UK Startup Achieves 'Projectile Fusion' Breakthrough (ft.com) 46
A British startup pioneering a new approach to fusion energy has successfully combined atomic nuclei, in what the UK regulator described as an important step in the decades-long effort to generate electricity from the reaction that powers the sun. From a report: Oxford-based First Light Fusion, which has been developing an approach called projectile fusion since 2011, said it had produced energy in the form of neutrons by forcing deuterium isotopes to fuse, validating years of research. While other fusion experiments have generated more power for longer, either by using "tokamak" machines or high-powered lasers, First Light says its approach, which involves firing a projectile at a target containing the fuel, could offer a faster route to commercial fusion power. "The value of this [result] is that it offers potentially a much cheaper, a much easier path to power production," said chief executive Nicholas Hawker.
To achieve fusion, First Light used a hyper-velocity gas gun to launch a projectile at a speed of 6.5km per second -- about 10 times faster than a rifle bullet -- at a tiny target designed to amplify the energy of the impact and force the deuterium fuel to fuse. The design of the target -- a clear cube, a little over a centimetre wide, enclosing two spherical fuel capsules -- is the key technology and is closely guarded by the company. "It is the ultimate espresso capsule," Hawker told the Financial Times last year. First Light, which is backed by China's Tencent, hopes to manufacture and sell the targets to future power plants -- built to its design -- which would need to vaporise one every 30 seconds to generate continual power. Further reading: So How Close Are We Now to Nuclear Fusion Energy? (August 2021).
To achieve fusion, First Light used a hyper-velocity gas gun to launch a projectile at a speed of 6.5km per second -- about 10 times faster than a rifle bullet -- at a tiny target designed to amplify the energy of the impact and force the deuterium fuel to fuse. The design of the target -- a clear cube, a little over a centimetre wide, enclosing two spherical fuel capsules -- is the key technology and is closely guarded by the company. "It is the ultimate espresso capsule," Hawker told the Financial Times last year. First Light, which is backed by China's Tencent, hopes to manufacture and sell the targets to future power plants -- built to its design -- which would need to vaporise one every 30 seconds to generate continual power. Further reading: So How Close Are We Now to Nuclear Fusion Energy? (August 2021).
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Very true. It would, if it was scalable and reactors relatively easy to manufacture, pretty much change the entire energy equation. Even if took 20 years to get from prototype to large scale roll out of fusion power plants, it would bring cheap power to millions, if not billions. EVs would pretty much take over the world far more quickly, every fossil fuel fired power plant would be shut down, and oil use would plummet (currently 40 out of every 100 barrels of oil go to power some form of transportation). M
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currently 40 out of every 100 barrels of oil go to power some form of transportation
You sure that isn't 80 out of 100? As far as I'm aware, just gasoline and diesel fuel comprise ~75% of oil distillates. Some of the heavy residual fractions also go into ships.
Gasoline mainly energy carrier for electricity... (Score:2)
and natural gas used to refine oil into gasoline, as explained here: http://evnut.com/gasoline_oil.... [evnut.com]
"How much electricity does it take to make a gallon of gasoline? We don't know - but here's one stab at it. Ballpark figures only, and NOT a supportable conclusion. The most important message to take away is that it is not trivial! This part of gasoline is ignored by the folks who are concerned about the big impact on our electrical grid if we were to suddenly shift all transportation from gasoline to elect
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Now we will have a cheap and unlimited energy. What do you think will happen? I think huma
Re: A fusion reactor would allow global cooling. (Score:2)
Yeah the last sentence there is the most realistic, sorry.
Re:A fusion reactor would allow global cooling. (Score:5, Informative)
The Earth gets around 7000x more energy from the Sun than the entire human race consumes, so even if we switched to 100% fusion energy and then tripled our total consumption, it'd still be a tiny fraction of even normal solar variation - lost in the noise. The Earth's own radioactive decay produces vastly more energy than we could.
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Heat energy is not the problem (yet)
Maladaptive excess was a theme in Midas World... (Score:2)
a world powered by cheap fusion energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ..."
The specific chapter: ""The Lord of the Skies" (originally published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories in 1983). Earth has been ravaged by the heat produced by nuclear fusion and most human beings now live in Earth orbit.
You're right that humans need a change of heart to thrive with advanced technology. See also my comment here (or my sig) for a different angle on that: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
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What you are failing to account for in your calculations is the waste energy in each method of production. If nuclear fusion has 10% waste energy (in the form of heat) and fossil fuel energy production has 50% waste energy (again in heat and yes these numbers are just being pulled out of the air as examples) then even if we use 5x as much energy from nuclear fusion we are no worse off than using fossil fuels.
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Forgot to add that with nuclear fusion we also don't have the build up of CO2 trapping the energy we are constantly getting from the sun. That would need to be figured into your calculations as well.
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All energy from fission, fusion, or fossil fuels ultimately ends up as heat - some during generation, the rest during use (through direct heating, friction, or by being emitted, absorbed then re-radiated as heat). Even energy that is stored (chemically, gravitational potential etc) will eventually dissipate or get used, and will wind up as heat. Best you can hope is that some of that is radiated into space.
Only energy derived from the Sun (solar, wind) or geothermal will not add extra heat, and that only be
Not hard to fuse atoms together (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people with a reasonable amount of effort can do this in their garage and you can fuse a few atoms together. The real problem is net energy gain and not destroying your apparatus in the process. The article mentions absolutely nothing about how much energy or how much fusion they are attaining.
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Not to mention, capturing and using the energy. All the articles are light on details. There is nothing I can find about the technique except the company's won website, which is all fluff. You'd think if this was not pure bunk, there would be some scientific literature describing the technique. I can't find any. It's like these guys appeared out of the blue, today.
But who knows, it sounds plausible at least. It's doing some kind of focused cavity collapse thing, they say they were inspired by cavitation and
Re: Not hard to fuse atoms together (Score:1)
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This particular scheme isn't obviously crazy but right now their energy yield is about 1e-17 of the energy they put in. Their projectiles are 6.5Km/s and they probably need ~100Km/s and maybe quite a bit more. Shock waves behave differently at high temperatures - X-ray radiation starts to become a big issue etc. Might work, I think collision fusion is worth studying
Re: Not hard to fuse atoms together (Score:2)
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This reminds me of EESTOR [wikipedia.org]. Different company. Same pitch.
Re:Not hard to fuse atoms together (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Not hard to fuse atoms together (Score:4, Informative)
Fusion is easy. Getting more energy out of fusion than you put in is what is hard. There are a LOT of ways to do fusion, from Farnsworth fusor (which is not hard to build in your garage) to explosively driven shock tunnels, to deuterium guns etc etc. None of those have any hope of getting to breakeven,.
I think this https://firstlightfusion.com/s... [firstlightfusion.com] is the orginal source. They have detected neutrons but so far the efficiency is very low.
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Getting more energy out of fusion than you put in is what is hard
Eh... not so much. Some plutonium, some tritium, some conventional explosives, and you will get many orders of magnitude more energy out than you put in... Being able to use the energy you get out (and, as someone else noted above, not destroying the apparatus) is what it hard.
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Fusion bombs use fission to get to them started so it's cheating
Very skeptical (Score:3)
The article is paywalled, but apparently their accomplishment was "produced energy in the form of neutrons by forcing deuterium isotopes to fuse". There are quite a few impractical, unscalable techniques out there that can produce some neutrons from some sort of fusion. Firing little pellets at each other once in a while seems no more feasible than shooting a giant array of lasers at a target every so often.
Here's one that also uses kinetic compression, and they seem to have it pretty well thought out;
https://generalfusion.com/tech... [generalfusion.com]
Re:Very skeptical (Score:5, Informative)
Their technique is covered in a video from 2019 (start around 8 mins):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Interesting! So they would use liquid lithium to capture the neutron energy and carry it away to boil water.
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Interesting! So they would use liquid lithium to capture the neutron energy and carry it away to boil water.
Lithium and water, what could go wrong [youtube.com]? :-)
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Somebody might forget to include an intermediate heat transfer stage, using (say) mineral oil to take the heat from the lithium and transfer it (the heat, not the lithium) to the steam generator.
Wow, that was difficult! It's almost as if people have given this more thought than you have.
Actually, as long as the lithium is on the high-pressure side of the heat exchanger, a leaky pipe isn't that much of a problem. You'd need to monitor the pH of the boiler water (w
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It's almost as if people have given this more thought than you have.
You did see the smiley at the end, right?
Or were you too busy thinking about being bitchy?
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Update, per a link below to the register, it sounds like how they fire the projectile has changed!
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
First Light's equipment instead shoots a tungsten projectile out of a gas-powered gun at a target dropped into a chamber
The rest sounds similar.
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These have been around since the 1960s, when space agencies started building them to study the impact of (micro-) meteorites on spacecraft materials.
I remember seeing a program years ago about the NASA gun, which is located in some Redneck state full of gun-mad wingnuts, and noticing that the castings from which the barrel was machined included moulded-in lettering implying that the manufacturer of the castings expected to make enough of them to need serial num
Theme of the 2000's (Score:4)
Re: Change the course of humility (Score:2)
Ah. I see what you did there.
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Precisely. You will notice that they don't offer to sell electricity. If they actually had something they could basically control the world electricity market. Instead they offer to show you how to build a special fusion reactor that uses one of their sooper secret targets every 30 seconds.
That doesn't sounds suspicious at all.
Non paywalled article (Score:3, Informative)
First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets [theregister.com]
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It does however use a fancy extremely high velocity gas gun with an inherently very low repetition rate, and, like current ICF work, fancy complex tiny targets. The ones used in the recent NIF work achieving the very lowest level of "breakeven" that LLNL could define (not what is normally meant) cost more than a million dollars to make. Investing in fancy magnets that are simply a capital expense and burning hydrogen gas is likely a far more cost-effective solution than one that pushes most of the cost into
Orignial Source (I think) no paywall (Score:2)
If I'm reading correctly they have O(100) neutrons form a 100g projectile at 6.5km/s. Not at all clear how this scales with impact velocity, but at the moment the efficiency is very low.
br. I'm not suggesting its a bad idea, just that there isn't enough information on scalign to know where breakeven would happen and if that is practical with this approach
Oy Veh Inertial confinement again. (Score:4, Interesting)
About the only things it's good for are Simulating H-Bombs and investigating extreme realms of physics. Not that these aren't important but when it comes to power generation it's not in the list. If magnetic confinement is 50 years away, inertial confinement is 500 years away.
It's hard to imagine how anyone gets conned into these projects. If you just think about how the process goes you're going to say these guys make net energy generation from a tokomak look easy.
Just go through what needs to happen.
1 You need focus enough energy on your target either by bombarding it with some form of particle beam (Usually a high energy laser) or you need to make your fusion target hit something hard enough you get fusion.
2. You need to do this in a vessel that can survive the explosion that happens.
3. The mechanism you used to trigger the reaction needs to survive the explosion as well. In the case of lasers they are currently the size of a football field and very delicate. If it's using a gas gun like this it's not as delicate but shoving out a projectile at 6.5 km/s is going to make any target seem delicate.
4. You need to repeat the process rapidly enough to generate megawatts to gigawatts of power. Lasers that can fire at best once per hour, or gas guns that will have the barrels wear down after no more than a few hundred shots, just don't cut it.
5. You need all this contained in a mechanism that can actually extract power from the process while surviving it.
6. This all needs to be done cheaply enough that you can actually repay the capital costs with a profit.
3 and 4 th generation nuclear plants are already here, safe and well understood. This is just a waste.
This is the experimental proof... (Score:2)