We get rid of the power plant

Friday, January 7th, 2022

Fusion has been just 20 or 30 years away for decades, but new fusion projects are being fueled by billionaire dollars:

The dream inspired Ajay Royan, cofounder of Mithril Capital (with billionaire Peter Thiel), who in 2013 first invested $2 million in Redmond, Wash.-based Helion Energy so that it could build a prototype “repetitive pulse power” machine. Mithril has invested in Helion ever since, including its recent $500 million round (valuing the company at $3 billion) — with the promise of $1.7 billion more if the company’s seventh prototype works as hoped. Helion’s round was led by Sam Altman of Y Combinator.

The year of 2021 was a big one for both fusion financings and forecasts, as developers raised more than $3 billion to fund their next round of machines — with some now promising commercially viable fusion in just five years. Royan is happy to see fusion getting more attention; “Sure 2021 may be a turning point for fusion according to Google analytics, but the real turning point happened a decade ago when power electronics passed a threshold.”

[...]

In Helion’s novel system, the energy released in the fusion reactions continuously pushes out against its magnetic containment field, which pushes back — causing oscillations (“like a piston,” says Kirtley) that generate an electric current, which Helion captures directly from the reactor.

Royan of Mithril says perhaps the biggest attraction of Helion’s direct electricity generation method is its simplicity. Other fusion approaches aim to generate heat, in order to boil water and power steam turbines, which make electricity — like at traditional nuclear power plants. “We can do it with no steam turbines or cooling towers. We get rid of the power plant.”

[...]

That puts Helion in a race with Boston-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff, which raised $1.8 billion from investors including Bill Gates and George Soros. CEO Bob Mumgaard says they’ll have a working reactor in 6 years. His optimism is buoyed by Commonwealth’s successful summer test of new electromagnets engineered with superconductors made from rare earth barium copper oxide.

Mumgaard says these super powered magnets will enable Commonwealth to perfect their somewhat more traditional fusion approach of building a donut-shaped “tokamak” reactor, which Mumgaard calls a “big magnetic bottle” where powerful magnetic fields control balls of 100 million degree plasma — “star stuff.”

There are roughly 150 tokamaks around the world; the biggest one is under construction in France for $30 billion by an international consortium called ITER. The 20,000-ton machine, the size of a basketball arena, is slated to be complete by 2035.

[...]

Whereas ITER’s primary magnets (called solenoids) will weigh some 400 tons and achieve fields stronger than 12 tesla, Commonwealth is eyeing 15-ton magnets, each using 300 km of ReBCO thin-film tape, that will generate 20 tesla (for comparison, a magnetic resonance imaging machine does 1.5 tesla).

[...]

Other leaders include General Fusion, based in Canada and backed by Jeff Bezos, which raised $130 million this year. Other notable billionaires in the fusion game are Neal and Linden Blue, who own San Diego-based General Atomics, which for decades has operated a research tokamak on behalf of the DOE, and which this year delivered to ITER the guts of its tokamak electromagnets — a 1,000-ton central solenoid. And there’s TAE Energy of California, which has been experimenting with $1 billion for the past decade, and raised $130 million during the pandemic.

Comments

  1. Bob Sykes says:

    Meanwhile, the Chinese tokamak achieved a sustained run of 17 minutes.

  2. Bomag says:

    “…for $30 billion by an international consortium called ITER. The 20,000-ton machine, the size of a basketball arena, is slated to be complete by 2035.”

    Modern day Cathedrals.

    Solemn and serene tours will be given, with careful explanations how it will all be producing net power within ten years.

  3. Grifty says:

    10 years, 10 billion dollars, 10,000 grad students will have this think licked — as repeated every decade for the last 60 years.

  4. Gavin Longmuir says:

    Here’s a link to a news item about that Chinese Tokamak:
    https://www.rt.com/news/545120-china-sun-nuclear-energy/

    It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the Usual Suspects’ focus on using the nuclear reactions involved in fusion (maybe coming 10, 20, 40 years in the future) is mainly a way of delaying using the nuclear reactions involved in fission (available for 70 years now).

  5. c matt says:

    Like Iranian nukes, fusion is always just a few years away.

    Don’t get me wrong, I would love for fusion to work. But as Gavin points out, fusion’s main purpose seems to be to stymie fission development which works today.

  6. Contaminated NEET says:

    “Like Iranian nukes, fusion is always just a few years away.”

    Yes. It’s just like the cloned mammoth, the return to the moon, and mass starvation. Ten years out is the perfect number: close enough that we can look forward to it, but far enough that it remains vague and nobody feels disappointed or betrayed when it fails to materialize.

  7. Jim says:

    Peter Thiel is one not to be bet against. If that nigga thinks he’ll have nucular power, so shall it be.

  8. Sam J. says:

    “It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the Usual Suspects’ focus on using the nuclear reactions involved in fusion (maybe coming 10, 20, 40 years in the future) is mainly a way of delaying using the nuclear reactions involved in fission (available for 70 years now).”

    Yes.

    We could have had molten salt reactors that took care of the problems of high pressure water reactors long ago. They were doing great research, had working reactors and closed it down to build a breeder reactor made of sodium coolant (explodes on contact with water) that they placed on an earthquake fault in California. What could go wrong?

    Really? Yes really.

    I’ve heard of a really safe fission reactor that uses a particle accelerator to start the fusion that the numbers work out on but I don’t think they’ve spent a dime on actually building one. It’s perfectly safe. Turn off the accelerator and it stops.

    Adams of Adams atomic engines had a great design that used off the shelf aircraft jet turbines and already designed ceramic fuel balls with uranium in them using nitrogen as a gas but…no money for that.

    The JASON guys were tasked one time with building a safe rector and did. They built a reactor and tested a small one that you could remove all the control rods and it could literally not melt down but…only one built. We say we need small reactors but no one will build what we already have done.

    I saw a smaller tomahawk fusion reactor they built and the plasma got out of control and gouged a massive hole in the structure. So what do they do but plan to build one as big as a mall. Wonder what that one would do if it lost control surrounded with tritium blankets???

    But smaller, safer fusion and fission experiments are starved for funds.

    I think eventually someone will make a smaller less expensive one work.

  9. Gavin Longmuir says:

    Sam J: “I’ve heard of a really safe fission reactor that uses a particle accelerator …. Turn off the accelerator and it stops.”

    Apparently, one of the key elements in the first nuclear bombs was building a neutron generating seed, to make sure there were enough neutrons around to start the chain reaction. It had to work for milli-seconds.

    Later, the oil industry extended this technology to provide a neutron source for well logging tools. This avoided all the bureaucratic problems of transporting radioactive neutron sources. The neutron generator in the well logging tool has to work for a few hours.

    It would seem to be a plausible extension of known technology to design a nuclear reactor with a fail-safe sub-critical fuel load being stimulated by an external non-radioactive neutron generator. As to why that is not in use today? The likely answer is bureaucracy.

Leave a Reply