The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has recently started working with a new company called Commonwealth Fusion System. The two are hoping to build a fusion plant within 15 years.
Ferrofluid Magnet under glass - By Gregory F. Maxwell [email protected] PGP:0xB0413BFA (Own work) GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
As you may know, one of the most promising ways to build a fusion reactor is to use a tokamak – a chamber in which a magnetic field is created by strong magnets. This magnetic field keeps the plasma under control. The experts from MIT want to first build a smaller tokamak called SPARC which is capable of producing up to 100 MW of warmth. But this power won’t be used to generate electricity but to create the thermal energy to heat the plasma.
This should allow a few technological milestones needed to create a prototype of a fully scalable fusion reactor capable of producing 200 MW of power. This reactor would actually be used to produce electricity. The key to success should be the strongest superconductor magnets in the world which should be developed at MIT in the coming three years.
The magnets will be based on a material that became commercially available on recently. It is a lead strip coated with a compound called yttrium-barium-copper oxide (YBCO). YBCO strips can massively simplify and fasten the construction of fusion devices. New magnets will allow to scale the power plants down and the components won’t have to be built at the location but will be built in a factory somewhere else. This should lead to a drastic reduction of costs.
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Nice post
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I wanted to add that a very important fact to understand the significance of this. Nuclear fusion produces energy the same way the sun does. In order for nuclear fusion to happen, plasma has to be heated to millions of degrees, roughly ten times hotter than the center of the sun!
This is because on earth we cannot use gravity like the sun does, because it's so massive! This is why we need to reach temperatures even hotter than the sun.
The reason magnets are so important is that the plasma is so hot, that no material could ever touch it without melting! Therefore, ultra strong magnets are a smart solution to contain the plasma inside magnetic fields.
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