U.S. physicists rally around ambitious plan to build fusion power plant

[Mook]

Science | AAAS

www.sciencemag.org

Cliffs: U.S. fusion scientists, notorious for squabbling over which projects to fund with their field’s limited budget, have coalesced around an audacious goal. A 10-year plan presented last week to the federal Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee is the first since the community tried to formulate such a road map in 2014 and failed spectacularly. It calls for the Department of Energy (DOE), the main sponsor of U.S. fusion research, to prepare to build a prototype power plant in the 2040s that would produce carbon-free electricity by harnessing the nuclear process that powers the Sun.

Click to read more...

 

[Mook]

So I might still be alive to see this happen.

 

[Turbocharged400sbc]

ITER is already a dinosaur in its design and they just started assembly of the base reactor housing.....

its all about the OFF THE SHELF superconducting ribbon designs utilized in the spherical tokamak

 

[DEEZUZ]

Yea, that

 

[10sec]

OffshoreDrilling there goes our budgets.

 

[nytebyte]

This won't end well...

 

[Flyn]

LOL! I was thinking there goes the planet, too.

Put the reactor in space and beam down the power. Isaac Asimov and Nikola Tesla had the ideas a long time ago.

 

[Turbocharged400sbc]

Yea.... ITER is a dinosaur. MIT +1

That off-the-shelf high temperature superconducting ribbon material is showing supremely promising results...


"Fusion took a key step forward in its movement from the lab to commercial viability with the successful test of a key technology — a very powerful magnet that uses very little energy.

In the test, the magnet reached 20 tesla, which is a unit of measurement showing the strength of a magnet. (Like the car company, it's named after the engineer Nikola Tesla.) For reference, 20 tesla is 12 times more than the magnetic field of a traditional MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging scan.

It did this while consuming only about 30 watts of energy — several orders of magnitude less than the traditional copper-conducting magnet that MIT had tested previously, which used 200 million watts, said Dennis Whyte, Director of MIT's PSFC and a co-founder of CFS, on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday."

Fusion gets closer with successful test of new kind of magnet at MIT start-up backed by Bill Gates

If fusion can be achieved on earth and commercialized, it will provide a nearly unlimited source of clean energy without producing the waste of nuclear fission.

www.cnbc.com

 

[Turbocharged400sbc]

New superconducting magnet breaks magnetic field strength records, paving the way for fusion energy

It was a moment three years in the making, based on intensive research and design work: On Sept. 5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth. That...

phys.org

 

[Turk]

It’s too late. By 2040s solar and wind will have taken over.

 

[GTPpower]

I have serious doubts that wind will ever take over. Solar, I could see though.

 

[Blownbyyou]

It’s too late. By 2040s solar and wind will have taken over.

Need lots of batteries for back up

 

[OffshoreDrilling]

Need lots of batteries for back up

The battery technology is getting better and better, and batteries already exist. It’s not like we have a prototype fusion reactor running and are working on commercialization. Assuming we successfully build a fusion reactor, it’s going to be decades before it could be put on the grid.

 

[Turk]

The battery technology is getting better and better, and batteries already exist. It’s not like we have a prototype fusion reactor running and are working on commercialization. Assuming we successfully build a fusion reactor, it’s going to be decades before it could be put on the grid.

Exactly. 20 years from now I imagine solar panels and batteries in homes will be the norm.

 

[Turbocharged400sbc]

I wonder how well solar and wind farms would do to power all of the desalination plants that we're going to need to keep people from dying of thirst all over the planet.... it might be enough to Power Industrial processes in a lot of places but probably not enough to power all of the aluminum and steel arc furnace smelting plants

 

[cdh027]

All of this is crap. I read my grandpas popular mechanics mag in the 70's and we were supposed to have flying cars by 2000.