Author: Dugan Flanakin
The race to commercialize nuclear fusion is taking a major turn, but a high school student is shaking up the fusion world by building a nuclear fusion reactor as a high school science project.
Cesare Mencarini was an Italian who studied in England and taught himself programming and how to use electrical systems. He scoured YouTube and the Internet and built a custom reactor controlled and hosted by a Raspberry Pi system. His reactor achieves plasma, the fourth state of matter, a key step in the fusion process by efficiently using high pressure to heat atoms to the required temperature.
His work earned him a college scholarship to work on larger reactors. “I had to adapt the design to fit the budget, and my goal was to encourage other young people to come up with ideas on how to improve our world and innovate,” Mencarini explained.
Menkarini's success should inspire thousands of scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 500 of whom were affected by a June 2022 decision by the CERN Board of Directors to end cooperation with Russia in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Scientists from Russian institutions.
While approximately 100 Russian-affiliated scientists have found other funding and will continue to work with CERN, the Russian government withdrew $46.8 million from financing for CERN's Large Hadron Collider upgrade and will no longer provide 4.6% of the LHC experiment budget .
On the other hand, CERN signed an agreement last November with members of EUROfusion, the European consortium of fusion research laboratories, to promote cooperation in the development of innovative technologies for future colliders and nuclear fusion reactors. EUROfusion's laboratories are creating the technical design of a fusion demonstration power plant (DEMO) to succeed ITER (International Fusion Reactor).
It may be recalled that ITER was launched in 1985 by a consortium including China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, the United States and the European Union, with support from the European Atomic Energy Community (which itself was created under the 2017 Euratom Treaty ) support. Its mission is to bring fusion to a point where demonstration fusion reactors can be designed.
Construction of the ITER tokamak began in 2010, and in May 200 a 1,250-ton cryostat base was installed on the 42-hectare site. The latest news from ITER is plans to build a more complete machine than initially planned, with full magnetic power by 2036 and a deuterium-tritium operational phase by 2039.
While European efforts are slowing, the exploration of nuclear fusion is escalating in the United States, especially in Wisconsin.
In December 2022, the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, made significant progress in fusion ignition using 192 laser beams focused on a tiny gold cylinder made of deuterium and tritium. Composed of diamond capsules. The hydrogen atoms instantly integrated into helium, emitting 3.15Mj of energy, which exceeded the 2.05Mj contributed by the laser.
The success of this experiment marks a paradigm shift in nuclear energy. It also sparked new curiosity and financing for fusion energy, which promised virtually unlimited power with no safety concerns and virtually no waste issues. The challenge remains the fragile balance of conditions necessary to maintain fusion.
On the other hand, MIT researchers have just published the results of a study that addresses the problem of building a tokamat that can withstand extremely hot plasma. Senior researcher Ju Li describes a method by dispersing iron silicate into large chunks of metal to pump out problematic helium atoms that can wreak havoc on the inner walls of a tokamak.
A July survey by the Fusion Industry Association showed that 25 of the world's 45 private fusion companies are headquartered in the United States. Perhaps the biggest news on the U.S. fusion front comes from three companies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—Realta Fusion, Type One Energy, and SHINE Technologies.
On July 15, Realta Fusion scientist Elliot Claveau reported that his team produced a beam of superheated plasma for the first time as part of the Wisconsin High-Temperature Superconducting Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM) project at the University of Wisconsin's Plasma Physics Laboratory in Stoughton.
WHAM was created in 2020 as a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison, MIT, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which received a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and funding from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. WHAM is currently a public-private partnership between UW-Madison and Realta Fusion, which was spun out from the university.
Just one week later, scientists at SHINE Technologies in Janesville demonstrated their FLARE™, billed as the world's most powerful continuous fusion neutron system, at the IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference and the Technology Conference on Fusion Energy (TOFE). FLARE™, short for Radiation Effect Fusion Linear Accelerator, produces 50 trillion fusion neutrons per second.
FLARE™ can perform tests that previously took weeks in a matter of hours. This can shorten development cycles and speed up iterations in developing radiation-hardened components. As a result, the Department of Defense will be able to more quickly determine how much radiation our defense systems can withstand before being compromised or destroyed.
The third bell came on July 30, when Wisconsin-born Type One Energy, which recently relocated to Oak Ridge, Tenn., announced it had raised more than $82 million in seed funding for a nuclear fusion prototype based on the work of scientists in its Madison office . Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the extension, with Australia's Foxglove Ventures and New Zealand's GD1 also contributing.
The Type One's reactor is a stellarator with a shape known as a “doughnut” – a twisted, bulging circle. This shape is defined by magnets, which apply a specially shaped magnetic field that confines the superheated plasma required for fusion reactions. Stellar simulators require a lot of computing power to fine-tune the design to make it work. Type One was spun off from the University of Wisconsin, which also operates the stellarator.
Chief executive Christofer Mowry said the next step is to finalize the core reactor design, then build a prototype reactor called Infinity One and design a pilot reactor by 2030. “When Infinity One is running and testing, it's actually validating key design aspects of the pilot plant.”
Wisconsin's involvement in the nuclear fusion industry began in 1971 with the establishment of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Wisconsin’s manufacturing capabilities combined with its research capabilities create this new industry that has huge potential to be a huge economic engine for the state,” said Realta’s Furlong.
Furlong added, “Detroit was to the global auto industry in the 1950s what Houston is to the global oil and gas industry today… I can see Wisconsin becoming the global fusion industry in the 21st century. center.Yingshi century. “I think we can all agree… that advanced societies will derive their energy from nuclear fusion,” said SHINE CEO Greg Piefer.
Dugan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Council for a Constructive Tomorrow and writes on a variety of public policy issues.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and provided via RealClearWire.
Relevant
