But now, finally, the joke may no longer be true: Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor – and it’s one that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say.
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Fusion, the nuclear response that powers the solar, includes fusing pairs of hydrogen atoms collectively to type helium, accompanied by monumental releases of power. The entrapment of this fusion power can also increase the level of “achievable power”.
The magnets used here are built from rare-earth barium copper oxide, a superconductor material.
“Any increase in the magnetic field gives you a huge win”, Sorbom says.
Now, according to researchers at MIT, a new material base has been found by them for superconductors and this helps reactors generate energy.
Moreover, the design is still modeled after the donut-shaped Tokamak reactors that Russian physicists invented in the 1950s, which ITER also uses.
For perspective, Sorbom explains the world’s largest planned fusion power plant- a huge device called ITER that is under construction in France – was designed before these new superconductors were available and will cost $40 billion. Sorbom and the MIT team believe that their new design would produce about the same power as the french reactor, while being only half the diameter, cost but a fraction of its price and being faster to construct. By coiling a fusion device with the magnets, you can generate a strong magnetic field, and this particular material makes the fields stronger and minimizes the size of the equipment needed to generate them.
“We’re not extrapolating to some brand-new regime”, he adds.
If successful, MIT researchers estimate that the current improvements to the design will allow for their fusion reactor to create three times as much energy as it needs to run with hopes to ramp that up to 5 or 6 times.
Another key breakthrough the design of the reactor brings is that it replaces the blanket of solid materials that surrounds the fusion chamber with a liquid material, that can be easily circulated and replaced.
The fusion reactor that is first of its kind produces more energy than the amount it consumes.
“It is a particularly harsh surroundings for [solid] supplies”, Whyte says, so changing these supplies with a liquid could possibly be a serious benefit. It is scheduled to start plasma tests in 2020, and aspires to be proof of concept that a fusion reactor is an effective energy source. The reactor’s design is just in the stage of a simple proposal for now, but the M.I.T. ARC team announced that it can be built with our actual technology in just a five-year timeframe.
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The MIT analysis, Kingham says, “exhibits that going to greater magnetic fields, an MIT speciality, can result in a lot smaller (and therefore cheaper and quicker-to-build) units”. The work is of “exceptional quality”, he says; “the next step … would be to refine the design and work out more of the engineering details, but already the work should be catching the attention of policy makers, philanthropists and private investors”.
