We're making progress. Fusion has gone from "twenty years away and will always be twenty years away" to "ten years away and ?".

Controlling fusion reaction is the holy grail of all power generation. We need it. We need it to propagate mankind to other planets than planet earth and we need it to power space stations and spaceships far away from our sun. Glad to read that progress is made in this area although I will not stay up late at night waiting for this to become commercialized anytime soon. It is as complicated as it gets and we probably need 50 years rather than 10 years. Hell making a new car design from an existing design takes 6 years so this is not 10 years from commercialization.

mahonj

It is fusion reactor! It is a controlled continuous hydrogen bomb detonation. Its circular magnetically controlled core burns hydrogen at over 100 million degrees Celsius! You do not need a huge reactor to make 500mW for that obviously. When we can make even stronger magnetic fields. Say magnetic fields at 50 tesla instead of 32 the reactor can be made even smaller and still do 500 MW. For spaceships we need really small reactors that could power seriously powerful ion engines for propulsion just like the solar observatory satellite that Space X launched a few month back and that now is sending breathtaking pictures of the earth back apart from monitoring solar activity of cause.

@Paraway,
I accept that the Reactor can generate 500MW in a very small volume. My question is how do you get the energy out of that small space and turn it into electricity that can go onto the grid.

mahonj

I believe that it uses a liquid salt bath (fluorine lithium beryllium (FLiBe)) to absorb and carry away the heat. The hot salt will then be used to heat helium to run a Brayton cycle (closed cycle gas turbine) power plant. There is a little detail in the caption for the drawing.

Anyway, I hope they get the funding to keep working on this project as this is the most hopeful thing that I have seen on Fusion. I would also like to see more work on traveling wave fission reactors that have the possibility of consuming the current nuclear waste and burning mostly U238.

Most of you have no appreciation for what is happening in controlled Fusion research. Ever since the ITER project was given a multinational budget and marching orders, progress slowly accelerated. ITER has been surpassed in terms of scientific research and new ideas in technology have come from the engineers.

No longer is Fusion research merely small groups of Physicists happy to explore some new plasma instability. As the several orders or magnitude improvements in containment occurred each revealing a maddening new instability to be encountered, understood and controlled, we have finally emerged from that as ALL the instabilities were understood and countered.

ITER often described as the last Fusion Experiment and the First Engineering effort to construct a controlled Fusion Reactor. Ity is now forcing the Physicists to move over as the Engineers take over and have to design heretofore unfaced construction and operations considerations on the gargantuan ITER reactor.

Methods of producing miles of superconducting cables have forced manufacturers to multiply world wide production several times over.

Demand for both new materiels such as these ERBE superconductors, and non-activated materials and steels produced in quantity has forced manufacturers to develop factories to produce them.

Control electronics and their processing speeds have been pushed to ever faster speeds to control the plasma instabilities.

Software to drive the ITER controllers had to be designed built and debugged.

All this, plus big budgets, forced the experimental Scientists aside, forever willing to "study" a problem to death and practical Engineers seeking to construct a useable device have been pushed forward. ITER was and is much like the Apollo project forcing the technology.

Even though ITER won't see "First Plasma" until 1919, and will still be a testbed a decade later, every cognizant scientist and engineer in the field knows that ITER is obsolete.

A follow on design labled DEMO and begun as early as 2017 could undertake to design and build the first DEMOnstration, commercial Fusion Power station to add electricity to the Grid. It is no longer 50 years off.

While you all have been talking of redesigning 16th century wind mills, the solution to the Energy problems of Mankind is virtually here, now.

This advance in Superconducting materials would not have happened as quickly without ITER even though ITER won't have a foot of these new superconducting cables. The "non-inductive" energy inputs herein discussed come as a result of ITER work to make the ITER reactor near steady state operational. As do the design for these rugged massive antennas to beam energy into the Plasma.

In a much shorter time than the so-called "Energy Crisis" began in the 70s, all Mankind will have prodigious amounts of cleanly and inexhaustively generated electricity for its factories, cars and homes.

The research to create fusion is like the cure for cancer. It keeps the researchers employed and there's a whole lot of hope and promises; but, not a lot of success.

When will the vapor turn into something useful?

J Martin:

The amount of heat required to run our civilisation is trivial compared to that from the sun, an hours worth of solar for a year's supply, or whatever the exact figure is.

So the output of reactors is commensurately small.

It is when greenhouse gases are trapping heat that things get sticky.

This would be hundreds or thousands of time less warming than present use of fossil fuel.

"If small transportable units can be mass produced (by x 1,000 in factory) and installed in every town and city sector, most high voltage transmission lines could be elimnated."

The problem with the economics of small modular reactors is that in order to reach economies of scale you have to have enough customers who will pay up front to create manufacturing volume to bring the price down from day one.

If you don't have those pre-purchasers then you have to start building and bring the cost down over time. And where do you find a few hundred customers willing to pay very high prices for the early production? Where are the people who bought the $2,000 cell phones and even more expensive first laptops?

Plus, few cities will tolerate a reactor of any size close to them. There's no market for 'thousands'.

Saying the reactor is 3.3M across is a bit like saying the cylinder in the car engine displaces 1.7 Liters. It's true, but the total system is a much bigger. Heat exchangers, turbines, and lots of other system elements still make this large, not portable, and plenty pricey.

I've been waiting for this breakthrough most of my life, and getting net energy out is really, really hard. Getting cost-competitive energy is much, much harder. Lockheed has a compact fusion project (http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html).
EMC2 has done a number of contracts for the Navy on compact fusion (http://www.emc2fusion.org/). Everybody has a story for why this time it's different. I support almost every one of these avenues being pursued. However, I do not get my hopes up because, you know, it's really hard.

Henrik,
Yeah, I know. But it's really fun to paraphrase Robin and you don't get many chances like this LOL

@Alex

Good you brought this topic up because it shows another advantage of fusion reaction over fission reaction (the conventional nuclear power plants that burns (splits) uranium or plutonium) and that produces a large amount of extremely radioactive waste.

The fusion reaction is kept alive by injecting microscopic frozen pellets of ultra heavy hydrogen atoms into its circular plasma core that subsequently ignites etc. If this injection process is interrupted or stopped the reactor stops. In other words, a fusion reactor can be turned on and off like a light ball. You start the reactor by hitting the first hydrogen pellet injected by multiple high energy laser beams so that it reaches its critical 10 to 100 million degrees Celsius temperature and starts burning by itself converting the hydrogen into helium. You stop it by stop feeding the plasma core with new hydrogen pellets. Each pellet can keep the reactor operating for a few microseconds or seconds (or something in that order). The only explosion I can think of happening in a fusion reactor is if too much hydrogen is added to the core at a given time span so that the plasma core expands and melts the inner walls of the reactor. That might expose the cooling liquids that vaporizes and causes an explosion. In that case the reactor stops or is stopped and it is ruined. It does not explode in a big way. If the plasma hit the inner walls of the reactor it will cool down below is burning temperature which is 10 to 100 million degrees Celsius and then the fusion process stops 100%. There is very little plasma by weight probably less than 1/1000 of a gram. So even though it is incredibly hot in a tiny string inside the reactor core it does not contain enough energy for a massive explosion. The only radioactive material in the fusion reactor will be the material the inner walls are made of as they are exposed to radiation from the burning plasma core all the time and will therefore also become more radioactive over time. That radiation is only a tiny fraction of the radioactive material and its radiation level that an old school fission reactor produces. I am not an expert but I believe it is millions of times less radioactive than a typical fission reactor. The only time when that radioactive material needs to be removed is for decommission of the fusion reactor or perhaps also for maintenance once every say 10 years.

Fusion reaction is the holy grail of energy production and if you ask me we should spend many times more on developing it. Make it a global research project with a 25 billion USD annual budget and run it for as many years as it takes to demonstrate a working reactor that makes electricity at 3 cents per kwh. And then make that technology available for any nation to exploit. Until that happens solar and wind power is a practical and affordable replacement for fossil fuel, bio fuels and old school nuclear fission power.