Part 1 of 2 Parts
I have been posts a lot of articles lately about the race to create commercial nuclear fusion. A lot of companies and institutions are taking part in the research. Last year, I posted about a spin-off from M.I.T.’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center called Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Today I am posting an update on their research.
Researchers at M.I.T.’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and engineers at the company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, have started testing an extremely powerful magnet that is needed to trigger nuclear fusion to generate immense heat which can then be converted to electricity. It is one step on the path towards the creation of a commercial nuclear fusion reactor. Nuclear fusion is a desirable energy source because it can help mitigate climate change while producing no carbon dioxide or toxic waste.
Despite decades of investment and aggressive promises, there has been no commercial payoff for fusion research. There is a long history of nuclear fusion research but, so far, scientists and engineers have yet to create a fusion system that will generate more power than it consumes.
Though the necessary breakthroughs that are needed for commercial nuclear fusion reactors have not yet been achieved, it is still promoted as one of the possible paths to ending reliance on fossil fuels. Some researchers believe that fusion research could finally make that critical leap during this decade.
More than two dozen private companies in the U.S., Europe, China and Australia as well as government-funded consortia in some countries are now investing heavily in efforts to construct commercial fusion reactors. Total investment in such research is approaching two billion dollars.
Some of the startups and consortia are constructing powerful lasers to generate fusion reactions while others are exploring new kinds of fuel. Most of them say that they believe that they will be able to prove that their technology can generate competitively priced electricity by the end of this decade. They claim that they will be able to construction commercial nuclear fusion power plants to send electricity to the power grids soon after 2030.
Commonwealth’s revolutionary new magnet will be one of the most powerful in the world. It will be a critical component in compact nuclear fusion reactors called a Tokamaks. Tokamaks use magnetic fields to compress plasma until it is hotter than the center of the sun. Tokamaks are donut shaped reactors surrounded by magnets. They were first considered by Soviet scientists in the 1950s.
Commonwealth claims that their magnet is a significant technological breakthrough that will make Tokamak designs commercial viable for the first time. They say that they are not yet ready to test their reactor prototype. Their researchers are just completing the new magnet and hope that it will be operational by 2025.
The Commonwealth scientists hope that they will soon be able to generate a magnetic file that is almost twice the strength of the magnets that are planned for use by a global consortium of the European Union and six other countries who are assembling an experimental fusion reactor named ITER in Cadarache, France. The ITER consortium hopes to be able to generate electricity at the site by 2035.
Please read Part 2 next