The rumble in the reactor!
Forget about unreliable, intermittent wind and solar power! What a waste of resources! What a regression!
Will machine learning & AI finally design a working and effective nuclear fusion reactor? You bet!
"The doughnut-shaped tokamak is the familiar face of fusion reactors. But many researchers—and startup companies—are beginning to realize that its twistier cousin, the stellarator, has better prospects as a future power plant. They’ve gotten less attention over the years because they performed less well and are tough to build, but in operation a stellarator should just purr along like a kitten, compared to the twitchier tokamak.
The ultimate test of stellarators and other fusion reactors is to get their fuel of ionized hydrogen to a temperature and pressure where nuclei will fuse, something that no reactor has achieved except in the brief laser flashes at the National Ignition Facility in California. Tokamaks and stellarators both used complex systems of magnets to hold the ionized gas, or plasma, in place while it is heated. Tokamaks have long performed best at holding onto particles and heat but are prone to potentially damaging “disruptions” when the plasma breaks free.
After decades of work trying to understand why stellarators underperform, researchers believe they have computed out their shortcomings.
The key is a series of bizarrely twisted magnets to produce an exact magnet field to hold onto particles. Now the largest stellarator yet built, Wendelstein 7-X, is beginning to compete with similar tokamaks. Investors have noticed and a bevy of companies are now hoping to commercialize stellarators. Over the past few weeks, several of them—Type One Energy, Proxima Fusion, and Thea Energy—have published magnet test results and reactor designs that they believe could be generating electricity by the end of next decade. “People are coming to realize the stellarator maybe is the way to go,” says Type One vice president Chris Hegna."
"Type One Energy announced today publication of the world’s first comprehensive, self-consistent, and robust physics basis, with conservative design margins, for a practical fusion pilot power plant. This physics basis is presented in a series of seven peer-reviewed scientific papers in a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP). They serve as the foundation for the company’s first Infinity Two stellarator fusion power plant project, which Type One Energy is developing for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) utility in the U.S.
The Infinity Two fusion pilot power plant physics design basis realistically considers, for the first time, the complex relationship between competing requirements for plasma performance, power plant startup, construction logistics, reliability, and economics utilizing actual power plant operating experience. This Infinity Two baseline physics solution makes use of the inherently favorable operating characteristics of highly optimized stellarator fusion technology using modular superconducting magnets, as was so successfully proven on the W7-X science machine in Germany. ..."
Physics Basis of the Infinity Two Fusion Power Plant "This special issue’s six peer-reviewed articles provide a comprehensive physics basis for a fusion pilot power plant, Type One Energy’s Infinity Two stellarator. The completion of this study is a major achievement in efforts to commercialize fusion energy based on the stellarator confinement concept."
Wendelstein 7-X
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