Fusion Research Facility's Final Tritium Experiments Yield New Energy Record (phys.org) 61
schwit1 quotes a report from Phys.Org: The Joint European Torus (JET), one of the world's largest and most powerful fusion machines, has demonstrated the ability to reliably generate fusion energy, while simultaneously setting a world record in energy output. These notable accomplishments represent a significant milestone in the field of fusion science and engineering. In JET's final deuterium-tritium experiments (DTE3), high fusion power was consistently produced for five seconds, resulting in a ground-breaking record of 69 megajoules using a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel.
JET is a tokamak, a design which uses powerful magnetic fields to confine a plasma in the shape of a doughnut. Most approaches to creating commercial fusion favor the use of two hydrogen variants -- deuterium and tritium. When deuterium and tritium fuse together they produce helium and vast amounts of energy, a reaction that will form the basis of future fusion powerplants. Dr. Fernanda Rimini, JET Senior Exploitation Manager, said, "We can reliably create fusion plasmas using the same fuel mixture to be used by commercial fusion energy powerplants, showcasing the advanced expertise developed over time."
Professor Ambrogio Fasoli, Program Manager (CEO) at EUROfusion, said, "Our successful demonstration of operational scenarios for future fusion machines like ITER and DEMO, validated by the new energy record, instill greater confidence in the development of fusion energy. Beyond setting a new record, we achieved things we've never done before and deepened our understanding of fusion physics." Dr. Emmanuel Joffrin, EUROfusion Tokamak Exploitation Task Force Leader from CEA, said, "Not only did we demonstrate how to soften the intense heat flowing from the plasma to the exhaust, we also showed in JET how we can get the plasma edge into a stable state thus preventing bursts of energy reaching the wall. Both techniques are intended to protect the integrity of the walls of future machines. This is the first time that we've ever been able to test those scenarios in a deuterium-tritium environment."
JET is a tokamak, a design which uses powerful magnetic fields to confine a plasma in the shape of a doughnut. Most approaches to creating commercial fusion favor the use of two hydrogen variants -- deuterium and tritium. When deuterium and tritium fuse together they produce helium and vast amounts of energy, a reaction that will form the basis of future fusion powerplants. Dr. Fernanda Rimini, JET Senior Exploitation Manager, said, "We can reliably create fusion plasmas using the same fuel mixture to be used by commercial fusion energy powerplants, showcasing the advanced expertise developed over time."
Professor Ambrogio Fasoli, Program Manager (CEO) at EUROfusion, said, "Our successful demonstration of operational scenarios for future fusion machines like ITER and DEMO, validated by the new energy record, instill greater confidence in the development of fusion energy. Beyond setting a new record, we achieved things we've never done before and deepened our understanding of fusion physics." Dr. Emmanuel Joffrin, EUROfusion Tokamak Exploitation Task Force Leader from CEA, said, "Not only did we demonstrate how to soften the intense heat flowing from the plasma to the exhaust, we also showed in JET how we can get the plasma edge into a stable state thus preventing bursts of energy reaching the wall. Both techniques are intended to protect the integrity of the walls of future machines. This is the first time that we've ever been able to test those scenarios in a deuterium-tritium environment."
Progress is small steps (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad to see continuous small steps forward in fusion energy, just like the small steps necessary for the development of fission reactors. No, fusion hasn't reached the stage where the energy produced will be self sustaining yet, but forward progress is progress.
Congrats to the JET team!
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Re: Progress is small steps (Score:1)
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SPARC should be in operation in 2025.
Helion projects breakeven in 2024.
JET is just doing research with the old system, so they are not even trying actually.
ITER hopes to maintain fusion by 2035. It is a real shame that we invented better magnets only after ITER was build.
I don't understand where you got the 2 year timeline?
Re:Progress is small steps (Score:4, Insightful)
Helion projects breakeven in 2024.
Real breakeven or the fake kind, like what we've seen so far?
Re: Progress is small steps (Score:3)
They claim real break even. Helionâ(TM)s deisgn is, in most people in the knowâ(TM)s opinion, unlikely to work as they expect though.
SPARC is expecting to hit high Q_plasma compatible with electrical break even in 2025-26. It though will not have the hardware for actual electrical generation. ARC is expecting to be an actual working, on the grid, reactor a few years later.
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This is one of those things that just bothers the shit out of me. Not only is the equipment to extract energy from the reactor in a usable fashion absolutely critical to have ready (and extremely non-trivial), but it's also about the symbolic value. One of the very first things that the first experimental atomic reactors (that weren't purely designed for making bombs) had done, in both the USA and the Soviet Union, was connect the coolin
Re: Progress is small steps (Score:2)
Yes, but those reactors all broke even. They were prototypes for industrial reactors. They were not (primarily) science experiments.
ARC, STEP, and DEMO are the equivalent of those reactors. ITER, and SPARC are pure science experiments. Adding a cooling loop to them (which btw they donâ(TM)t have, let alone one connected to a turbine) would massively complicate the design, and serve no purpose other than to delay making the discoveries they need to make.
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Helion projects breakeven in 2024.
I wish them well - it's an interesting design, however AFAIK there was not fusion reaction at all yet for the reverse field configuration devices, so maybe 2024 is planned as the first fusion event, not break even?
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> Helion projects breakeven in 2024.
They have been predicting breakeven and commercial reactors any day now pretty much every year since they formed.
In 2014, they said that they would have commercial reactors in 2019.
In 2015, they said they would have net energy gain in 24 months and a pilot commercial plant in 2019.
In 2016, they said energy gain "in a few years" and commercial power in six years.
In 2018 they said breakeven in less than three years.
All of those have come and gone, without any of these mi
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But also the major issue related to the material science due to be able to sustain the conditions (like neutron bombardment) within the reactor itself.
Tritium production is another limiting factor, given that most of the current fusion reactor designs use that as fuel.
Good progress, and I am not saying we should not invest on it, but investing in newer fission reactors technologies can lead tangible resu
Re: Progress is small steps (Score:4, Informative)
To expand on the tritium point, only a small amount of tritium (a few dozen kilos) exists on the planet at any given time because it has a half-life of only about 12 years. In North America, the primary civilian source is a byproduct of the CANDU reactors in Canada, and that's only a few kilograms per year. The other major source, used for supplying tritium for US nuclear warheads, is a fission reactor in Tennessee where special rods are irradiated over the course of months to produce a few hundred grams of tritium.
To have enough tritium for fusion, effective lithium blankets need to be developed that capture neutrons and produce tritium (Li-6 + n = He-4 + T) to be fed back into the plasma. To my knowledge, this has not yet been demonstrated, though work has been ongoing.
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The primary US source of tritium is, as I mentioned, specialized rods called tritium-producing burnable absorber rods (TPBARs) [pnnl.gov] that are inserted into one of the reactors of the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee. Each rod can produce 1.2 grams of tritium over a lifespan of 600 full-power days. They have run up to 1792 rods at one time, allowing for just under 1.8 kg every 1.65 years. Cooling ponds may produce some tiny amount of tritium, but it is not recovered.
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The US does not have better "designs" than CANDU.
CANDU reactors run on natural uranium. There is nothing imaginable better than that.
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> The US does not have better "designs" than CANDU.
Of course they do. Even AECL does (did).
> CANDU reactors run on natural uranium. There is nothing imaginable better than that.
Running on natural uranium is one of those things that sounds great until you understand the first thing about reactors, and especially their economics.
In the 1950s, enrichment was wildly expensive and quite limited. At that time, running on natural uranium seemed like a good idea. You simply dig up the yellowcake, smelt it, pr
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Well,
instead of making up your mind with random internet mems.
You actually could read a book about it.
Or at least an wikipedia article.
Your post is utter nonsense.
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The sea water is full with Tritium.
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It is not "full" with tritium. On Earth, tritium makes up 10E-18 of hydrogen atoms. There are about 4.6E49 molecules of water on/in Earth. Rounded off, that's about 10E48 hydrogen atoms in water. That means there are about 10E30 tritium atoms in all the water on/in the planet. Using Avogadro's number, that's 10E30/6.023E23, or 1.66 million grams of tritium. So yes, technically there is much more tritium in the oceans, but it is still less than two metric tons in the entire world, and that's only if you coul
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> that's only if you could process the entirety of the world's water supply
And do so more rapidly than the half life is destroying what you collected.
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Interesting!
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> CANDU reactors in Canada, and that's only a few kilograms per year
And that will dwindle as the reactors go out of service and are replaced with non-CANDU designs.
> To my knowledge, this has not yet been demonstrated, though work has been ongoing.
They were supposed to build a test system to demonstrate this... in 1984. That's because they predicted it would take about 20 years to develop the technology to commercial levels, and they expected tokamaks to reach the same level of development around 2000
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Nice to see some progress, but I'm more interested in whether or not it's break-even. Consider the length of time to get here and the cost of the project. It effectively produced enough electricity to charge a single Tesla model 3 to about 25% capacity. We're likely still quite a few generations away from seeing fusion power at any significant scale.
Re:Progress is small steps (Score:4, Informative)
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just like the small steps necessary for the development of fission reactors
Fission technology went from Enrico Fermi's first experimental pile in 1942 to a plant capable of powering a small town in Idaho in 1951. And the primary focus of fission research in the US wasn't nuclear power. It was blowing things up.
We also made it to the moon in less than a decade from project start. What has happened to our engineering capabilities?
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Yeah. If AGW was real, we'd treat solutions like the moon shot. Get it done. Now. Sorry we didn't allow enough time for Green New Deal interests to siphon funds out of the program.
Re: Progress is small steps (Score:4, Insightful)
Who knew?!
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> What has happened to our engineering capabilities?
Attempts to build fusion reactors pre-date both fission and the moon shot. To be exact, the first attempt to make a fusion reactor was in 1938.
So it's not because we've lost engineering capability or can-do attitude. The same people were working on both (literally).
Fusion is just stupidly hard.
1.21 Gigawatts (Score:2)
Nice, keep going until you ready 1.21 Gigawatts!
Great news (Score:5, Insightful)
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TFA should have specified that they consumed more energy than they generated though
A Tokamak reactor is a heat engine, so it needs to generate much more energy than it consumes to make any sense. "Energy breakeven" is a nice milestone, but it doesn't really matter.
Economic breakeven will be much, much harder.
Re:Great news (Score:4, Informative)
This was an end-of-life test, operating JET above its design power level for the highest power level of any tokamak ever to date: 13 MW for 5.2 seconds. It had Q=0.33 because this was not its most efficient power level.
This is 2.6% of ITER's power level for about 1% of its planned operating cycle time -- quite impressive for what is strictly a laboratory instrument. JET will always have a legendary status in fusion power history as it provided the design data and proof of scaling principles used to design ITER, which will be engineering test bed for a full scale power plant.
For perspective (Score:5, Informative)
It is mind boggling they can get that from 0.2 mg of fuel - that is 7.5 million times more energy dense.
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How did you calculate the density of the "0.2 mg fuel" to come to this mind-bogging result?
Re: For perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
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I think his point is that what you compute is not energy density because it is not per volume.
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You do realize TFA is talking about the part of the "fuel" that has reacted, and not the full volume? And you do realize that in a gasoline "reactor", practically all the fuel burns out, right?
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I want my Mr. Fusion for my flying car.
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Too lilttle, too late (Score:1, Interesting)
This probably has pushed the projected break-even point from +30 to +15 years. So let's assume that in 15 years or so this idea will generate enough energy to be financially viable. You then need another 15 years to figure out how to built it at scale, deploy enough of them, and whatnot.
Surprise: we can't wait another 30 years before we *really* reduce CO2 output.
Also, even after these 30 years the tech will hardly be cost effective. Not when compared to building the same power output with a heap of solar a
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So easy to sweep that under the table when comparing nuclear and renewables.
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It's a bit odd that you brought global warming up and used it as a reason to dismiss this research when there's nothing in the title, summary or article posed this as the solution to global warming.
Care to explain why you're so adamantly against researching technology for the future that you'll just make up reasons for it to not be done?
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Look around you. There's heaps of people out there who tout nuclear fusion as THE solution.
Care to explain why "this will never be cost effective compared to solar+wind+storage" is a "made up reason", given that ages-old and well-tested tech (fission reactors) have the exact same problem? The latest French reactor that went online cost about 100 times more than its solar+wind equivalent. You could have built that, bought a heap of batteries, and would still be way ahead, financially as well as environmental
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Fission is not cheaper in China than Solar or wind.
Howe do you come to that stupid idea?
You know nothing about the topic, just bullshit pull out of your ass ideas.
The majority of the cost of those reactors in France have nothing to do with engineering or manufacturing or operating costs.
Then kindly explain what the costs are. Unicorn herding fenris wolfs?
Re: Too lilttle, too late (Score:1)
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More importantly, tritium has problems as a fuel for a commercial reactor because it's not a naturally occurring isotope. It has to be generated, usually by bombarding lithium with neutrons. The only economic source of those neutrons is a nuclear reactor. Currently we do this with fission reactors, where tritium production is a minor byproduct. You can produce some tritium from a fusion reactor, but I can't see how you can get even close to one tritium per fusion reaction in any real-world design.
The
Re:Too lilttle, too late (Score:4, Informative)
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Neutron Embrittlement? (Score:2)
Re:Neutron Embrittlement? (Score:4, Informative)
We are still so far away from a situation where that calculation is relevant, that it is pointless to even talk about it. The current metrics are "did we manage to contain the 0.2 mg of fuel for 5 seconds" or not.
Re: Neutron Embrittlement? (Score:1)
Re: Neutron Embrittlement? (Score:2)
SPARC/ARC have a solution to this. They have a magnet design that can be broken in half. That allows them to remove the entire inner reactor in one step and replace it when its walls become too damaged. This compares very favourably with other reactors where the inner surface must be brought out between the magnet coils in pieces, while working in a radioactive environment.
They also plan to cool the system using molten FLiBe which can be replenished over time in the chemical plant as they extract tritium
Re:Neutron Embrittlement? (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently there are metals that resist embrittlement, which is a problem in fission reactors as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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>> Al is one of those metals
I didn't know that, interesting. One challenge for fusion is capturing the energy efficiently, and from what I can gather it is mostly in the form of high-energy free neutrons. In the ITER tokamak the kinetic energy would be harvested in a water jacket, and it seems like you would want the walls of the containment vessel to be very transparent to neutrons.
The neutrons decay into protons and smaller particles within about 15 minutes, so you wind up with hydrogen byproduct.
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Stop making up stuff. If nobody asks about it, how are there multiple projects geared towards tackling that issue?