, progress on scaling it up is likely to come quickly. The hard part is getting to the point where it works at all.

The first nuclear power plant attached to a grid was only 6MW. The first "full-scale" plant, according to Wikipedia and the BBC, had four reactors producing only 60MW each.

Re: New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality

#6

Post by Retric »

Someone wrote: post #4

"The design could produce a reactor that would provide electricity to about 100,000 people, they say." It would be a huge step forward if this can be built, but there still would be a long way to go. To scale that to "electricity for everyone in the USA", you would need to build about 3,000 of these (or build much bigger ones). And that's for _current_ electricity use, not if everybody starts driving an electric car.…

Fusion, is one of those things that scales really well so being able to build a small power plant is a good thing.

Also, ~3,000 for the US seems like a lot. But it's only ~60 per state which is not that bad. Also, we often have multiple nuclear reactors on the same site for a range of reasons and we could do the same with this tech.

In the end we create and use crazy amounts of electricity in the US and we need any solution is going to be a large scale effort.

Re: New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality

#7

Post by DrNuke »

The lab demonstration, if and when hopefully achieved, will be great but still a long way from full scale demonstration, licensing and commercialisation. Physics may eventually work well but engineering must hold up at 1:1 and make sense from several points of view. We're not there yet, ITER in Cadarache, France, being the nearest and biggest shot. Fingers crossed.

Re: New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality

#8

Post by mikeash »

DennisP wrote: post #3

Meanwhile, MIT's fusion program is likely to be shut down soon. Their Alcator C-Mod has the strongest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, and made a serious breakthrough in tokamak physics several years ago. I had a chance to visit a couple years ago. A grad student showed us a metal tie, about a meter long, and said they'd calculated that two of them could hold down the Space Shuttle during launch. To hold t…

I had to run the numbers on that Space Shuttle thing, just to see. The Space Shuttle weighed about 4.5 million pounds at launch, and had a thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.5, meaning there was about 2.25 million pounds of net upward force on it. So each of those metal ties was capable of carrying a bit over a million pounds of load. Neat.
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