Nuclear Fusion Power [again] and most Powerful Magnet in the world: [13 Tesla's]

[beecee]

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-world-powerful-magnet-ready-ship.html

World's most powerful magnet ready to ship:

After a decade of design and fabrication, General Atomics is ready to ship the first module of the Central Solenoid, the world's most powerful magnet. It will become a central component of ITER, a machine that replicates the fusion power of the sun. ITER is being built in southern France by 35 partner countries.

ITER's mission is to prove energy from hydrogen fusion can be created and controlled on earth. Fusion energy is carbon-free, safe and economic. The materials to power society with hydrogen fusion for millions of years are readily abundant.

Despite the challenges of Covid-19, ITER is almost 75 percent built. For the past 15 months, massive first-of-a-kind components have begun to arrive in France from three continents. When assembled together, they will make up the ITER Tokamak, a "sun on earth" to demonstrate fusion at industrial scale.

ITER is a collaboration of 35 partner countries: the European Union (plus the United Kingdom and Switzerland), China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States. Most of ITER's funding is in the form of contributed components. This arrangement drives companies like General Atomics to expand their expertise in the futuristic technologies needed for fusion.

The Central Solenoid, the largest of ITER's magnets, will be made up of six modules. It is one of the largest of the U.S. contributions to ITER.

Fully assembled, it will be 18 meters (59 feet) tall and 4.25 meters (14 feet) wide, and will weigh a thousand tons. It will induce a powerful current in the ITER plasma, helping to shape and control the fusion reaction during long pulses. It is sometimes called the "beating heart" of the ITER machine.

How powerful is the Central Solenoid? Its magnetic force is strong enough to lift an aircraft carrier 2 meters (6 feet) into the air. At its core, it will reach a magnetic field strength of 13 Tesla, about 280,000 times stronger than the earth's magnetic field. The support structures for the Central Solenoid will have to withstand forces equal to twice the thrust of a space shuttle lift-off.

more at link.......................

https://www.iter.org/

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OK, my understanding of nuclear fusion power is of course, that methodology that powers stars, or nuclear fusion. The ongoing problem with creating that on Earth, is containing the extremely hot plasma, and the only method of doing this is magnetic containment. While the advantages of fusion power is known and are many, what would be the greatest danger of a nuclear fusion reactor?

Could the magnetic containment apparatus fail? 

 

 

[Sensei]

57 minutes ago, beecee said:

what would be the greatest danger of a nuclear fusion reactor?

Unemployed and angry coal miners..

[Ken Fabian]

1 hour ago, beecee said:

"Fusion energy is carbon-free, safe and economic".

- from the quote, not said by beecee.

Safe maybe; the fusion reaction isn't self sustaining so most things that might go wrong will result in cessation of fusion energy production, unlike fission where it keeps making heat for years after the control rods bring it below critical. Which doesn't mean fission has stopped, just been reduced. Fusion will stop.

Still some radioactive waste to deal with but potentially less waste than almost any other energy option. How much waste we will tolerate is not always rational; heavy metals contaminated coal ash for example is not usually classed as a toxic waste... mostly because the industries involved have fiercely resisted it, to avoid the costs of safe disposal, and those industries are deemed essential by lawmakers. The potential for serious disasters with fusion is probably still there - lots of energy there that might be released in unwanted ways, like explosions and fires, with possible releases of toxic materials (eg coolants?) but they seem more likely to be localised. If they are large, few in number and whole nations depend exclusively on them the economic consequences of failures may exceed the direct damage.

Carbon-free? In the same sense that renewables must initially rely on energy and materials with carbon footprints to get established and will not be zero emissions until their use fully replaces fossil fuel energy and inputs across manufacturing and transport - zero emissions potential, using fossil fuels as the starter fluid.

Economic? No. Current price of power from fusion power stations is approaching infinity - you need to be making power that can be sold to even assess if it is economic. It may be fair to socialise the development costs of technologies deemed important and not expect them to be repaid by those building them if commercial plants are built - but whether that is taxpayer money well spent is a real question; there are lots of potential clean energy technologies that could use levels of R&D funding ITER gets. Seems to me if it is this hard to do fusion at all  it is unlikely to be easy to make it low cost as well.

 

Edited June 15, 2021 by Ken Fabian

[swansont]

1 hour ago, beecee said:

Could the magnetic containment apparatus fail? 

Yes, but there are only a few grams of fuel in it at any given time, limiting the thermal energy, and it cools as it expands.

https://www.iter.org/sci/FusionFuels

[beecee]

1 hour ago, Sensei said:

Unemployed and angry coal miners..

Particularly in Australia, being among the top coal pruducing nations.

51 minutes ago, Ken Fabian said:

Economic? No. Current price of power from fusion power stations is approaching infinity - you need to be making power that can be sold to even assess if it is economic. It may be fair to socialise the development costs of technologies deemed important and not expect them to be repaid by those building them if commercial plants are built - but whether that is taxpayer money well spent is a real question; there are lots of potential clean energy technologies that could use levels of R&D funding ITER gets. Seems to me if it is this hard to do fusion at all  it is unlikely to be easy to make it low cost as well.

Nice overall informative post, thanks. Commenting on the above though, the first highlighted sentence while true with regards to "lots of potential clean energy" don't they also present there own problems, space for example, with regards to solar power.....The second sentence would probably be true at the beginnings of such endeavours, but costs would also of course diminish and come down as technology improves, after getting these things up and running. Not forgetting the biggest advantage of fusion reactors in that the supply of fuel is abundant and accesible. 

 

47 minutes ago, swansont said:

Yes, but there are only a few grams of fuel in it at any given time, limiting the thermal energy, and it cools as it expands.

https://www.iter.org/sci/FusionFuels

Bingo, as I should have realized from the article itself, where it says, "The risk of accidents with a fusion plant is very limited—if containment is lost, the fusion reaction simply stops."

 

 

In summing, I'm not "promoting" fusion reactors as such,  as the be all and end all of future clean power sources above any other alternative source. It is only one source with inherent advantages and disadvanatges.

Edited June 16, 2021 by beecee

[Sensei]

2 hours ago, beecee said:

The materials to power society with hydrogen fusion for millions of years are readily abundant.

No. Tritium is not abundant. You have to make it. From e.g. Lithium. Irradiate it by free neutrons in nuclear plant to induce decay to Tritium and Helium.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium

Tritium has short half-life (12.32y) disallowing it to store it in serious amounts in advance.

[Ken Fabian]

Beecee, there is the possibility costs just do not come down enough, even that it will be made to work but be too expensive to be our clean energy solution. Worst might be to forever be just out of reach.

All our clean possibilities come with problems and doing R&D is about identifying and solving them. I wouldn't want to cut fusion energy funding prematurely, I'd like more overall funding that supports some things I think deserve to be better funded.

With a US$20 Billion budget could optical rectennas aka nantennas - that ought to be an innately superior clean energy solution even to fusion - be made to work? I'd be surprised if this is something, that despite the potential for something that can harvest thermal energy from the environment and waste heat and turn it to electricity, has ever gotten single digit millions.

I suspect we will increasingly be able to model the things we want to do before we do them and know a lot before we try them. I suspect what ITER is building is in part the product of that kind of process. Is that something only their kind of budget can afford or is that something that others can tap into?

[beecee]

6 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

I suspect we will increasingly be able to model the things we want to do before we do them and know a lot before we try them. I suspect what ITER is building is in part the product of that kind of process. Is that something only their kind of budget can afford or is that something that others can tap into?

Many possibilities exist. But like I said, I'n not campaigning for fusion reactors, I don't know enough about them, simply rehashing a news item, with emphasis actually on the largest magnet in the world.

[studiot]

11 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Safe maybe; the fusion reaction isn't self sustaining so most things that might go wrong will result in cessation of fusion energy production, unlike fission where it keeps making heat for years after the control rods bring it below critical. Which doesn't mean fission has stopped, just been reduced. Fusion will stop.

I think that is an oversimplification.

I seem to remember seeing a calculation leading to the reason for the magnetic containment for the minimum sized ball of hydrogen or helium that would be necessary to spontaneously initiate self sustaing fusion.

[swansont]

12 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Safe maybe; the fusion reaction isn't self sustaining so most things that might go wrong will result in cessation of fusion energy production, unlike fission where it keeps making heat for years after the control rods bring it below critical. Which doesn't mean fission has stopped, just been reduced. Fusion will stop.

Just to clarify, because this is a little unclear: fission is not the source of heat after shutdown. It's called "decay heat" and comes from the decay of the fission products.

As I stated earlier, the thermal energy you have to deal with in fusion would be the couple of grams of fuel at whatever the plasma temperature is.

[MigL]

9 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Beecee, there is the possibility costs just do not come down enough, even that it will be made to work but be too expensive to be our clean energy solution. Worst might be to forever be just out of reach.

This reads as "Let's put all out money into breeding faster horses, because electric cars will never be as cheap. They, and the infrastructure needed to support them, may be forever out of reach."
The biggest rewards come from the biggest risks.

[Ken Fabian]

9 hours ago, MigL said:

This reads as "Let's put all out money into breeding faster horses, because electric cars will never be as cheap. They, and the infrastructure needed to support them, may be forever out of reach."
The biggest rewards come from the biggest risks.

I don't think what I said does read like that - assuming you mean the "faster horses" are the other options and nuclear fusion is the "electric car", (I think). Analogies don't always work - I don't think yours does.

I never said pull the money out of fusion, I said give more money to other options that have potential. My optical rectenna example was just that, one example - like fusion I think it is looks very difficult but has potential for big rewards. I thought my point was that plenty of other kinds of clean energy are also deserving of being well funded, including existing ones that do already work - breeding better batteries and lower cost solar and tidal and geothermal and nuclear fission, because we don't know that fusion will ever be as cheap. Betting on it being a big contributor to emissions reductions in the time frames we are dealing with for climate change looks... overly optimistic. We need those other technologies - much more certainly than we need fusion.

Truisms, like analogies, don't always work either; the greatest losses can also come from taking the greatest risks - I suspect risk taking more reliably results in losses than in big rewards. But wealthy nations aren't really risking much, even with 10's of $billions thrown at fusion that fails to realise it's promise; even if these efforts don't work there is usually a lot of new knowledge built that has value. That may be a truism too, but I think a better, truer one.

However, where the R&D funding pool is limited (and it always has limits) we do pick and choose what gets support and what doesn't; I don't see that fusion development that isn't working should get special treatment forever if other R&D is being sacrificed to fund it. But even pulling back levels of funding support doesn't mean we cannot come back to it later - where ongoing R&D in other areas will continue to come up with new techniques and technologies that can be applied to the problems controlled fusion pose.

I think the entirety of R&D is as essential to success of fusion in the long term as the specific programs currently working.