How fast can you get fusion energy from the sun? A new facility to generate energy for future nuclear power plants in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance
Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, France — From a small hill in the southern French region of Provence, you can see two suns. One has been blazing for four-and-a-half billion years and is setting. The other is being built by thousands of human minds and hands, and is — far more slowly — rising. A construction site that could solve the biggest crisis in human history is being built, because of the glow from the last of the sun’s evening rays.
Nuclear fusion, a process that occurs naturally in the sun and all stars but is difficult to replicate on Earth, has been tried and mastered by 35 countries in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance.
The nuclear power plants we have today generate electricity through fission, which is sort of the opposite of fusion. Energy is released when atoms are split rather than fused together.
Atomic experts often joke that fusion energy is always 30 years away, no matter which way you look at it.
A source confirms to CNN that for the first time ever US scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain.
NIF scientists readily acknowledge that the facility was not designed with commercial fusion energy in mind — and many researchers doubt that laser-driven fusion will be the approach that ultimately yields fusion energy. Campbell believes that the success of the technology could lead to a new programme focused on energy applications. “This is absolutely necessary to have the credibility to sell an energy programme,” he says.
ITER director-general Bernard Bigot: “Tokamak hasn’t been built” and the future of fusion energy
There has been a huge sense of momentum at ITER since the success in the UK, but the people working on the project are also undergoing a major change. Their director general, Bernard Bigot (pronounced bi-GOH in French), died from illness on May 14 after leading ITER for seven years.
Bigot shared his optimism for fusion energy from his office, which overlooked the tokamak, a sci-fi like structure still under construction.
It’s not anymore. Since the Industrial Revolution and the population explosion. Fossil fuels did a lot of harm to our environment when we embraced them. He said that we now have 8 billion strong and in the middle of a climate crisis.
He said, there is no alternative, but to stop using our current main power source. “And the best option seems to be the one the universe has been utilizing for billions of years.”
Powering the tokamak with nuclear fusion and fission: Can anything on Earth hold so many degrees of extreme heat? The case of the UK
There are two main ways to generate nuclear fusion, but both have the same result. Fusing two atoms creates a tremendous amount of heat, which holds the key to producing energy. That heat can be used to warm water, create steam and turn turbines to generate power – much like how nuclear fission generates energy.
Scientists working in the UK attempt to generate the exact same result with a machine that has giant magnets. There is a missing mass that converts to an enormous amount of energy. The tokamak has a blanket lining the walls of it that the neutrons can hit when they escape the plasma. This heat can then be used to warm water, create steam and power turbines to generate power.
The tokamak has to contain some serious heat. The plasma needs to reach at least 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. It begs the question: How can anything on Earth hold such high temperatures?
It’s one of many hurdles that generations of fusion energy seekers have managed to overcome. Scientists and engineers designed giant magnets to create a strong magnetic field to keep the heat bottled up. Anything else would melt, that’s what it would do.
The stars, our sun and all interstellar matter are made ofplasma, a substance that makes up 99% of the universe. Down on Earth, it is used in televisions and neon lights and can be seen by the lightning and the northern part of the planet.
The ITER project: the construction of a giant tokamak powered by tritium, hydrogen and hydrogen isotopes
The ITER project aims to produce 500 MW of energy from an input of 50 megawatts, by using newer magnets that can last much longer.
The JET project used two hydrogen strontium and tritium to create helium, which will also be used by the ITER. These isotopes behave almost identically to hydrogen, in terms of their chemical makeup and reactions.
A house could be powered from a glass of water with a little tritium added. Tritium can be made synthetically, but it is more difficult to get.
The construction is complex and spanned across 39 sites. The main worksite is very sterile, with great parts being put in place with help of 750-ton cranes. The shell of the tokamak has been made, but workers are still waiting for some parts, such as a giant magnet from Russia.
This powerful behemoth will be surrounded by some of the largest magnets ever created. It’s too big to move and they have to be assembled in a hall on site.
Even the digital design of this enormous machine sits across 3D computer files that take up more than two terabytes of drive space. The same amount of space can be utilized to save more than 160 million Word documents.
ITER is a kid of the Cold War and a project of peace: Laban Coblentz’s comments on the role of Russia
ITER is a kid of the Cold War according to Coblentz. “It’s a deliberate collaboration by countries that are ideologically unaligned who simply share a common goal for a better future.”
But as Russia seeks to redraw Europe’s map with its war in Ukraine, and even challenge the post-war world order, there are concerns over the country’s continued role in ITER, and just as many over its potential exclusion.
Russia has been cut out of a number of other international scientific projects in the fallout of its war, but the European Commission has explicitly made an exception for ITER in its sanctions.
Russia is one of the main funders for the ITER project, as it provided some of the most critical elements. The magnet for the top of the tokamak, for example, was made in St. Petersburg and waits there, ready to be sent to France, said ITER’s head of communications, Laban Coblentz.
The collaborative spirit never changed around the latest Russia circumstances. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that ITER is a project of peace,” he said.
Our commitment remains as strong as ever. I can say that, from the beginning of my involvement with the project, daily politics has had virtually no impact on our endeavors,” he said.
The partners know that if they drop the ball, the project would be doomed. This, of course, is a tremendous responsibility.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/05/world/iter-nuclear-fusion-climate-intl-cnnphotos/
The ITER project: building of the International Transporter Experiment (ITER) site for science and chemistry in the 21st century
ITER has always been involved ingeopolitics. Finding the right location took years and involved a lot of technical studies and political bargaining. France’s Saint-Paul-lez-Durance was finally made the official site in 2005 at a meeting in Moscow, and the agreement on construction was signed in Paris a year after.
As the diplomacy and technology fell in step, building began. The first construction machines were put on use in the year 2014.
The scale and ambition of the ITER project may seem enormous, but it is, at the very least, a proportional response to the mess humans have made of the planet. Since 1973, global energy usage has more than doubled. By the end of the century, it might actually triple. Humans create the majority of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere through their energy consumption. Fossil fuels account for 80% of the energy we use.
Now, the Earth is barreling toward levels of warming that translate into more frequent and deadly heat waves, famine-inducing droughts, wildfires, floods and rising sea levels. The impacts of the climate crisis are getting harder and harder to reverse as entire ecosystems reach tipping points and more human lives are put on the line.
ITER Project: The Challenges and Prospects for a High-Energy, Low-Carbon Nuclear Fusion Construction in the Tokamak
The world is racing to decarbonize quickly, so it can transition to renewable energy more quickly. Some countries are banking on nuclear fission energy, which is low-carbon but comes with a small, but not negligible, risk of disaster, storage problems for radioactive waste and a high cost.
Stephen Hawking pointed to this process when he was asked by Time in 2010 which scientific discovery he wanted to see in his lifetime.
But as ever with nuclear fusion, as one challenge is overcome another seems to crop up. The limited stocks and price of tritium is one, so ITER is trying to produce its own. On that front, the outlook isn’t bad. The blanket within the tokamak will be coated with lithium, and as escaped plasma neutrons reach it, they will react with the lithium to create more tritium fuel.
The European Union is footing 45% of the project’s ever-mounting construction costs. All the other participant countries are contributing a little over 9% each, by rough estimations. Initially, the entire construction was estimated at around 6 billion euros ($6.4 billion). Right now, the total has more than tripled to around 20 billion euros.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/05/world/iter-nuclear-fusion-climate-intl-cnnphotos/
The First Nuclear Ignition Facility Expires in October 2025 – 2035: From Coblentz to Granholm
Expectations and deadlines were revised, though under his leadership, to be more realistic. First plasma is now expected in 2025, and the first deuterium-tritium experiments are hoped to take place in 2035, though even those are now under review — delayed, in part, by the pandemic and persistent supply chain issues.
“When you got here, his car was in place at 7 a.m., and often here until 9 or 10 p.m. at night,” Coblentz said. “So you always had the impression that no detail was too large or too small for him to take seriously and be involved in.”
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to make an announcement on Tuesday. The breakthrough was first reported by the Financial Times.
The National Ignition Facility project creates energy from nuclear fusion by what’s known as “thermonuclear inertial fusion.” The US scientists used to fire hydrogen fuel into an array of nearly 200 lasers, creating a series of extremely rapid, repeat explosions at the rate of 50 times per second.
The machine that produces the reaction has to be very hot. The burning of the material in the corona needs to reach 10 times hotter than the core of the sun.
Whether it’s using magnets or shooting pellets with lasers, the result is ultimately the same: Heat sustained by the process of fusing the atoms together holds the key to helping produce energy.
Energy Loss: What Happened in the LHC Space Telescope at 1/km2? Chittenden’s Theorem Revisited
“At the moment we’re spending a huge amount of time and money for every experiment we do,” Chittenden said. The cost needs to be brought down by a huge factor.
He said the opposing argument was that the result was far away from the energy gain required for the production of electricity. “Therefore, we can say (it) is a success of the science but a long way from providing useful energy.”
There are few details on how the event was accomplished. The national lab wouldn’t confirm the Financial Times report in an email. “Our analysis is still ongoing, so we’re unable to provide details or confirmation at this time. We look forward to sharing more on Tuesday when that process is complete,” Breanna Bishop, senior director of strategic communications at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote to The Verge.
There will be a panel discussion and Q&A with experts from the national laboratory right after the press conference. That discussion will also be livestreamed at energy.gov/live and is scheduled to start at 10:30AM ET.
Nuclear Fission: A New Energies for Nuclear Power Plants and Nuclear Power Reactors in the Earth’s Most Exhaustive Region
In theory, once humans figure out how to make nuclear fusion happen in a controlled way, the possibilities are endless. The simplest and most abundant element in the universe is hydrogen. You can get it from the ocean. The Department of Energy claims that a single gallon of sea water can produce as much energy as 300 gallons of gasoline.
Whereas fusion fuses two or more atoms together, fission is the opposite; it is the process of splitting a larger atom into two or more smaller ones. Nuclear fission is the type of energy that powers nuclear reactor around the world. The heat from splitting atoms can be used to generate energy.
A zero-emission energy source is nuclear. But it produces volatile radioactive waste that must be stored safely and carries safety risks. The results of nuclear meltdowns, such as at the Chernobyl and the Fukushima nuclear power plant, are not limited to a single reactor.
Is this the next generation power plant? “The future is now,” says Betti, the chief scientist for laser energetics at the University of Rochester
This requires a lot of money and highly specialized technology. It is amazing that we have been able to make any progress at all. Are you actually commercializing it? That’s got another mountain of issues that we’ll talk about in just a little bit.
A big stadium-sized facility with 192 lasers was used by scientists to make the breakthrough on December 5.
Friedmann said that this will not contribute meaningfully to climate change in the next 30 years. “This the difference between lighting a match and building a gas turbine.”
Then in August 2021, after years of slow but steady progress, physicists were able to “ignite” the hydrogen inside the capsule, creating a self-sustaining burn. Betti, the chief scientist for laser energetics in the University of Rochester, says that the process is almost similar to lighting gasoline. You start out with a small spark, and then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and then the burn travels through the air.
“I think the science is great,” Roulstone says of the breakthrough. There are many engineering obstacles. “We don’t really know what the power plant would look like.”
At that rate, fusion power won’t come soon enough for the Biden administration, which is seeking to bring America’s net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 — a goal that experts say must be met to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
The Future of Clean Energy: How Much Nuclear Fusion is Needed to Power the Electric Grid? A National Laboratory Expert Advised by Kerry McBride
When the lasers are fired at the target, they generate x-rays that vaporize the diamond in a tiny fraction of a second. The shockwave from the diamond’s destruction crushes the hydrogen atoms, causing them to fuse and release energy.
He says that there are many steps towards laser fusion energy. He says the NIF was not designed to be efficient. “It was designed to be the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research programme.”
Betti, who holds a security clearance, declined to say exactly how the ignition milestone would help physicists working on nuclear weapons, but he said “I think it’s very significant.”
Ryan McBride is a nuclear engineer at the University of Michigan. That doesn’t mean that NIF is making power. For one thing, he says, the lasers require more than 300 megajoules worth of electricity to produce around 2 megajoules of ultraviolet laser light. In other words, even if the energy from the fusion reactions exceeds the energy from the lasers, it’s still only around one percent of the total energy used.
Moreover, it would take many capsules exploding over and over to produce enough energy to feed the power grid. “You’d have to do this many, many times a second,” McBride says. NIF can currently do around one laser “shot” a week.
The future of clean energy is going to be a milestone in this scientific breakthrough.
Scientists at the national labs do research that can help the US move forward with cleanenergy and keep a nuclear deterrent without testing.
The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy gave a presentation about how she spent three months at Lawrence Livermore working on a nuclear fusion project as a young scientist.
We are still a very long way from having nuclear fusion power the electric grid, experts caution. The US project only produced enough energy to boil about 2.5 gallons of water, according to an expert from the engineering department at the University of Cambridge.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Kim Budil on Tuesday called her lab’s breakthrough a “fundamental building block” to eventually realizing nuclear fusion powering electricity. She estimated it will take “a few decades” more work before it’s ready for commercial use.
Budil said both European fusion projects that run on magnets and the US laser-based system can work alongside each other to push advancements in fusion forward. The federal government is interested in private investment in fusion.
The Stable Nuclear Implosion of the First US-based Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania, according to Roulstone, M.D. White
The first US-based nuclear power plant went offline in Pennsylvania 15 years after the first reactor was run in Chicago, according to Roulstone.
This must be done with perfect symmetrical precision—a “stable implosion.” The pellet will come loose and the fuel won’t heat up. To achieve last week’s result, the NIF researchers used improved computer models to enhance the design of the capsule that holds the fuel and calibrate the laser beams to produce just the right X-ray dispersion.
Researchers will also need to dramatically increase the rate at which the lasers can produce the pulses and how quickly they can clear the target chamber to prepare it for another burn, says Time Luce, head of science and operation at the international nuclear-fusion project ITER, which is under construction in St-Paul-lez-Durance, France.
NIF and ITER are two fusion technology concepts among many being pursued by governments around the world. Insturment is a hybrid of the two approaches, magnetic confinement and magnetic confinement of tokamak and stellarators.
The technology required to make electricity from fusion is largely independent of the concept, and, says White, and the latest milestone won’t necessarily lead to researchers abandoning or consolidating concepts.
The Miracle of December 5, 1945: An Experiment to Ignite a Little Star with Ultra-powerful Lasers and the Discovery of its First Ignition
On December 5, ultra-powerful lasers were fired on a pellet the size of a peppercorn containing a mix of deuterium and tritium – which are components of the fuel that powers the sun. The tiny object was heated to temperatures hotter than the sun’s center by 192 lasers and formed a little star in a fraction of a second. Then, just as quickly, it winked out of existence. This technological triumph was made possible by decades of efforts of thousands of researchers.
The Verge has an explainer on nuclear fusion and the breakthrough with ignition that took place this week. Ma, who directs the Inertial Fusion Energy Institutional Initiative at the Lawrence National Laboratory, was interviewed. Check out our conversation to learn more about her work and what breakthroughs come next after ignition.
Well, turns out, it’s really hard to recreate a star in a lab. To trigger fusion, you need tremendous amounts of pressure and heat. The environment in the heart of the Sun naturally provides the extreme pressure needed for fusion to take place. Scientists on Earth do not need that kind of pressure to get the same reaction, they only need to hit temperatures even hotter than the Sun. That takes more energy than scientists can generate through fusion in a lab.
Not by a long shot. While the lab achieved “ignition,” they based their achievement on a limited definition of a “net energy gain” focused only on the output of the laser. While the lasers shot 2.05 megajoules of energy at their target, doing so ate up a whopping 300 megajoules from the grid. The experiment lost a lot of energy and took into account that.
Precision Physics at the National Ignition Facility: Tammy Ma as a Plasma Physicist in New York, December 13th
“The fuel capsule is a BB point sized shell made of diamond that needs to be as perfect as possible,” Michael Stadermann, Target Fabrication Program manager at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said during the December 13th press conference. “As you can imagine, perfection is really hard, and so we’ve yet to get there — we still have tiny flaws on our shells, smaller than bacteria.”
Symmetry is involved in the target and its implosion. Maintaining near perfect symmetry while hitting a target with intense pressure and heat is important, as well as aligning the lasers. It is like taking a basketball and making it 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465, all while maintaining a perfect spherical shape. If you deviate from that shape, you waste too much kinetic energy and won’t get ignition.
We also have to build up many of the underlying technologies that will support a fusion power plant in the future. But that means cheaper targets that we generate at high volume and that are very robust and good quality. High repetition rate is what lasers can run at. The NIF only shoots once every four to eight hours or so. It is thought that a fusion power plant would have to shoot 10 times a second. We have to figure out a way to speed things up. It is a big challenge. We work with universities and academia, not just with a huge team at the lab. The private sector is getting interested now, too. We need all of that expertise in order to make it happen.
That said, reaching ignition is more of a scientific breakthrough than one with practical application for our energy system — at least not for many more years.
Tammy Ma was about to board a plane at the San Francisco International Airport when she got the call of a lifetime. She’s a plasma physicist at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world’s largest and most energetic laser. A breakthrough in nuclear fusion was achieved at the facility by an experiment.
“I burst into tears, and I was jumping up and down in the waiting area,” Ma told reporters at a technical briefing on the achievement in Washington, DC, this week.
What’s next at the NIF atomic nucleosynthesis accelerator (NIF)? It’s exciting to be here, but what is going on now?
I would like to be honest. We have an assortment of data that we are building off, so it’s not like we are pulling new ideas out of the air. But, how do we improve on the last set of experiments? What design changes do we want to do?
We work with the laser scientists to try to define the best laser pulse that we can use. The materials that we need to develop for targets have to be worked on with material scientists. When the burst of neutrons arrives, the diagnostic instruments have to be set to capture it. We have some of the fastest X-ray cameras in the world, so we can actually record what’s going on in real time. So in total, it’s a huge team that brings all this together.
Right now, my role is moving towards the next step of fusion energy. We’ve been trying to prepare, you know, after we get ignition, how can we capitalize on this great discovery? And now we’re here.
It was amazing because the NIF runs 24/7 — we are doing experiments every single day. And it’s just built on decades of work, right? And I’m very lucky to be here at this time. But there’s been giants that came before us. And I’m still not sure it’s fully sunk in yet that we’ve achieved this. So it’s exciting.
We will continuously try to repeat the shot and improve the situation in the future. We are continuously trying to improve the quality of the targets — that makes a huge difference. We have plans to continue turning up the laser energy in the future. We are doing new things every couple of weeks.