Amazing technologies developed by private companies are on the verge of creating nuclear fusion reactors to power mankind

While industry uses solar, water and geothermal energy to solve the world’s energy problems, it has been believed by many for some time that the core source of unlimited clean energy will be nuclear fusion.

Fusion reactors replicate the power and process of the sun down here on earth by creating plasma, the fourth state of matter, in a controlled device that uses the given heat as energy to convert it into electricity.

Now two private companies, one near MIT and one in England, are developing what could be called a “portable” fusion reactor, using super rare minerals and some of the strongest magnets ever made.

If only companies could solve a laundry list of some of the most complex technological problems imaginable, coal and oil could stay in the ground, there would be no need to risk another Fukushima. The enormous inefficiencies in renewable energies could all be forgotten. and all of these engineers and technologists could lend their talents to other areas of the economy.

“It really is every engineer’s dream to have a technically demanding project where you have to develop new technologies and solutions to difficult problems that are important to the world at the same time,” said Dr. Greg Brittles of Tokamak Energy The British company is developing a new fusion reactor, the BBC said.

In contrast to other physical equations, the fusion reactor theory is actually quite easy to explain. Hydrogen atoms get into the reactor, under immense pressure they fuse and become helium. Part of this hydrogen mass is converted into heat that can be used to generate electricity. Easy.

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The difficulty comes with the process. To enable fusion on Earth, scientists like Brittle must heat isotopes of hydrogen to hundreds of millions of degrees. At this point they break apart and form a plasma.

The sun has its gravitational field to absorb the plasma. Tokamak Energy and other companies plan to use super-powerful magnets to keep the plasma under control because they lack an object 330,000 times the mass of the earth.

Herein lies the problem: How can you build a device that can heat and contain matter so extremely that it not only consumes more energy than is generated?

For the past five years, Brittles has helped develop a series of power magnets wrapped in layers of superconducting tape and placed in a spherical or apple-shaped fusion chamber called a tokamak.

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As the magnetic forces interact, the pressure in the chamber rises to incredible levels – about twice as high as at the deepest point of the ocean. The superconducting tape draws huge amounts of energy from the tokamak so that the reactor can produce more than it consumes.

Tokamak Energy

“It’s going to be a collection of many, many coils creating forces that all work together and pull each other to form a balanced set. This has to be controlled, otherwise the forces could be unbalanced, ”he told the BBC.

A race to the top

More of that Tony Stark-like technology, this time from America’s Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), is also trying to solve the inefficiency problem. Strong magnets form a D-shape that is big enough for a person to stand in and are wrapped in 300 kilograms of superconducting adhesive tape made of barium copper oxide.

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It took decades for this bond to develop. When it cools to 253 ° C, where a refrigerator the size of a house used to be used, it conducts almost all of the 40,000 amps running through the tokamak at one time.

Eighteen of CFS’s magnets are said to be placed in this donut shape, similar to a particle accelerator, and their research and development team boasts that their reactor will be able to convert a lifetime glass of water into a person’s electricity consumption.

CFS

Government funds have gone into fusion reactors before, tens of billions of dollars, but so far this has not solved the fundamental problems. For example, the international nuclear fusion research project ITER, reported on by GNN and funded by dozens of countries, is years behind schedule.

The metal and magnet Leviathan being built in France by all of these nations might one day be able to create a fusion, but it will be in a facility that will require many workers, with components that will require more rare earth minerals , and it will be completely immobile – not to mention that humanity might need more than one such reactor.

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This kind of private innovation, this “race” as Kingham calls it, with limited resources, produces the most innovative technologies. There’s no reason to make a reactor that weighs and costs as much as a cruise ship when you can make it the size of a phone booth.

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