Lifeboat Foundation

And just as private space travel is now materializing, many industry observers are forecasting that the same business model will give rise to commercial fusion — desperately needed to decarbonize the energy economy — within a decade. “There’s a very good shot to get there within less than ten years,” says Michl Binderbauer, chief executive of TAE Technologies. In the FIA report, a majority of respondents thought that fusion would power an electrical grid somewhere in the world in the 2030s.

An emerging industry of nuclear-fusion firms promises to have commercial reactors ready in the next decade.

The creation of the Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) business was announced following a £195m cash injection from private firms and a £210m grant from the government.

It is hoped the new company could create up to 40,000 jobs by 2050.

However, critics say the focus should be on renewable power, not new nuclear.

Continue reading “Rolls-Royce gets funding to develop mini nuclear reactors” »

A team of researchers from Tri Alpha Energy Inc. and Google has developed an algorithm that can be used to speed up experiments conducted with plasma. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the group describes how they plan to use the algorithm in nuclear fusion research.

As research into harnessing nuclear fusion has progressed, scientists have found that some of its characteristics are too complex to be solved in a reasonable amount of time using current technology. So they have increasingly turned to computers to help. More specifically, they want to adjust certain parameters in a device created to achieve fusion in a reasonable way. Such a device, most in the field agree, must involve the creation of a certain type of plasma that is not too hot or too cold, is stable, and has a certain desired density.

Finding the right parameters that meet these conditions has involved an incredible amount of trial and error. In this new effort, the researchers sought to reduce the workload by using a computer to reduce some of the needed trials. To that end, they have created what they call the “optometrist’s algorithm.” In its most basic sense, it works like an optometrist attempting to measure the visual ability of a patient by showing them images and asking if they are better or worse than other images. The idea is to use the crunching power of a computer with the intelligence of a human being—the computer generates the options and the human tells it whether a given option is better or worse.

Experiments conducted in August achieved a record yield of more than 1.3 megajoules.

After decades of inertial confinement fusion research, a record yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ) from fusion reactions was achieved in the laboratory for the first time during an experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) on August 8, 2021. These results mark an 8-fold improvement over experiments conducted in spring 2021 and a 25-fold increase over NIF’s 2018 record yield (Figure 1).

NIF precisely guides, amplifies, reflects, and focuses 192 powerful laser beams into a target about the size of a pencil eraser in a few billionths of a second. NIF generates temperatures in the target of more than 180 million F and pressures of more than 100 billion Earth atmospheres. Those extreme conditions cause hydrogen atoms in the target to fuse and release energy in a controlled thermonuclear reaction.

In the race toward practical fusion energy, tokamaks (donut-shaped plasma devices) are the leading concept—they have achieved better confinement and higher plasma temperatures than any other configuration. Two major magnetic fields are used to contain the plasma: a toroidal field (along the axes of the donut) produced by external coils and the field from a ring current flowing in the plasma itself. The performance of a tokamak, however, comes with an Achilles heel—the possibility of disruptions, a sudden termination of the plasma driven by instabilities in the plasma current. Since the plasma current provides the equilibrium and confinement for the tokamak, the challenge of taming disruptions must be addressed and solved.

As the magnitudes of the plasma current and plasma energy increase, disruptions can cause more damage. As such, they are a particularly important concern for the newest and most powerful machines, such as the SPARC tokamak. SPARC is a compact, high-magnetic–field tokamak under design and in the early stages of construction by a joint team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The SPARC plasma is predicted to produce more than 10 times the power than is required to maintain its 250 million F temperatures. All tokamaks of this performance class must develop strategies to protect the machine against disruptions.

A solution, however, may be in hand. Prompted by a theoretical idea from Prof. Allen Boozer of Columbia University, the SPARC design includes an innovative new coil structure which promises fully passive protection from the threat of runaway electrons.

Engineers have successfully transferred digitally encoded information wirelessly using nuclear radiation instead of conventional technology.

Radio waves and mobile phone signals relies on electromagnetic radiation for communication but in a new development, engineers from Lancaster University in the UK, working with the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, transferred digitally encoded information using “fast neutrons” instead.

The researchers measured the spontaneous emission of fast neutrons from californium-252, a radioactive isotope produced in nuclear reactors.

Rolls-Royce will move ahead with a multibillion pound plan to roll out a new breed of mini nuclear reactors after securing more than £450m from the government and investors.

The engineering firm will set up a venture focused on developing small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs, in partnership with investors BNF Resources and the US generator Exelon Generation with a joint investment of £195m to fund the plans over the next three years.

Fusion – combining atomic nuclei to release energy – is a clean and safe way to power our homes and industry. This ‘holy grail’ of energy has eluded physicists for decades, but there are signs that a bright future could be on the horizon.

A new joint project between the U.S. and Romania will bring small modular reactors to Eastern Europe! In addition to SMR simulators to train students.