My last couple of posts have been about the international ITER project for nuclear fusion. This is a huge project with participation of the European Union and other countries with major nuclear power programs. It is slated to be completed in 2027 and will be tested for years before a prototype of a nuclear fusion power reactor is built based on what is learned from the ITER. There are other groups working on developing nuclear fusion power reactors that will be much less expensive and will take much less time to construct.
At the University of Washington, a new fusion reactor design was a project for a 2012 class conducted by Thomas Jarboe, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics as well as an adjunct professor in physics. Jarboe and a graduate student by the name of Derek Sutherland took over the project and are working on developing a commercial reactor based on the design from the class project.
The new design is referred to as the Dynomak. Instead of the donut-shaped tokomak design of the ITER, the Dynomak is spherical and is referred to as a spheromak. There is no central core as in a tokomak and no superconducting magnets surrounding the Dynomak. Instead of having magnetic fields generated externally to compress and contain the plasma, the Dynomak uses internal magnetic fields created by superconducting tape wrapped around the Dynomak to contain and compress the plasma. This is much more efficient and simpler because the plasma itself is used to generate the magnetic fields by the superconducting tape driving electrical fields into the plasma. The reactor should be self-sustaining because the plasma would be continuously heated to maintain thermonuclear fusion. The heat from the fusion reaction would be used to heat a coolant that would be fed to a turbine to generation electricity.
Because of this different design, the Dynomak is much simpler that the ITER. It is estimated that the Dynomak is about one tenth of the complexity of the ITER, costs about one tenth of the cost of the ITER and will generate five times as much power. It will, of course, be much smaller and will take less time to construct. It is estimated that a one gigawatt Dynomak will cost just about the same two billion seven hundred million dollars that it costs to build a one gigawatt coal fired power plant. This would certainly make it highly competitive with power generated by fossil fuels.
Currently, the test Dynomak is about one tenth of the size of a full commercial version which will take years to fully develop. The tests of the prototype have been successful and the Dynomak team has filed patents with the University of Washington Center for Commercialization. Jarboe says that, “Right now, this design has the greatest potential of producing economical fusion power of any current concept.”
