UW Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal
October 8th, 2014Via: University of Washington:
Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply.
Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven’t penciled out. Fusion power designs aren’t cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.
University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output.
The team published its reactor design and cost-analysis findings last spring and will present results Oct. 17 at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Fusion Energy Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.
“Right now, this design has the greatest potential of producing economical fusion power of any current concept,” said Thomas Jarboe, a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics and an adjunct professor in physics.
The UW’s reactor, called the dynomak, started as a class project taught by Jarboe two years ago. After the class ended, Jarboe and doctoral student Derek Sutherland – who previously worked on a reactor design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – continued to develop and refine the concept.
The design builds on existing technology and creates a magnetic field within a closed space to hold plasma in place long enough for fusion to occur, allowing the hot plasma to react and burn. The reactor itself would be largely self-sustaining, meaning it would continuously heat the plasma to maintain thermonuclear conditions. Heat generated from the reactor would heat up a coolant that is used to spin a turbine and generate electricity, similar to how a typical power reactor works.
“This is a much more elegant solution because the medium in which you generate fusion is the medium in which you’re also driving all the current required to confine it,” Sutherland said.
Research Credit: SWS
What could possibly go wrong, and what happens when a burning ball of plasma lands in the bottom of a reactor during an earthquake or when a coolant pipe gets torn off by an idiot on a fork lift?
There is a chance something explode.
But, the reaction would stop immediatly. It is not the same as the fission reactor that we have all over the world right now. Those are dangerous, because if you don’t cool the cores the reaction restart. With fusion devices, breaking containement would break the condition required for fusion to occur (even if it waas self sustaining while in the containement). They would probably be some release of radioactivity, but nothing like fukushima.
Fusion really looks like a promising future green energy source.. if we can finaly get it to work properly. The downside, compared to say solar energy, is that it doesn’t looks like it will be able to be acquired by individual homeowner which would make them independent.
What exactly is it about humans that we always seem to want to build huge, complex, ridiculously expensive and hyper-centralized contraptions? And then become utterly dependent on those contraptions? Be it huge fusion reactor power plants or huge gov’t leviathans, humans just don’t seem to get it that small, nimble, distributed, and multiplicable is Nature’s way to go in nearly all cases.
Nature Works. Use that simple statement as your guide to everything.
Fusion is indeed the holy grail of power sources, and the real and most fascinating work, not to mention the most likely to actually work,
is here:
http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/index2
and here:
http://www.blacklightpower.com/
and here:
http://www.e-catworld.com/
Each of these approaches to fusion energy could be operated at a local or even an individual level.