A new goal for fusion: 50 MWe for the U.S. grid by 2035–2040Nuclear NewsResearch & ApplicationsFebruary 19, 2021, 7:00AM|Nuclear News StaffCoordinated federal and private industry investments made now could yield an operational fusion pilot plant in the 2035–2040 time frame, according to Bringing Fusion to the U.S. Grid, a consensus study report released February 17 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).Developed at the request of the Department of Energy, the report builds on the work of the 2019 Final Report of the Committee on a Strategic Plan for U.S. Burning Plasma Research, and it identifies key goals, innovations, and investments needed to develop a U.S. fusion pilot plant that can serve as a model for producing electricity at the lowest possible capital cost.“The U.S. fusion community has been a pioneer of fusion research since its inception and now has the opportunity to bring fusion to the marketplace,” said Richard Hawryluk, associate director for fusion at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and chair of the NASEM Committee on the Key Goals and Innovations Needed for a U.S. Fusion Pilot Plant, which produced the report.Pilot first: The committee concluded that a viable design for a pilot plant with peak net electrical power greater than or equal to 50 MWe would be needed by 2028 to support initial pilot plant operation between 2035 and 2040. As it progressed through three successive operating phases, the pilot plant would be expected to sustain peak power output above 50 MWe for increasingly long periods of time and demonstrate operation through environmental and maintenance cycles. Data and operating experience from the pilot plant would provide the technical and economic information needed for U.S. utilities to invest in future plants. The committee targeted total overnight construction costs of less than $5–6 billion for the pilot plant.The technology: Although several technical approaches exist for achieving fusion and producing net electricity, the goals and timelines developed for the NASEM report are technology neutral and intended to be applicable to the design that is eventually chosen based on technological and economic criteria.Any design will face technical hurdles, and the committee recognized that innovations in plasma confinement, extraction of heat, ensuring sustained structural integrity of the power plant components, and closing the fuel cycle would need to be developed in parallel to meet the challenge of operating a pilot plant between 2035 and 2040.Larger context: The United States has already made sizable investments in ITER, the international magnetic confinement fusion experiment designed to produce a sustained burning plasma, and the report recommends continuing the partnership as “the most cost-effective way to gain experience with a burning plasma at the scale of a power plant.” Building off technological and research results from ITER, a U.S.-based fusion pilot plant would aim to produce net electricity from fusion over longer periods of time, test integration with the U.S. electric grid, and provide the technical and economic information for a future first-of-a-kind commercial fusion power plant.The report goes beyond a discussion of technical details and addresses how fusion could fit in the U.S. electricity marketplace. The committee concluded that strong interest from private sector developers can provide motivation to deploy the pilot plant, and utility operators also indicate that an operating pilot plant could create an opportunity for fusion to support the transition to low-carbon energy systems.Act now: The report emphasizes that other countries and groups around the world are rapidly working to build fusion pilot plants, and that by investing now the United States could take a global leadership role in fusion power development.The committee recommends that the DOE support the creation of diverse teams, including national laboratories, universities, and industry working together and through public-private partnerships, to develop conceptual pilot plant designs and technology road maps.Tags:clean energyfusioniternational academiesShare:LinkedInTwitterFacebook
Canadian survey reveals solid support for nuclear investmentA new survey exploring the attitudes of Canadians toward climate change and their expectations and level of support for government intervention to tackle the issue finds that 86 percent believe that Canada should invest in clean technologies, including renewables and nuclear energy.The survey, conducted by research and strategy firm Abacus Data between January 29 and February 3, was commissioned by the Canadian Nuclear Association (CNA).CNA says: “It’s clear there is strong support for the government to implement a mix of solutions to address the [climate change] challenge, including investing in renewables and clean nuclear technologies,” stated John Gorman, CNA president and chief executive officer, in a February 18 press release. “We continue to see that the more understanding Canadians have, the more they support zero-emissions nuclear technologies to help reach our net zero 2050 goal. This includes investment in small modular reactors, which Canadians believe bring value to replace carbon-based fuels with clean electricity, decarbonize high-emissions industries, and transition remote communities away from reliance on diesel.”Go to Article
Big fusion moment coming soon, Popular Mechanics saysRendering of SPARC, a compact, high-field, DT burning tokamak, currently under design by a team from MIT and CFS. Source: CFS/MIT-PSFC - CAD Rendering by T. HendersonThe fusion community is reaching a "Kitty Hawk moment" as early as 2025, according to the Popular Mechanics story, "Jeff Bezos Is Backing an Ancient Kind of Nuclear Fusion."That moment will come from magnetized target fusion (MTF), the January 25 story notes, a technology that dates back to the 1970s when the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory first proposed it. Now, however, MTF’s proponents say that the technology is bearing down to reach the commercial power market. The question is, Will it be viable before the competing fusion model of tokamaks, such as ITER, start operations?Go to Article
A growing part of the fusion communityFusion energy is no longer a far-off goal. It is now routinely achieved at laboratory scale but requires more energy to control the fusion reaction than the fusion reaction has released.The path to viable fusion power from a magnetically confined plasma source requires the creation of a burning plasma, whereby the primary heating source comes from the fusion reaction itself.To begin to consider the economic viability of a fusion power plant, the reaction must have a significant energy gain, or “Q” factor (the ratio of output power to input heating power), in a reaction that is sustained over a time frame of minutes or hours.Construction has begun on an international experiment—the ITER tokamak—that aims to achieve a sustained reaction, and numerous privately funded smaller experiments have the potential to move forward toward this goal.Nuclear News reached out to companies in the fusion community to ask for insights into their ongoing work. All are members of the Fusion Industry Association. Most companies submitted briefs at a specified word count, while others ran long and some ran short. Their insights appear on the following pages.Go to Article
Understanding the ITER Project in the context of global Progress on Fusion(photo: ITER Project gangway assembly)The promise of hydrogen fusion as a safe, environmentally friendly, and virtually unlimited source of energy has motivated scientists and engineers for decades. For the general public, the pace of fusion research and development may at times appear to be slow. But for those on the inside, who understand both the technological challenges involved and the transformative impact that fusion can bring to human society in terms of the security of the long-term world energy supply, the extended investment is well worth it.Failure is not an option.Go to Article
Notes on fusionThe ST25-HTS tokamak.Governments around the world have been interested in fusion for more than 70 years. Fusion research was largely secret until 1968, when the Soviets unveiled exciting results from their tokamak (a magnetic confinement fusion device with a particular configuration that produces a toroidal plasma). The Soviets realized that tokamaks were not useful as weapons but could produce plasma in the million-degree temperature range to demonstrate Soviet scientific and technical prowess to the world.Following this breakthrough, government laboratories around the world continued to pursue various methods of confining hot plasma to understand plasma physics under extreme conditions, getting closer and closer to the conditions necessary for fusion energy production. Tokamaks have been by far the most successful configuration. In the 1990s, the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory produced 10 MW of fusion power using deuterium-tritium fusion. A few years later, the Joint European Torus (JET) in the United Kingdom increased that to 16 MW, getting close to breakeven using 24 MW of power to heat the plasma.Go to Article
U.K., Japan to research remote D&D, fusion systemsThe LongOps project will develop innovative robotic technologies. Photo: UKAEABritain and Japan have signed a research and technology deployment collaboration to help automate nuclear decommissioning and aspects of fusion energy production. According to the U.K. government, which announced the deal on January 20, the £12 million (about $16.5 million) U.K.–Japanese robotics project, called LongOps, will support the delivery of faster and safer decommissioning at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan and at Sellafield in the United Kingdom, using long-reach robotic arms.The four-year collaboration on new robotics and automation techniques will also be applied to fusion energy research in the two countries.Funded equally by U.K. Research and Innovation, the U.K.’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, and Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power Company, the LongOps project will be led by the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority’s (UKAEA) Remote Applications in Challenging Environments (RACE) facility.Go to Article
General Fusion boasts backing from Shopify, Amazon foundersShopify founder Tobias Lütke is backing General Fusion with an undisclosed capital investment through his Thistledown Capital investment firm, the Canadian fusion technology firm announced January 14.In an article published the same day by TechCrunch, Jonathan Shieber noted that a separate investments by Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, first made through his venture capital fund nearly a decade ago, means General Fusion “has the founders of the two biggest e-commerce companies in the Western world on its cap table.”Go to Article
Increasing costs of climate change–related disasters reflects importance of nuclearHurricanes, wildfires, and other disasters across the United States caused $95 billion in damage last year, according to new data referenced by the New York Times. The cost is almost double the amount in 2019 and the third-highest loss since 2010.The new figures, reported January 7 by Munich Re—a company that provides insurance to other insurance companies—are the latest signal of the growing cost of climate change. The spike reflects the need for increased reliance on clean energy sources such as nuclear, solar, and wind.Go to Article
Fusion and the bounty of electricityFrom the time we discovered how the sun produces energy, we have been captivated by the prospect of powering our society using the same principles of nuclear fusion. Fusion energy promises the bounty of electricity we need to live our lives without the pollution inherent in fossil fuels, such as oil, gas, and coal. In addition, fusion energy is free from the stigma that has long plagued nuclear power about the storage and handling of long-lived radioactive waste products, a stigma from which fission power is only just starting to recover in green energy circles. Go to Article
The year in review 2020: Research and ApplicationsHere is a look back at the top stories of 2020 from our Research and Applications section in Newswire and Nuclear News magazine. Remember to check back to Newswire soon for more top stories from 2020.Research and Applications sectionARDP picks divergent technologies in Natrium, Xe-100: Is nuclear’s future taking shape? The Department of Energy has put two reactor designs—TerraPower’s Natrium and X-energy’s Xe-100—on a fast track to commercialization, each with an initial $80 million in 50-50 cost-shared funds awarded through the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. Read more.Go to Article