Posted: 5/25/2015
Trigger
Just read “The new shape of fusion”. This is a summary of current developments in tokamak fusion reactor technology. In particular, it contrasts torus versus spherical shaped tokamaks.
Compact Spherical Reactors
“ Later, one of the company's suppliers showed them a new multilayered conducting tape, made with the high-temperature superconductor yttrium-barium-copper-oxide, that promised a major performance boost.
Lacking electrical resistance, superconductors can be wound into electromagnets that produce much stronger fields than conventional copper magnets. ITER will use low-temperature superconductors for its magnets, but they require massive and expensive cooling. High-temperature materials are cheaper to use but were thought to be unable to withstand the strong magnetic fields around a tokamak—until the new superconducting tape came along. The company changed direction, was renamed Tokamak Energy, and is now testing a first-generation superconducting spherical tokamak no taller than a person.
Superconductors allow a tokamak to confine a plasma for longer. Whereas NSTX and MAST can run for only a few seconds, the team at Tokamak Energy this year ran their machine—albeit at low temperature and pressure—for more than 15 minutes. In the coming months, they will attempt a 24-hour pulse—smashing the tokamak record of slightly over 5 hours.
Next year, the company will put together a slightly larger machine able to produce twice the magnetic field of NSTX-U. The next step—investors permitting—will be a machine slightly smaller than Princeton's but with three times the magnetic field.”
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that this private company or any other private company can finally pull of the feat of generating energy through nuclear fusion.
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