Companies across the globe have continuously been working on new ways to utilize hydro, solar, and geothermal power in order to find the best solution to the world’s energy issues. And for many of them, they truly believe that the answer is in nuclear fusion. But when it comes to using any type of nuclear power, there is always a bit of hesitation due to the irrefutable risks that come along with working with it.
What fusion reactors do is they copy the process and power of the sun and its effects on the planet by creating the fourth material state, plasma. This is done within a controlled device which takes the heat from the sun and gives it off as energy that harnesses electricity.
In recent years, a set of private firms within England and another in Boston, MA that just so happens to be near MIT, have joined together to develop what they described as a “portable” fusion reactor. They created it by using rare minerals alongside magnets that are considered some of the most powerful ones ever created on the planet.
If these firms manage to figure out the incredibly complex technological issues that come with harnessing nuclear fusion, there would be no need to mine for oil and coal – leaving them in the ground where they belong – and people will have no worries of a nuclear power plant meltdown, like the tragedy that occurred in Fukushima in Japan back in 2011. Meanwhile, issues of renewable energies would no longer be a problem, and all the technologists, scientists and engineers could use their talents in other much needed areas of the world’s economies.
Dr. Greg Brittles belongs to Tokamak Energy, the UK company behind this novel fusion reactor, explained to news publication BBC, “It’s every engineer’s dream, really, to have a project that’s technically challenging, which requires you to develop new technology and solutions to hard problems, but that are so simultaneously important for the world to have.”
How It Works
Although many will argue that there are no simple physics equations, it would seem that fusion reactor theory is actually deemed quite simple, in comparison to most. How it works is that hydrogen atoms are sent into the reactor where colossal pressure induces fusion where as a result, helium is made. From here, ‘hydrogen mass is converted into heat, which can be used to generate electricity.’ Sounds simple enough, right?
If only it was really as simple as it appears to be. Where the difficulty actually lies is in the actual process. For this fusion to happen on planet Earth, such scientists like Dr. Brittle ‘must heat hydrogen isotopes to degrees in the hundreds of millions.’ When this occurs, they eventually break apart and form into plasma.
Unlike the sun, which has its own gravitational field that allows it encompass the plasma created within it considering it’s 330,000 times the mass of the planet Earth, these firms do not. Therefore, such companies as Tokamak Energy and other such firms plan to control the plasma by using the abovementioned incredibly powerful magnets.
But of course, there are always issues that come up when considering to build something so complex. They need to ask themselves whether they’ll be able to construct a device that’s capable of both heating and containing matter in such absolute extremes that it doesn’t actually require more energy to work than it will have the ability to create?
Incredibly, for the last five years, Dr. Brittles has been working on developing such a ‘series of power magnets wrapped with layers of superconducting tape.’ They are to be arranged in a spherical, or easier to understand, apple-shaped fusion chamber the team decided to call tokamak.
How it works is that the magnetic forces within the chamber are forced to interact with each other, which causes pressure to build to an incredibly acute level within the chamber. The pressure is described to be as ‘about two times more intense than at the deepest point in the ocean.’ Then, the superconducting tape pulls huge amounts of energy from the tokamak, which then grants the reactor the ability to create more energy than it uses.
Dr. Brittle went on to tell BBC, “It will be an assembly of many, many coils generating forces that are all interacting and pulling on one another forming a balanced set. This has to be controlled or the forces could become imbalanced.”
Others Attempt to Do the Same
Meanwhile, other companies such as America’s Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is also in the race to help solve the world’s inefficiency issues. They too created a D-shape that is big enough for an adult to stand inside, and it also has impressive magnets that have been wrapped with ‘300 kilograms (660 pounds) of superconducting tape made from a barium copper oxide.’
Notably, this special tape took decades to create and establish. It’s said that when the tape is cooled all the way down to -253 °C – which could only be done before with a refrigerator that was the size of a house – it manages to keep in all of the 40,000 amps that are passing through the tokamak at any given time, and it does so incredibly efficiently as well.
According to CFS, 18 of their magnets will be made into a doughnut shape that is quite similar to a particle accelerator. Their research and development team also claim that their reactor will have the ability ‘to turn a glass of water into the electricity usage of one human’ over their entire lifetime. If that’s not impressive, we don’t know what is.
While government funding has been used to explore the use of fusion reactors in the past, which have cost tens of billions of dollars, fundamental problems have yet to be solved despite the amount of money spent. One example is the super-intriguing International Nuclear Fusion Research (ITER) project, which has been funded by over at least 20 countries at least, yet it is still considered many years from completion.
The colossal structure in France, being made with metal and magnets, is made possible through the cooperation of all these nations. The hope is that it will be able to produce fusion that will need tons more rare minerals from Earth, but within a facility that will need a bigger number of employees. The facility will also be completely static, while there will be a need to have more than one reactor to cover all of the planet.
While this so-called “race” to find better solutions to the earth’s energy issues has been a private enterprise that has come with limited resources, they have still managed to come up with inventive technologies. But one huge consideration that they should consider is that they shouldn’t be building reactors that weigh and cost the same as a cruise ship if they can create one that’s just the size of a phone box. Of course, only time – and new nuclear fusion progress – will tell.
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