Nuclear fusion for the grid is coming much sooner than you think – Telegraph

Credit: ITER

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Credit: ITER

Nuclear fusion has been pursued for decades, but is it now ‘time to drop the old joke that fusion is 30 years away, and always will be’ as the author suggests?
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Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade, claims The Telegraph.

Even well-informed members of the West’s political class are mostly unaware of the quantum leap in superconductors, lasers, and advanced materials suddenly changing the economics of fusion power.

Britain’s First Light Fusion announced last week that it had broken the world record for pressure at the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, pushing the boundary to 1.85 terapascal, five times the pressure at the core of the Earth.

Days earlier, a clutch of peer-reviewed papers confirmed that Commonwealth Fusion Systems near Boston had broken the world record for a large-scale magnet with a field strength of 20 tesla using the latest high-temperature superconducting technology. This exceeds the threshold necessary for producing net energy, or a “Q factor”, above 1.0.

“Overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, plasma doyen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The March edition of the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity published six papers ratifying different aspects of the technology.

The magnets are used to fuse hydrogen isotopes by squeezing super hot plasma inside a tokamak device. The temperature must be ten times hotter than the surface of the sun in order to replicate solar fusion because the Earth’s magnetic field is that much weaker.

The “old” low-temperature magnets are made of niobium alloys operating near absolute zero at -270C. The new magnets lift the temperature from 4 kelvins to 20 kelvins using rare earth barium copper oxide (ReBCO) with a radical new design. They combine superconductivity with extreme magnetic power. This leverages a “multiple order-of-magnitude increase” in fusion capability.

Commonwealth’s chief executive, Bob Mumgaard, told me the game-changing technology scarcely existed 10 years ago, and was still in its infancy five years ago. “The breakthrough is in superconductors. Much stronger magnets mean that we can build a plant that is 40 times smaller,” he said.

It is time to drop the old joke that fusion is 30 years away, and always will be. A poll at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s forum in London found that 65pc of insiders think fusion will generate electricity for the grid at viable cost by 2035, and 90pc by 2040.

The Washington-based Fusion Industry Association says four of its members think they can do it by 2030. If the industry is anywhere close to being right, we need to rethink all our energy assumptions. Britain’s planned gas plants are rendered obsolescent almost before they are built.
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Britain is going gangbusters on all fronts, a legacy of ITER’s Joint European Torus project at Culham, but also a feat of leadership. “Of all the countries in the world, the UK is most aggressively pursuing fusion power,” said American scientists Matthew Moynihan and Alfred Bortz, co-authors of Fusion’s Promise.

Full article here.