Secretive fusion company claims reactor breakthrough
news.sciencemag.org
news.sciencemag.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8
Published on Aug 22, 2012 Google Tech Talks November 9, 2006
ABSTRACT This is not your father's fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that's been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.
Dr. Robert Bussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2), has spent 17 years perfecting IEC, a fusion process that converts hydrogen and boron directly into electricity producing helium as the only waste product. Most of this work was funded by the Department of Defense, the details of which have been under seal... until now.
Dr. Bussard will discuss his recent results and details of this potentially world-altering technology, whose conception dates back as far as 1924, and even includes a reactor design by Philo T. Farnsworth (inventor of the scanning television).
Can a 100 MW fusion reactor be built for less than Google's annual electricity bill? Come see what's possible when you think outside the thermonuclear box and ignore the herd.
Google engEDU Speaker: Dr. Robert Bussard
I just found out about that video in the course of checking this comment out, so I have not watched it. No idea what's in it.
Edit edit: Digging around an ethusiast forum at http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewforum.php?f=10 , I see there's also a paper at arxiv.org from Jun 1, 2015: http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0133
Both are pretty good. The Google video has Bussard in it and was made not long before he died.
The Microsoft paper talks about, well a lot of things, but I recall one of the key research items was cusp confinement. The problem with using magnets to control a plasma is the plasma will reject the magnetic field as its density increases. The wiffle ball shape of the resulting plasma of the polywell allows the field lines to penetrate the plasma even at higher density.
For meaningful energy production, they would need say ~10s confinement of 3*10^9 degree plasma (300x the current temp -same as the temperature difference between the Earth and the surface of the Sun ). It's an interesting development, but I'd call the outlook very uncertain.
Their next step is burning D-T fuel (needs 10x temperature increase). Their goal is burning H-B fuel which requires much higher temperatures, but has numerous advantages.
Update: "Tri Alpha is backed by Sam Altman, among other things." -> not at all.
Helion is though, which I think has a much better chance of producing commercial fusion power!
From some blog post of yours, I took the impression that you invested in it, too. On re-reading http://blog.samaltman.com/energy I see my mistake.
I'm correcting my comment.
Why the shudder?
Would be a hell of a wrong horse to bet on ;).
actually here's the one i think i was thinking of
http://blog.samaltman.com/energy
link to helion in the post
Since temperature scales with energy input, they scale up their box to produce the necessary temperatures and start collecting energy. However, as the article points out, not only is there little experience with plasmas at those temperatures, there are challenges with building things at that scale. So not a slam dunk.
That said, if we have a Fusion power plant that requires a Fission power plant to 'start' it will be a challenging thing to commercialize. Once you have a number running you could presumably 'grid start' (use excess power on the grid to start your new plant) but that would make cold start pretty hard. And if the scaling is accurate, you couldn't really turn these things on/off easily so they would have the opposite challenge of renewables which don't provide good base load support as one which can only provide baseload.
The video was quite nicely done. I recommend watching.
Caveat: As with all fusion companies, they're only 10-20 years from being ready to market : )
And always have been ;-)
1. The NIF is and always has been a sideshow for the Nuclear Weapons development research that goes on there.
2. US last serious investment was the TFTR back in the 90s. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/20/fusion-energy-react...
3. IMO ITER is a joke, too large scale.
Presumably, the operative fact here is that it would mostly be other people's money, and no one minds spending that wildly
But again, it's super easy to spend money that isn't yours, to fix problems you don't really understand. It's just not very often useful.
[1] http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/Highlights.pdf
edit: clarity
On page 17, Fusion research for the NIF of ~480M is outlined. We could debate for a long time about how this is more of PR move, and not realistic. In the parent, this is where I talk about Nuclear Weapons research. For this to make power you literally need to drop millions of pellets of gold plated deuterium one after the other to create 'power', all the while firing the lasers like 100X faster than they can currently be fired. You decide if that's attainable.
On page 44, the supposed ~400M a year is outlined and in the discussion notes. "The FY 2014 Budget Request funds U.S. contributions to the ITER project for long-lead procurements required in construction of the facility; the majority of these contributions will be spent on in-kind hardware sourced from U.S. industries, national laboratories, and universities" Which is basically a retelling of my comment about the ITER 'boondoggle'. There is also a gov't sentence on how they money will go to existing projects, which is really lip service to Fusion research and mostly used for Public Education (very good!)
General research on the 'sun' is very far afield to say that it applies to harnessing fusion to create electricity.
Arguing that his idea would be spending "other people's money," is a non-sequitor. Following that logic nobody should have any say in how the government spends money, because no single person is contributing the majority of funding.
the question is "are we ready?". With nuclear energy we were on the brink of nuclear war during various periods of time, and the natural limitations of the technology help to limit the access to it. The success of fusion in non-Tokamak devices, something like inertial confinement and mixed schemas, brings the risk of a new class of weapons, something along neutron bomb (or boosted fission) without fission primary, which thus wouldn't be subject to technological limitations rooted in the fission.
A fusion bomb necessarily needs a transient, extreme ignition, which I believe can only be achieved with a fission bomb (even with the truly massive fission energy building an H-bomb took a while!).
>A fusion bomb necessarily needs a transient, extreme ignition, which I believe can only be achieved with a fission bomb
Inertial confinement doesn't really need much energy. It needs huge power, huge energy density (notice that power != energy). Fission primary is the best way to achieve that of course, yet Sandia Z-machine or LNL NIF lasers achieve power enough for ignition too while not spending any noticeable amount of energy (NIF uses old lasers so it consumes more energy than it would if it was built with today's lasers). Both devices - Z-machine or a NIF-like with the old lasers replaced by modern solid state ones - are already of the size on the scale of 10-20 shipping containers and are capable of burning something like a grain size pellets which creates neutron flux deadly in the area of the size like that LNL NIF building. To me it seems like there are really great chances that either of them would be miniaturized enough to produce a space engine as well as a weapon (to which our civilization doesn't look ready).
Well, when you consider that the Iraq war cost to the USA has been at least 1 trillion (this is not just what the DoD spent), spending tens of billions on fusion research doesn't sound so bad.
Public funding for fusion research in the US and Europe is a waste of money; it's simply providing employment for past generations of fusion researchers, and pouring money down a hole on technologies which will never work.
Tri-Alpha, on the other hand, has something new that might actually work. I went over the patents a few years ago (was going to do a blog on them; got busy); it's quite different from the approaches that get money via public funding, and unlike those approaches, it stands a chance of working.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Methods_for_...
Gravitic containment works.
Might be like an MRI machine. You could quench the magnet every other month, but at what cost and benefit?
1. Ions in the plasma need to interact with each other for enough fusion reactions to occur. For this to happen, the plasma needs to be somewhat dense and the temperature needs to be very high. If the plasma escapes, the temperature and densities fall off rapidly, and the nuclear fusion rate drops quickly. (Nuclear fusion has an incredibly steep temperature dependence --- the triple alpha process, for instance, goes as T^28 or something like that).
2. When the plasma escapes, it interacts with whatever is containing it and can destroy it very quickly.
But I'm an astrophysicist, not a nuclear physicist, so I could very well be wrong. Plasma confinement is much easier in stars. Just let the gravity do the work for you. :)
The problem in general with pulsed systems is that they take a lot of energy to get them from idle to active, and the research machines have miniscule efficiency. The claim is often that "we'll scale this up and it'll be more efficient" but there are always unknown unknowns. Nature is a cruel mistress, especially in the fusion business.
2. If the plasma escapes, I would say you could dump it into a large tank (like a reservoir of water), and extract energy from it.
3 billion degrees... that blows my mind.
Surface temperature of a red dwarf star (e.g. Wolf 359) 2500 C
Melting point of tungsten: 3400 C
I find the idea of making balloon-like objects out of tungsten and gas, with a density less than that of the star's photosphere, and floating them around on the surface of a star to be intriguing. It would be a great location to put a heat engine. A totally sci-fi idea, I know, but still interesting to think about.
The only way of dumping heat would be to radiate it out to space, but "radiation" is a very inefficient way of losing heat. Unless I'm missing some really clever trick, soon your radiator will become about as hot as the surrounding gas, at which point the efficiency (= (T_hot - T_cold) / T_hot) drops to near zero.
* Not a physicist, so I might be wrong. :P
If the photosphere above the heat engine was opaque, then the heat engine would not work. So it makes sense to keep the heat engine near or above the top of the photosphere, without going high enough to overheat near the top of the chromosphere.
It's mainly just a fun idea. I have no plans of trying to build one in the near future. :)
* I am a physicist, but that is no protection against being wrong. ;)
I met David earlier this year at the NASA NIAC symposium, and spent a nice afternoon hanging out with him and Joe Haldeman and his wife. Very nice people! We toured the Swampworks and launch sites at KSC, and talked about practical methods for moving planets. It was a very enjoyable day.
(Yes, questions about the validity of defining temperature in such a system arise :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_rocket#Electricity_gene...
This has the advantage of not needing a power recovery system and the actual power can be external (like solar) and the fusion engine would act more like a souped-up ion engine (with correspondingly ultra-low thrust).