Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has addressed all of those issues: 1. The higher field strength from the new HTS magnets eliminates turbulence. 2. The ARC reactor will use a FLiBe molten salt blanket to capture energy from neutrons and breed tritium to be used in the fusion reaction. 3. The ARC reactor is designed to have a swappable 2cm thick vacuum chamber, which is the component subjected to the most neutron radiation (everything else is shielded by the molten salt blanket). These chambers are expected to last a year, and while they are moderately radioactive waste, the amount of material is relatively small and they should become safe in the order of a decade. I highly recommend watching Dr. Whyte's talks on YouTube, he discusses the challenges, design, and performance in an approachable way. There's a timestamp index in the comments on this video: ▶ this video

> “People say nuclear is expensive in the West, but they forget to say it’s expensive because of interest rates,” Morin said. It's still a valid criticism if: - They could get those high interest rates from the return on other capital projects (nuclear less return than something else) - All externalities are included in costs We only have so much labor/material/energy available, and we do have to have some way of allocating them to the things with the most return. The big issue, obviously, is that tons and tons of negative externalities aren't priced in to most economic endeavors, that might make fission look a lot better. It might make it look a lot worse. Personally I'm hoping Elon/Mackenzie/Gates/Buffet/etc decide to throw a few dozen billion at fusion. I think its time truly is nigh. If you haven't watched this yet, it's definitely worth your time. Rather than being a super opinionated think-piece, it instead does a fantastic job walking the viewer through: - high level nuclear fusion engineering performance curves / the engineering design contraint space - the current state of nuclear fusion research (as of 5 years ago) and - breaks down why some new smaller reactors will likely begin construction soon and counter-intuitively, the most recently started ones may be completed before a fusion reactor that first broke ground 25 years ago and is still very much being actively built ▶ this video Also worth noting that interesting things happen when you assume you can have "large" a

Watch Robert Whyte's presentation. ▶ this video The basic problems have all been solved, the science has been solved too. Tokamaks have already made net fusion power. The only difference between JET, which already succeeded, and ARC, is using Magnets with 2.6x the field strength. The B^4 power scaling, gives you about 50x the power, so ARC will generate 500 MW of power whereas JET (remember, already proven engineering), generated 10MW. So without a doubt, this is just an engineering problem at this point. A prototype device that didn't have to be maintained, could be built exactly like any other Tokamak, just with REBCO magnets, and you'd have the required fusion power. To get the required electric power, and add in maintenance, you need to at the FliBe liquid blanket, replacable toroid sections, and a heat exchanger, but again, these are known engineering problems with known solutions, akin to knowing that landing a rocket is possible, but figuring out the grid fins, heat shield, landing legs, and guidance software. Fusion devices on a small scale have been proving the plasma physics since the 90s. We don't have fusion yet simply because of people being conservative and sticking with traditional "known to work" magnets, which is why ITER is a huge, hulking monstrosity. As Dr Whyte says, cost scales by R, R can be reduced by a factor of 10 from ITER simply by using different magnets, so ARC will produce the same power as ITER, but significantly smaller and cheaper. The basic paper

I’ve been following them since they were giving promising lectures at MIT and I absolutely think they have the most solid approach! Tokamaks are well understood, they supposedly have the same plasma physics as ITER which has been heavily scrutinized and supported by work at JET, and their concept is simple - Tokamak but with very high field superconducting magnets using technology that wasn’t available when ITER was conceived, and apparently higher field strengths mean a smaller reactor for the same power gains. As a lay person the story is simple and that’s good! Then they demonstrated their magnets and got $2B in funding and now they’re deep in the construction phase for SPARC. I encourage anyone curious to look up videos on SPARC on YouTube. It’s very encouraging! It seems honestly very reasonable that they will see sustained net energy gain for their entire power plant before 2030 (tho SPARC is still a demonstrator not designed for continuous service, so “sustained” means like one minute). Here’s some videos: 8 years ago: ▶ this video 2 years ago: ▶ this video Latest update posted yesterday: link

In total a land area about the quarter of the size of California was contaminated with over 37 becquerel of radiation due to Chernobyl, including 10,000 farms in the UK alone. The solitary story was to get people to read the book. The debate is if fission is sustainable for the environment. I talked about contaminated agriculture and how much that was covered up and missing in the statistics — people still living in contaminated land and eating contaminated food today. “The huge numbers of people” is what I’m concerned about and why I advocate for wind and solar. I’m not in favor of the fossil fuel status quo. The radiation and pollution from coal ash and effects of global warming on agriculture are massive. But that’s not an argument for “fission is ecologically sustainable”, that’s an argument for “even though it’s not, we should still build dams and fission power plants anyways”. Which is a fine argument. It’s just a different one. A fission disaster or attack on a fission plant can take half of Californias agriculture out of the picture over night. You can’t say fission and wind have similar risk at the tail ends. Yeah, statistically it hasn’t happened, but the risk exists. Besides, new fission plants will take 20 years to build and by then we'll have actually clean baseload energy from fusion reactors. This video[0] is from 7 years ago, but it provides an amazing breakdown of the physics of fusion energy. The timeline and physics predicted in the lecture have come to pas

The MIT Club of Northern California posted a video a few years ago on this exact topic and reactor: ▶ this video This thing came out of MIT, at least according to the video, and was really the collective efforts of a bunch of MIT grad students who made the breakthrough partially by taking a very Silicon Valley startup approach of using off-the-shelf parts, experimenting with new ideas, and starting small. I don't know if Professor Whyte framed it that way to appeal to the crowd or not.

yes thats true. ITER is obsolete already because it actually cannot use these high-temp-high-Tesla superconductors. at the moment ITERs best hope is that it 'proves' that fusion is viable & then do a full redesign for DEMO to do proper scaled operation. here is the original presentation by Dr Whyte of MIT behind this Sparc project: ▶ this video he talks about the impact of these newer magnets at around 26min mark.

"Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion?" - Professor Dennis Whyte. ▶ this video The title threw me off, but it's a very interesting and grounded talk about the different approaches to scaling fusion energy.

The real deal is here, from MIT: ▶ this video Apparently there was a recent breakthrough in superconductors, which allows significantly more current in the inductor coils while still maintaining superconductivity. This in turn allows for much stronger magnetic fields, hence tighter confinement of the plasma and therefore more fusion. A standard tokamak with these new superconductors should produce more energy out than energy in, and be a viable source of energy.

Eye opener is the chart at 18:03: "from 1970 to 1995, [fusion] power and energy increased much faster than computing power (Moore's Law)" [1]. Magnetic-confinement fusion stalled, according to Dr. Whyte, because to get more power (and efficiency) we need stronger fields. To get stronger fields we needed bigger magnets. To support bigger magnets one needs bigger structures. Big magnets and big structures will absorb more magnetic and neutron flux; that increases maintenance frequency, complexity and cost. Better superconductors let us get stronger fields without bigger magnets. That changes the cost function. [1] ▶ this video

Instead of trying to reduce options for people, why not put your energy toward something positive, like this? ▶ this video

Any solution to climate change will take decades to implement. There is no turning this around quickly. CFS are working on their first prototype reactor to be finished within a few years, but their factory to begin mass producing will take another decade. It is of course possible CFS will fail. However they have been on track for a while now. ▶ this video