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MIT Plans To Build Nuclear Fusion Plant By 2033
Mallory Locklear reports via Engadget: MIT announced yesterday that it and Commonwealth Fusion Systems -- an MIT spinoff -- are working on a project that aims to make harvesting energy from nuclear fusion a reality within the next 15 years. The ultimate goal is to develop a 200-megawatt power plant. MIT also announced that Italian energy firm ENI has invested $50 million towards the project, $30 million of which will be applied to research and development at MIT over the next three years. MIT and CFS plan to use newly available superconducting materials to develop large electromagnets that can produce fields four-times stronger than any being used now. The stronger magnetic fields will allow for more power to be generated resulting in, importantly, positive net energy. The method will hopefully allow for cheaper and smaller reactors. The research team aims to develop a prototype reactor within the next 10 years, followed by a 200-megawatt pilot power plant.
A functional fusion reactor that's commercially viable seems to be perpetually 15-20 years in the future.
Next......
FYI, the CEO of this new company (Bob Mumgaard) and CTO (Dan Brunner) helped answer the questions asked in the Ask MIT Fusion Researchers About Fusion Power in April 2012: https://hardware.slashdot.org/... Prof. Dennis Whyte and Dr. Martin Greenwald were also on that thread and are now core members of the founding team of the new startup (although they remain employed by MIT).
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
The secret to getting away with a bullshit promise is to set the promised payoff so far in the future that you'll be long gone by the time people realize you were full of shit. See every American President for the last 50 years who's promised we'll put a man on Mars just 30 years after he leaves office.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If they can use higher magnetic fields, that increases the pressure and decreases required volume of the reactor to get to breakeven.
That said, the picture the show looks really small even with high field magnets .
We'll see. There have been a lot of claims of practical fusion in the next few years. So far non have worked, but its not fundamentally impossible.
I'm not sure fusion will ever be economical even if we get it working. Fusion has to compete against direct conversion technologies, where energy is directly converted from its original form into electricity.
Solar voltaic converts light energy directly into electricity. Wind turbines turn energy from moving air directly into electricity. Gas turbines burn natural gas directly in turbines that generate electricity.
Most fusion reactions create a lot of their energy in the form of fast neutrons, whose energy can't be converted to electricity directly, but must instead be used to heat up steam, and the hot steam then is used to turn turbines and generate electricity. This is indirect conversion, and the argument I've heard is that steam conversion plants cost more all by themselves than many direct conversion technologies do--therefore fusion reactions that generate the bulk of energy in fast neutrons will be uneconomical by comparison.
Coal plants too, incidentally--there's a reason no new coal plants are being built in the USA--they're uneconomical compared to natural gas turbine generation. And fusion plants will be extremely capital intensive.
Furthermore, plasmas in thermal equilibrium that produce energy in charged particles instead of neutrons (which would allow for direct conversion), cool off faster via Bremsstrahlung radiation than they self-heat from their own fusion reactions. So direct conversion from fusion would have to come from nonequilibrium plasmas. And nonequilibrium plasmas are really, really unstable--they tend to thermalize very, very fast.
Bottom line, I'm not optimistic about terrestrial fusion in any form being economical when it has to compete with solar, wind, and natural gas. Leave planet Earth and go past the orbit of say, Jupiter, and I could see it being a good solution way out there.
You mean NMR? - oh, wait.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I would like nothing better than seeing this built, if even next door to me. But in the Boston Area ? Lots of Luck.
You cannot even build a Dog House in that area without the following:
1. Multiple studies on how it will impact the neighborhood.
2. Protesters showing up at the town meetings, and you have to defend your dog house hundreds of times.
3. Fighting with various politicians.
4. Getting all kinds of subpoenas arriving at your door step in their pretty colored envelopes.
5. At least 1 court appearance, lawyers will be happy.
6. If you are lucky you hit the jackpot. Your dog house will show up as a ballot question which at best will be ignored by the politicians, or more than likely the politicians will decide to do the exact opposite.
7. I will not even mention the cost overruns
So maybe in 200 years you will see it build :(
They should have built a stellarator or literally anything other than a tokamak.
How many tens of billions have been invested in Tokamaks thus far with very little to show for it? Other approaches consistently get shafted for serious funding due to dogma/politics and risk aversion.
Comparatively peanuts have been spent on stellarators to date and they have already demonstrated far better results than any tokamak ever has.
Less polluting than fusion?
DT fusion emits copious neutrons that irradiate everything around the core. You can put a "lithium blanket" around the reactor, to absorb the neurons and breed more tritium, but you are not going to catch them all. Fusion is cleaner than fission, but still produces radioactive waste.
Fusion reactor waste management
In the 70s it was always 40 or 50 years in the future In the 90s and 00s this dropped to about 30 years in the future
Seems like people may be shifting their goals and expectations to about 20 years in the future now.
I would not be surprised that this decrease is due to people expecting things to happen more quickly now---not because of the technological advancements occurring in this field.
Also, let's face it, the only fusion-derived electricity sold to consumers currently living will be from solar panels (the Sun is a fusion reactor after all).
We've already got a really big nuclear reactor.
It's called the sun.
It distributes power with light which we can safely convert to electricity with solar panels.
About 150M Kms is about as close as we should get to a nuclear reaction of any type.
Go well
With respect, I do not think you have any conception of the developments of the last few years. For example, Generative Adversarial Networks, and especially the Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks of the last 18 months or so, have really revolutionized the field. If you believe this just to be a tweak of the algorithms of 20, 30 or 40 years ago, you are simply wrong.
MIT announced yesterday that it and Commonwealth Fusion Systems -- an MIT spinoff -- are working on a project that aims to make harvesting energy from nuclear fusion a reality within the next 15 years.
We already HAVE a nuclear fusion reactor. It has been operating for YEARS with an unmatched safety record, harming no one directly except occasionally causing problems for people over-exposed to it without proper shielding. I have spoken of this before, I think, probably right here on slashdot. In their wisdom, our ancestors chose to live a safe distance away from it, at about 98 million miles, give or take a few. which makes the only issue harvesting its output, and storing it for periods when the reactor is unavailable for periods of time, as it often is.
The beauty of this reactor is that it's so big, we can all share it and it won't ever, (from our perspective, anyway,) run out.
HOWEVER, like manna raining down from heaven, all that needs be done is collect enough of the output of this fusion reactor to go until the next time it becomes available. FORTUNATELY, its availability is pretty regular and fairly predictable; in fact, you can set your clock by it, and historically, people have and still do, even if a touch indirectly. All schemes to avoid using the power of this reactor and instead prefer some other, can mostly be attributed either to ignorance, or greed. Ignorance that a better, cheaper, and safer way already exists, and greed that by providing a more "convenient" alternative, you can get people to pay you money for the privilege of using what they could already get for free. Ugh.. people.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.