UK's Newest Tokamak Fusion Reactor Has Created Its First Plasma (futurism.com)

After being switched on for the first time last Friday, the UK's newest fusion reactor has successfully generated a molten mass of electrically-charged gas, or plasma, inside its core. Futurism reports: Called the ST40, the reactor was constructed by Tokamak Energy, one of the leading private fusion energy companies in the world. The company was founded in 2009 with the express purpose of designing and developing small fusion reactors to introduce fusion power into the grid by 2030. Now that the ST40 is running, the company will commission and install the complete set of magnetic coils needed to reach fusion temperatures. The ST40 should be creating a plasma temperature as hot as the center of the Sun -- 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit) -- by Autumn 2017. By 2018, the ST40 will produce plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), another record-breaker for a privately owned and funded fusion reactor. That temperature threshold is important, as it is the minimum temperature for inducing the controlled fusion reaction. Assuming the ST40 succeeds, it will prove that its novel design can produce commercially viable fusion power.

Comments

That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether it produces more energy out than it takes to maintain tells you it can run. I *assume* it passes this because prototype designs in a lab have managed, but this needn't be the case. Then it has to produce it with enough gain to make it a viable scale producer for the cost. Still not commercially viable yet. The running costs for maintenance and fixing need to be less than the viable profit next. And then decommissioning and cleanup costs have to be deducted. After that, insurance costs. Finally it has to last long enough to pay back investors and the sunk costs.

After all that, it proves it's commercially viable.

Solar and wind had to pass those tests.

Nukes in a changing climate over the timescale of a plant's lifetime means it fails the commercial lifetime test now. You can't guarantee a useful site for cooling will remain viable long enough to pay back the sunk costs.

And depending on whether this needs similar levels of cooling water (fracked water at that...) would stymie this the same way.

If deniers and do-nothings and anti-ecology idiots had not been so invested in their mantras, 30 years ago we could have cut enough that the future was a little more certain. But their intransigence and stupidity (and cupidity) has delayed things that we can't be sure the nuclear age can even start yet.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[CustomSolvers2]

Eventually fusion will have a role in special applications

A magic wand would also be useful there. Unfortunately, the transition from dreaming about an ideal solution and actually creating such a solution is quite difficult or even completely/practically impossible.

In any case, if you want to go deeper into elucubrations about the possible applications of what doesn't exist (and perhaps will never do), you should bring both positive and negative issues into account. For example, even by assuming that you are able to safely generate electricity from fusion power, you should bear in mind all the problems which that alternative will always provoke. Even in an ideal scenario, it will have to be used under very specific conditions (we are talking about sun-like temperatures!!! Something extremely dangerous whose confinement will certainly imply lots of constraints on many fronts). So, forget about putting all this in a spaceship or creating a portable device which you might bring anywhere. It will require extremely-expensive, huge, non-moveable facilities under constant surveillance and located in very specific areas. A particle accelerator or the whole CERN probably represent the best present-day examples of how an eventual fusion power plant might look like.

Fission power is much more adaptable than what the fusion power would ever be: on one hand, you have some dangerous materials which only need to be adequately contained; on the other hand, you have theoretically-much-less-dangerous materials but needing crazily high temperatures, what can only be generated with very expensive and complex equipment under very specific conditions. There is a very good reason why we first tried fission power: it is orders of magnitude easier, safer, more certain, controllable and adaptable than what fusion power will ever become; it is dealing with dangerous stuff vs. dealing with a whole sun!!

The problem for basically every source of energy is that renewables are cheap and growing rapidly, and so is storage. It's very hard to compete with that.

Why do you complain about objectively better alternatives outputting better results? Why do you think that you have to invest lots of money in something when you can get the same for a fraction of that? To accomplish a dream of someone? Even though that dream might be a pure nonsense and/or extremely dangerous (another very important issue: we will not know the real problems of fusion until after having suffered them; exactly the same than happened with fission, originally also assumed to be a magic wand expected to solve everything, and with any other innovation ever)? What you want is a cheaper way to generate cleaner energy, not to make something happen no matter what. If renewables are cheaper and easier why don't you spend all the planned-in-fusion huge amounts of money on them? Why not over-optimising what certainly works or adapting your needs to what you can get rather than pursuing the magic-wand solution? Or what is even worse: why complaining about the most practical alternatives to be much more affordable than the magic-wand research and seeing that as an excuse to continue their unmotivated over-funding?

Sorry to blow your bubble but, until this moment, there is only one good reason for continuing the tremendously-expensive-and-far-from-practical research on fusion energy: supporting theoretical/dreamy/other expectations for whatever reason, where practical and objective concerns are being (not sure if consciously) plainly ignored.

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there are a class of small nuclear reactors referred to as 'nuclear batteries'; Here's one;

http://thefutureofthings.com/3299-hyperion-nuclear-batteries/

Re:That won't prove commercially viable power

[zwarte piet]

Power grids are linked across countries in Europe. It isn't unusual to borrow power from a neighbouring country only to return the favour later. So if the wind is still in Denmark for a while, it might not be in Germany. Germany uses massive amounts of solar btw, even though it is not a super sunny place.

Make a fair comparison

[sjbe]

Still waiting for solar to pass its commercial viability test and I suspect wind power is a similar story.

Either you are willfully ignoring facts or you don't understand them. Solar has been economically viable in a wide variety of circumstances for quite a few years now. It's not the cheapest option everywhere (nothing is) but it's easily competitive in a great many places. Even better it's cost per unit of power generated has been dropping very rapidly with no evidence of an end in sight.

So far it only succeeds here in the UK because of government subsidies.

I could say the same thing about oil and gas in the UK. The UK subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of billions per year directly, not to mention the indirect subsidy of not requiring coal and oil to pay the full cost of their emissions. Solar is already competitive with coal and oil in many situations and it is easily competitive if you compare the full cost of each which folks like yourself arguing against solar tend not to do.

If I pay for and install my own 5kWh solar system the returns over 20 years don't cover the cost of the initial installation, let alone a replacement inverter after 10 years or any other maintenance.

The plural of anecdote is not data. Even if we take your statement at face value (and we shouldn't), it doesn't follow that there are no solar installations anywhere (UK or elsewhere) that do not recoup their costs. It is a trivial exercise to find examples of solar installations that pay for themselves within their operational lifespan.

Circumstance dependant

[sjbe]

And I'm not against green energy, just against stupid catch all remarks that say something is better than something else or has some specific ROI without taking into account any specifics.

We are in accord on that point.

Residential wind hasn't taken off for a simple reason, it is incredibly inefficient.

Again, whether residential wind power is useful is circumstance dependent. Sometimes it makes perfect sense as a supplement even on a home installation. I know a few local hobby farms that have smallish wind turbines which were economically sensible for their location. And who said it had to be residential? Communities can install large wind turbines and share the power. If rooftop solar doesn't work and the geography doesn't work for residential wind, then get the neighbors together for a large wind turbine. Battery systems for both home and grid scale are starting to become a real thing too.

Where my house is located (near the upper Great Lakes) wind doesn't make much sense but both grid and residential turbines make a ton of sense just 80 miles from my house and in fact are used. Conversely our local power company and a fair number of houses have solar installations which work great. Just our local geography. No one power source fits every circumstance and location.

No one here said anything like that, read through the thread again.

The claim was "Except solar definitely does not in the wonderful cloudy parts of the world near the north sea." which has nothing specifically to do with residential. Furthermore my statement was something of a more general statement aimed towards the people who invariably and unhelpfully point out that the sun doesn't shine 24/7.

Re:So use what you have

[hackertourist]

The UK has 2 large pumped-storage stations, Dinorwig and Ffestiniog are good for 4 GW combined.