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Carbon-free fusion power could be ‘on the grid in 15 years’

Gingerbread Demon said:
Ah the 50s, the can do decade of humanity where we had the wildest proposals, nuclear subs, nuclear trains, even cars with thorium reactors, whatever happened to the wild mavericky days?
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Fantasy gave way to reality.

We already have Nuclear Subs & Carriers.

Trains don't make sense given how often Trains have accidents and turning a typical Train Accident into a Nuclear incident is a bad idea.

Same with how often Automobiles have crashes.

Same with Aircraft. Given how often you hear about Airplane crashes, turning a Airplane Crash into a Nuclear Incident isn't worth it.

Not everything needs to be "Nuclear Powered".
 
Gingerbread Demon said:
Ah the 50s, the can do decade of humanity where we had the wildest proposals, nuclear subs, nuclear trains, even cars with thorium reactors, whatever happened to the wild mavericky days?
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It was new technology and people were optimistic about how it could be used.

Pres. Eisenhower started the Atoms for Peace program in 1953 and that started to propagate nuclear tech rapidly to areas of the world that might have otherwise waited decades. (Israel and Pakistan got their first nuclear reactors from the same company that built and still does build, ten-pin bowling alley equipment ) . Some ideas were tried out. The soviets and Americans both tried nuclear powered freighter ships, but it did not catch on. The NS Savannah was the American one. It used to be on display and you could walk around in it. I did back in the early 90s. The engine control room looks like something out of TOS. The interiors were very swank, albeit deteriorating.
 
XCV330 said:
It was new technology and people were optimistic about how it could be used.

Pres. Eisenhower started the Atoms for Peace program in 1953 and that started to propagate nuclear tech rapidly to areas of the world that might have otherwise waited decades. (Israel and Pakistan got their first nuclear reactors from the same company that built and still does build, ten-pin bowling alley equipment ) . Some ideas were tried out. The soviets and Americans both tried nuclear powered freighter ships, but it did not catch on. The NS Savannah was the American one. It used to be on display and you could walk around in it. I did back in the early 90s. The engine control room looks like something out of TOS. The interiors were very swank, albeit deteriorating.
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I remember that ship, I had diagrams and photos of it in a book many years ago and loved its design. Why did it go out of service though, was it financial?
 
Fusion achieved using an inertial method involving projectiles that I've never heard of previously:

First Light achieves world first fusion result, proving unique new target technology | First Light Fusion

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This animation shows a view of the reaction vessel in our reactor concept. The target is dropped into the reaction chamber from above, falling under gravity. The projectile is launched downwards on top of the target and catches it up in the centre of the chamber. The impact is focused by the target and a pulse of fusion energy is released. That energy is absorbed by the lithium flowing inside the vessel, heating it up. The lithium protects the vessel from damage, allowing it to last for the whole lifetime of the plant without replacement.
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Asbo Zaprudder said:
Fusion achieved using an inertial method involving projectiles that I've never heard of previously:

First Light achieves world first fusion result, proving unique new target technology | First Light Fusion

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They really take the "Inertia" part of Inertial confinement seriously! :D How would you imagine they going to use it as a powerplant? steam heat and turbine or some kind of direct capture?
 
XCV330 said:
They really take the "Inertia" part of Inertial confinement seriously! :D How would you imagine they going to use it as a powerplant? steam heat and turbine or some kind of direct capture?
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The lithium is used to capture the neutrons and kinetic energy of the fusion products. After that it's just a normal Rankine cycle heat engine. As their blurb states:
The impact is focused and amplified by First Light’s advanced target technology, and a pulse of fusion energy is released. That energy is absorbed by the lithium flowing inside the chamber, heating it up. The flowing liquid protects the chamber from the huge energy release, sidestepping some of the most difficult engineering issues in other approaches to fusion. Finally, a heat exchanger transfers the heat of the lithium to water, generating steam that turns a turbine and produces electricity.
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The D-T reaction path is:
D + T → He4 + n
The mean free path before capture of the 14.1 MeV neutron in a lithium blanket is about 0.147 metres so several times that is required to remove most of the neutrons I would expect. I'm not sure what would be done with the tritium produced other than feed it back into more D-T fusion.

However, I think this reactor is using D-D fusion, which produces a helium-3 and a 2.5 MeV neutron (with a shorter mean free path than the higher energy neutron from D-T) or a tritium and a proton. There are two possible reactions with similar probability of occurring:
D + D → T + p
D + D → He3 + n
Again, what happens to the tritium produced, such as how much is burnt up by reacting with deuterium, isn't described.

This company has produced a few proposal papers but, of course, I haven't read them. I assume the investors or their advisers will.
 
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Now this is where I start looking farther afield than just the usual suspects. I may have spoken before about vortex break down--where the breakdown bubble forced a single, violent suction vortex that was confined very tightly--something storm chasers call a drill-bit--with no magnetic fields at all--- about 3:30-3:50 mark here.
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From phys.org:

"The rate at which magnetic field lines reconnect is of extreme importance for processes in space that can impact Earth," said Yi-Hsin Liu, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth. "After decades of effort, we now have a full theory to address this long-standing problem."

https://phys.org/news/2022-04-theory-mystery-fast-magnetic-reconnection.html

The new study can also inform reconnection studies in magnetically confined fusion devices and astrophysical plasmas near neutron stars and black holes. Although there is no current applied use, some researchers have considered the possibility of using magnetic reconnection in spacecraft thrusters.

I wonder if things as disparate as severe weather research and heliophysics can combine to give us fusion at last.

More:
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-machine-harnessed-extreme-aids-fusion.html
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-ratios-key-inertial-confinement-fusion.html

A loss…
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-french-scientist-nuclear-fusion-dies.html

Wonder material
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-long-hypothesized-material.html

I wonder if this may help---wave mixing:
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-laser-x-ray.html
Unlike fictional laser swords, real laser beams do not interact with each other when they cross—unless the beams meet within a suitable material allowing for nonlinear light-matter interaction. In such a case, wave mixing can give rise to beams with changed colors and directions.

Even electrons have their kinks
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-electrons-crystal-linked-quantum.html
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-dead-cone-effect-particle-physics.html

Fusion paper
https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00203259.pdf

—but
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Breaking the plasma barrier
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-discovery-high-speed-plasma-turbulence-outpaces.html

Previously, heat and turbulence had been known to move almost simultaneously at a speed of 5,000 kilometers per hour, about the speed of an airplane, but this experiment led to the world's first discovery of turbulence moving ahead of heat at a speed of 40,000 kilometers per hour. The speed of this turbulence is close to that of a rocket.
https://www.energy-daily.com/m/repo...ool_edges_Super_H_mode_shows_promise_999.html

Laser fusion
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/07/laser-pb11-fusion-yield-increased-40-fold.html

The "Greenwald limit" rethought:
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-law-unchains-fusion-energy.html

The new equation posits that the Greenwald limit can be raised almost two-fold in terms of fuel in ITER; that means that tokamaks like ITER can actually use almost twice the amount of fuel to produce plasmas without worries of disruptions.
 
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Maybe everything could be nuclear powered.

Nuclear startup Avalanche Energy has modest funding, a skeleton crew, a pocket-sized prototype — and grand ambitions.

In sharp contrast, Avalanche’s small-scale modular approach is more akin to Tesla’s electric-vehicle battery design, co-founder and CEO Robin Langtry told Canary Media in an interview. “It’s hundreds of little cells that we can mass-produce in a giga-fusion factory. You might need a few of them for a car, a dozen for a bus, maybe 100 for an airplane.”
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Instead of relying on massive superconducting magnets, Avalanche Energy’s prototype employs electrostatic fields to trap fusion ions, while also employing a magnetron electron confinement technique to reach higher ion densities. The resulting fusion reaction produces neutrons that can be transformed into heat.

The magnetron used by the startup is a variation of a device “found in everyday microwave ovens” that enables the “densities and cross sections necessary for fusion,” according to Avalanche investor Joshua Posamentier, a managing partner at Congruent Ventures.
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Avalanche has received a relatively modest $5 million in venture funding in a round led by Azolla Ventures along with Congruent Ventures and Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital — a mere drop in the cash tsunami that’s flowing into nuclear fusion technology these days. The startup is competing with some much bigger, deep-pocketed players building cathedral-scale fusion prototypes.
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Avalanche’s design approach could open up new applications for fusion that are not about connecting to the electrical grid. According to Riordan, “We’re not trying to do grid-scale energy. There’s a whole realm of industries that need to be decarbonized: long-distance trucking, aviation, maritime — huge carbon sources. Right now, we don’t have great options. We’ve got hydrogen, but the process for making it isn’t necessarily green. We’ve got synthetic fuels. [Avalanche is] going after applications that are hard to decarbonize.”

“We have a unique opportunity to make a run at a tiny fusion reactor. Every day, I walk into the office thankful that we have that opportunity, along with this hair-on-fire sense of urgency that this [funding wave] may not last forever.”
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Electric cars, hydrogen fuel cell cars, and who knows what else they haven't told us yet - hopefully it happens on a large scale within my lifetime.
 
They are combining approaches:

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Delaware, University of Rochester, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Imperial College London, and University of Rome La Sapienza have recently showed what happens to this implosion when one applies a strong magnetic field to the fuel capsule used for inertial confinement fusion.
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-magnetizing-laser-driven-inertial-fusion-implosions.html

Tungsten is being added:
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-uncovering-energy-powers-sun-stars.html
The researchers explored the impact of adding tungsten metal, which is used to make cutting tools and lamp filaments, to the outer layer of plasma fuel pellets in inertial confinement research. They found that tungsten boosts the performance of the implosions that cause fusion reactions in the pellets.

An improvement
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-feedback-efficiency-fusion-reactions.html
The improved technique protects internal parts from damage by instabilities called "edge-localized modes" (ELMs) and allows tokamaks to operate for longer without pausing.

A new type of energy storage--via isomer beam:
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-physicists-reinvestigate-nuclear-electron-capture.html
Several million electron volts can be stored in one atomic nucleus. Therefore, long-lived isomers with high excitation energies are considered to be ideal energy storage materials, with high energy density, long storage periods, and excellent stability.
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-ultrathin-capacitor-enable-energy-efficient-microchips.html
 
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^ This would be cool but, we don't have any fully working reactors yet. Claiming to be able to build a mini-reactor (could power a nice sized house - car etc...) may be a bit premature or even possibly fraud.
 
We can dream…

Problems with fusion found?
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-scientists-solution-long-puzzling-fusion-problem.html

"The results indicate that when designing and operating spherical tokamak experiments, care must be taken to ensure that the plasma pressure does not exceed certain critical values at certain locations in the [facility]," he said. "And we now have a way of quantifying these values through computer simulations."

Stellarators
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-unsuspected-hurdle-stellarator-fusion-facilities.html
Investigation of a possibly critical issue with twisty magnetic stellarators, promising candidates to serve as models for a U.S. fusion pilot plant, has clarified the potential impact of a largely overlooked concern...This is why Roscoe's paper is important: It identifies the problem and proposes an efficient way to evaluate and optimize the stellarator shape to avoid it. This gives us the opportunity to develop stellarator configurations that are even better than existing ones."

Lasers
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-ways-fusion-lasers-magnetic-fields.html

Magnetic record
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-china-world-strongest-steady-magnetic.html
 
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Helion's turbo molecular pump achieves vacuum of 1E-8 TORR borrowing from semiconductor manufacturing:
https://twitter.com/Helion_Energy/status/1179404628510814209?s=20&t=G56VTYoYUQ4dNmUj-L5lwg

work continues on the Polaris reactor. They are still planning to have it running by next year, from what I can read, and net energy production by the year after.



I think we're getting close to a "Rainhill Trials" moment for fusion, if not for energy production itself.
 
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