A private company based in California says it has developed a new technology that represents a milestone in fusion energy technology.
TAE Technologies, a 20-year fusion energy developer, said their fusion reactor already has the ability to produce stable plasma at temperatures in excess of 50 million degrees – more than three times the temperature of the sun’s core – and the company said the technology is expected to operate on a commercial scale in a decade to enable fusion power generation.
Nuclear fusion provides clean, environmentally friendly and inherently safe energy with an abundant supply of fuel, unlike the nuclear fission energy used in current nuclear power plants.
This is an incredibly meaningful milestone, says TAE CEO Michl Binderbauer, arguing for a 1990 paper he co-authored with late company co-founder Norman Rostoker. That paper stated that certain plasmas controlled by energetic particles should become increasingly confined and stable as the temperature increases. “We have now been able to demonstrate the behavior of such plasmas with overwhelming evidence. This is a strong validation of the results of our work over the past three decades and a very key milestone for TAE.”
The difference between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission
Current nuclear power plants are nuclear fission power generation, which is very different from nuclear fusion power generation, even though it is only one word away.
Nuclear fission, a form of nuclear reaction in which heavier (higher atomic number) atoms, primarily uranium or plutonium, are fissioned into lighter atoms. The atomic bomb makes use of the heat generated by fission.
Nuclear fusion, a form of nuclear reaction in which two lighter nuclei are combined to form a heavier nucleus and a very light nucleus (or particle). Both the hydrogen bomb and the energy emitted by the sun harness the energy of nuclear fusion.
Because of the many potential benefits of fusion power generation, it has long been considered an ideal source of energy. Nuclear fusion does not produce long-lived and highly radioactive nuclear waste. And the risk of accidents at fusion plants is very limited; if fusion reactor containment is lost, the fusion reaction will stop and an explosion or massive energy release is unlikely. Most of the raw materials for fusion power generation are also abundantly stored, such as deuterium-tritium fusion reactions, where the raw material deuterium can be taken directly from seawater, and the sources are almost inexhaustible. But the earth has no tritium resources, can only be produced by neutron reaction with lithium-6 (6Li), which involves the problem of lithium resources, as well as a large number of neutron multiplication materials, such as beryllium, lead, etc., these resources are limited. TAE company uses hydrogen and boron as fusion raw materials, its reserves are very rich, including boron ore reserves in the world about 1.1 billion tons. Hydrogen reserves are also very abundant and can even be extracted directly from water.
Why not use nuclear fusion to generate electricity?
There are so many advantages of nuclear fusion for power generation, and scientists have known the principle of nuclear fusion for a long time (e.g. the test explosion of hydrogen bomb with fusion reaction as the energy source is only 7 years later than the test explosion of atomic bomb with fission as the energy source), why don’t we use nuclear fusion for power generation? The reason is that the conditions that prompt fusion to occur are difficult to recreate.
Simply put, in order for a fusion plant to produce electricity for commercial use, the plasma needs to be confined to a temperature that is “hot enough” so that the plasma can move vigorously, thereby increasing the probability of collision with each other for fusion to occur; it also needs to be confined for a time that is “long enough” to ensure that fusion reactions continue to occur. to ensure that fusion reactions continue to occur; and that the energy produced by fusion in the process is greater than the energy input to make it commercially viable. (Note: Plasma is a gas heated to a high temperature so that electrons are separated from the atoms, but the positively charged nucleus and the negatively charged electrons coexist with each other in a macroscopic electrically neutral manner.)
In the case of the Sun, for example, the Sun produces energy through nuclear fusion. The mass of the sun forms a strong gravitational force (equivalent to 300 billion atmospheres) that draws the plasma tightly together. Under such conditions, the core temperature of the sun, although only 15 million degrees Celsius, enables nuclear fusion to be continuously generated, thus releasing a constant flow of energy.
And on Earth, it is impossible to form the sun so much pressure, scientists will have to work on the temperature. If the temperature is too low to form self-sustaining fusion, a constant input of energy is needed to sustain the fusion reaction, making the heat obtained less than the energy needed to input the heating, and it is no longer commercially viable.
The significance of TAE’s latest achievement
- long enough: TAE said in 2015 that their reactor at the time (a previous generation reactor) proved that their company’s method could sustain the plasma indefinitely – meaning that once a fusion reaction starts it can go on forever.
Reactor temperature maintenance: TAE’s current compact reactor, “Norman,” has demonstrated stable operation at 50 million degrees Celsius in 18 months of testing, and the cycle has been repeated hundreds of times. This means that the “hot enough” temperature has been reached.
The Norman reactor has performed more than 25,000 fully integrated fusion reactor core experiments and optimized them using the most advanced computational processes available, including leveraging the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) tens of billions of computing power and learning intelligence robots from companies such as Google.
TAE’s fusion uses a new technology called field-reversed configuration (FRC). Instead of relying on deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion, the technology uses hydrogen-boron fusion. Although this fusion reaction requires temperatures at least an order of magnitude higher, it has the advantage of not producing high-energy neutrons as complex as DT fusion.
Benderbauer said the “Norman” milestone has convinced them that they can apply it to real-world economic activities. “As we transition from the scientific validation phase to a business model solution (phase) that includes fusion and power management technologies, TAE will become a significant contributor to the modernization of the entire energy grid.”
Because of this achievement, TAE has raised $280 million, bringing its total financing to $880 million, one of the most financed private fusion projects in the world.
They will use part of the financing to develop a facility called Copernicus, which will operate at temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees Celsius, a factor of one higher than current temperatures, to eventually apply the technology commercially.
The results have been reviewed and approved by the company’s independent scientific panel, which includes multiple Nobel and Maxwell Prize winners and corporate board members, including former CEO Jeffrey Immelt, former Morgan Stanley chief executive officer John M. Mackenzie, and former CEO John Mackenzie. John Mack, former chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley, Richard Meserve, chairman emeritus of the Carnegie Institution for Science and former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Ernest Moniz, former U.S. Secretary of Energy. Moniz, former U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, and others.
According to Tech Crunch, TAE has not yet generated electricity through a fusion reactor, and the company will not in the foreseeable future. “The energy is super small, it’s invisible, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” Benderbauer said. “In terms of its energy identifiability, we can use it for diagnostics.”
Their company’s next goal is to apply the technology to create the necessary conditions for fusion reactions to produce energy.
Other nuclear fusion
France is currently building another fusion project called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a $25 billion mega-reactor that is being co-financed by seven groups of 35 countries.ITER aims to be able to achieve sustained plasma burning by 2035. Once that goal is reached, the project is expected to take another decade to launch a full-scale power generator of experimental nature.
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