Fusion energy: Mastering plasma hotter than the centre of the Sun with tiny tokamaks
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fusion-energy-mastering-plasma-hotter-centre-sun-tiny-tokamaks-1610676By Richard Dinan, March 9, 2017
Using smaller reactors, Applied Fusion Systems hopes to move nuclear fusion forward within four to six years.
...The problem was that to get fusion reactions to occur within the plasma, you need extremely high temperatures (300M Kelvin). That's much hotter than the center of the sun. The plasma suffers "vibrations" under powerful magnetic confinement in the tokamaks, and these vibrations stop the reaction. This gave way to the physics of "gyrokinetics" and "magneto hydrodynamics", which are very complex studies of the understanding of plasma physics necessary to master nuclear fusion in tokamaks.
Of course there were other setbacks. Fusion is not a weapon unlike fission, which we utilise in today's nuclear power stations. There also wasn't as much demand for clean energy then as there is now. Fusion required huge funding and was still known to be very hard to achieve. Fusion also desperately needed development funding, but governments were in no hurry to pledge billions of dollars to the cause.
Luckily for fusion scientists, when achieved, fusion is capable of producing a million times more energy than a combustion or chemical reaction, but without producing long lived, radioactive waste or the use of materials like uranium.
So big is the payoff that it managed to survive the redundancy of government pragmatism. Finally, following the success at JET and after many years of deliberation and time wasting, seven countries signed up to fund ITER in 2006. The International, thermo-nuclear experimental reactor was given a budget of €5bn (£4.3bn).
To pledge this funding, governments wanted to be certain that it would work, and it must produce more energy than it uses up. Once this is demonstrated, then they can start commissioning and building fusion power stations.
TER predicted it to produce 10 times more power than will be required to run it. Scientists had to convince government funding powers that ITER would work. They had to navigate around the problem of these vibrations. One way to do this was size. In short, scientists found that the larger the reactor, the less of a problem these plasma vibrations were proving to be.
So one way to satisfy governments of the success of ITER was to make it large – almost 60ft tall and weighing over 23,000 tonnes.
Essentially, ITER was made so large as a direct result of a lack of understanding of the control and behaviour of plasma. Originally based on a 1990s design and without today's supercomputing powers, size was the only way to guarantee its success.
Since then, ITER's budget has grown to €12bn (£10.4bn) and the project is not set to turn on until 2040 after suffering many long setbacks. Again, this is largely due to the size of the project, the many contractors and the suggested improvements made along the way, as modern technology taught us more about this science. The perfect storm for an organisational catastrophe.
ITER has become an enormous sector funding drain, as governments are obviously reluctant to invest more into fusion until their €12bn experiment has turned on – and succeeded. Ultimately, there is no fusion funding from governments until 2040. This is a shame.
As an entrepreneur and non-scientist, I believe the real success is funding fusion. Private companies must step up. Modern supercomputing has revealed so much about plasma physics. It has shown us that the biggest breakthrough in fusion will not be stronger rare earth magnets, or more advanced materials, but understanding of the behaviour of plasma under confinement.
This will pave the way for modern, smaller reactor design. Smaller is cheaper and faster by default. Smaller reactors can be prototyped more efficiently, and it is my belief that this is the only way meaningful breakthroughs will be made in this sector before ITER turns on in 2040 (or longer).
That's why I've founded Applied Fusion Systems. We are now in the process of process of privately financing the construction of our own British made Tokamak reactor – STAR (Small Toroidal Atomic Reactor).
The designers behind STAR have compiled elements from some of the most successful reactors over the past 20 years and applied the very latest technologies, combined with a cutting edge understanding of plasma physics.
We hope that we can get the £200m funding we need to construct two spherical tokomak nuclear fusion reactors, with the intentions to generate data and results within the next four to six years....
