The Lemon Fool

Nuclear fusion plant to be built at West Burton A power station

BBC News

A power station has been chosen to be the site of the UK's, and potentially the world's, first prototype commercial nuclear fusion reactor.

"Fusion is a potential source of almost limitless clean energy but is currently only carried out in experiments.

The government had shortlisted five sites but has picked the West Burton A plant in Nottinghamshire.

The plant should be operational by the early 2040s, a UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) spokesman has said."

How long before it gets cancelled because there's no money available?

I was a bit surprised by this BBC article. I am unaware of any immediate prospect of power from fusion. ITER has not been completed yet and it was supposed to be the first test of whether a fusion reactor could produce greater power output from fusion than input. It does not appear to discuss the reactor configuration - the picture doesn't look like a Tokamak but may just be artistic licence.

This also seemed to me an error in the BBC article:

"Nuclear fusion reactors need to reach very high temperatures and pressure"

AFAIK fusion reactors do not operate at "very high pressure", one of the very reasons they need to operate at such extremely high temperatures.

More information here:

Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production

https://step.ukaea.uk/

STEP is a UKAEA programme that will demonstrate the ability to generate net electricity from fusion. It will also determine how the plant will be maintained through its operational life and prove the potential for the plant to produce its own fuel.

The first phase of the programme is to produce a concept design by 2024. It will be a spherical tokamak, connected to the National Grid and producing net energy, although it is not expected to be a commercially operating plant at this stage.

If it were not for the extreme credibility of the minister and the government

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-n ... e-63119465

I would dismiss this as an attempt to conjure something imaginary out of thin air to act as a smokescreen for other troubles.

There are no operating fusion reactors in the public domain, although there have been rumours of a a secret black project for over 30 years. Either this is the product of secret research or it is yet another fusion research project with no certainty as to whether it will get built and work if it is.

The plethora of preposterous government announcements is getting beyond amusing even by the standards of Private Eye, getting to the point where one feels the politicians are deliberately distorting reality for their own ends.

Regards,

XFool wrote:I was a bit surprised by this BBC article. I am unaware of any immediate prospect of power from fusion.

There isn't any immediate prospect, but this does seem to be optimistic that the hoped-for schedule for ITER will happen on time.

"Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) is a spherical tokamak fusion plant concept proposed by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and funded by UK government. The project is a proposed DEMO-class successor device to the ITER tokamak proof-of-concept of a fusion plant, the most advanced tokamak fusion reactor to date, which is scheduled to achieve a 'burning plasma' in 2035. STEP aims to produce net electricity from fusion on a timescale of 2040. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Tokamak_for_Energy_Production

"DEMO refers to a proposed class of nuclear fusion experimental reactors that are intended to demonstrate the net production of electric power from nuclear fusion. Most of the ITER partners have plans for their own DEMO-class reactors. With the possible exception of the EU and Japan, there are no plans for international collaboration as there was with ITER.

Plans for DEMO-class reactors are intended to build upon the ITER experimental nuclear fusion reactor."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant

Sounds like vapourware to me. If an ounce of steel is cut and concrete is cast, I'd be amazed.

Things do seem to have been happening that I wasn't very aware of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Ampere_Spherical_Tokamak

Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST) was a nuclear fusion experiment, testing a spherical tokamak nuclear fusion reactor, and commissioned by EURATOM/UKAEA. The original MAST experiment took place at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, Oxfordshire, England from December 1999 to September 2013. A successor experiment called MAST Upgrade began operation in 2020.

Though, now that I come to think of it, these have been reported in recent years.

£20Bn might be enough to build sufficient wind turbines and liquid air energy storage facilities to cover almost all of UK homes power needs. And push come to shove could see the 2030 time date being pulled down to perhaps 2026. And doesn't create a demand for minerals which may become increasingly scarce, other than the rising demand for the likes of electric vehicles.

ITER's current schedule of first plasma in 2025 (originally 2018) and first deuterium-tritium in 2035 now looks under threat due to defects in the thermal shields and vacuum vessel. But it's likely to take them 6 months just to work out how long they're going to delay it for...

https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles ... TER-tokama

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/ ... on-energy/

They have achieved fusion where the power generated was greater than the power consumed. A very big first!

...OK.

Interesting, but this is at the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility, created for research into fusion weapons. It's never been clear to me how their approach could be used as a continuous power generator - it was never designed or intended to, AFAIK.

How long does it take to recharge the energy storage to fire those lasers? Minutes? Hours? It is intrinsically a non continuous one shot at a time setup. Hopefully it may help in research into fusion power but, unless I am wrong, I can't see it as a direct option as a fusion power generator.

XFool wrote:How long does it take to recharge the energy storage to fire those lasers? Minutes? Hours?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#Laser

"One of the goals for NIF is to reduce this time to less than four hours, in order to allow 700 firings a year."

XFool wrote:...OK.

Interesting, but this is at the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility, created for research into fusion weapons. It's never been clear to me how their approach could be used as a continuous power generator - it was never designed or intended to, AFAIK.

How long does it take to recharge the energy storage to fire those lasers? Minutes? Hours? It is intrinsically a non continuous one shot at a time setup. Hopefully it may help in research into fusion power but, unless I am wrong, I can't see it as a direct option as a fusion power generator.

In theory (or dreams) an inertial containment fusion reactor would be like an internal combustion engine. A rapidly repeating series of small explosions average to a reasonably continuous power output. The fantasy art from decades ago had tens of explosions per second heating a water jacket that ran a steam turbine.

As you point out there is a lot of engineering, and perhaps basic physics, between where we are and where we hope to be. (The same could also be said of magnetic confinement.) It's not clear to me if the step from zero explosions to one explosion, or the step from one explosion to millions of explosions is bigger. It depends on whether you chose a log or linear model. Sometimes things proceed from proof of concept to commercial reality very quickly. Other times an initial proof of concept sits there taunting generations of scientists and engineers trying to put it to practical use.

IMHO controlled fusion is a big enough prize that both magnetic and inertial confinement should be pursued, even apart from the possibility that one line of research will generate insight that helps the other.

scrumpyjack wrote:https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/12/12/us-scientists-make-huge-breakthrough-fusion-energy/

They have achieved fusion where the power generated was greater than the power consumed. A very big first!

Yes:

...researchers have managed to release 2.5 MJ of energy after using just 2.1 MJ to heat the fuel with lasers.

But:

...the positive energy gain reported ignores the 500MJ of energy that was put into the lasers themselves.

RC

ReformedCharacter wrote:

...researchers have managed to release 2.5 MJ of energy after using just 2.1 MJ to heat the fuel with lasers.

But:

...the positive energy gain reported ignores the 500MJ of energy that was put into the lasers themselves.

Not sure I understand the arithmetic there...

Obviously that 2.1MJ heating from the lasers had to be put into the lasers in the first place, so where did the 500MJ come into it? Does it mean 500MJ was put into the lasers, resulting in an effective laser output of 2.1MJ? Or only 2.1MJ of the total laser output could be harnessed for heating?

XFool wrote:

ReformedCharacter wrote:

...researchers have managed to release 2.5 MJ of energy after using just 2.1 MJ to heat the fuel with lasers.

But:

...the positive energy gain reported ignores the 500MJ of energy that was put into the lasers themselves.

Not sure I understand the arithmetic there...

Obviously that 2.1MJ heating from the lasers had to be put into the lasers in the first place, so where did the 500MJ come into it? Does it mean 500MJ was put into the lasers, resulting in an effective laser output of 2.1MJ? Or only 2.1MJ of the total laser output could be harnessed for heating?

It means that produce the 2.1 MJ of optical energy used to initiate the fusion, about 500 MJ of electricity was required to power the lasers. The so-called "wall plug efficiency" of lasers can be very low.

XFool wrote:

ReformedCharacter wrote:

...researchers have managed to release 2.5 MJ of energy after using just 2.1 MJ to heat the fuel with lasers.

But:

...the positive energy gain reported ignores the 500MJ of energy that was put into the lasers themselves.

Not sure I understand the arithmetic there...

Obviously that 2.1MJ heating from the lasers had to be put into the lasers in the first place, so where did the 500MJ come into it? Does it mean 500MJ was put into the lasers, resulting in an effective laser output of 2.1MJ? Or only 2.1MJ of the total laser output could be harnessed for heating?

Sabine Hossenfelder explains why such figures can be misleading, ie. the other energy needed to make the fusion process and associated equipment work is usually not shown as part of the input\output energy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

RC

NotSure wrote:It means that produce the 2.1 MJ of optical energy used to initiate the fusion, about 500 MJ of electricity was required to power the lasers. The so-called "wall plug efficiency" of lasers can be very low.

OK. That's what I feared. If so, then this sounds even further away from being a source of "fusion power" than magnetic confinement!

Where did you get those number from, Lawrence Livermore? They aren't in the Telegraph article.