145
World’s 1st high-temperature superconducting tokamak built in China
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
145 points (96.2% liked)
Technology
59207 readers
3158 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Who knows, commercial fusion power might actually be less than 50 years away now. LOL.
Edit: Do keep in mind that this stuff doesn't have to be the efficiency of the Sun because the Sun is actually quite inefficient and takes millions of years for the heat to get from the core where it is fused out into the galaxy. They have to be hotter than the temperature of the Sun and more efficient.
Well they don't strictly speaking have to but to get fusion you need a combination of pressure and temperature and increasing temperature is way easier than increasing pressure if you don't happen to have the gravity of the sun to help you out. Compressing things with magnetic fields isn't exactly easy.
Efficiency in a fusion reactor would be how much of the fusion energy is captured, then how much of it you need to keep the fusion going, everything from plasma heating to cooling down the coils. Fuel costs are very small in comparison to everything else so being a bit wasteful isn't actually that bad if it doesn't make the reactor otherwise more expensive.
What's much more important is to be economical: All the currently-existing reactors are research reactors, they don't care about operating costs, what the Max Planck people are currently figuring out is exactly that kind of stuff, "do we use a cheap material for the diverters and exchange them regularly, or do we use something fancy and service the reactor less often": That's an economical question, one that makes the reactor cheaper to operate so the overall price per kWh is lower. They're planning on having the first commercial prototype up and running in the early 2030s. If they can achieve per kWh fuel and operating costs lower than gas they've won, even though levelised costs (that is, including construction of the plant amortised over time) will definitely still need lowering. Can't exactly buy superconducting coils off the shelf right now, least of all in those odd shapes that stellerators use.
They do fusion without millions of km of plasma tho.
So much more efficient then.
That is exactly what we want, a controllable much slower reaction to release a reasonable amount of energy at a time... The sun.