Fusion energy is almost like a unicorn. Everybody would like to have it but seems to be unattainable. ITER – the international experiment is getting more and more expensive and it’s still not finished. But fusion is just soo tempting.
Coil of the Wendelstein fusion reactor. Deutsches Museum, Munich.
Tiia Monto CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons
One of the companies who has succumbed to its temptations is Tokamak Energy from the British Oxfordshire. Currently, they are developing a fusion device called ST40. And on Wednesday 6th of June, they announced they achieved a temperature of 15 million degrees Celsius – higher than at the core of the sun. And they want to start delivering power in 2030.
The key to their success is supposed to small-scale fusion power. The ST40 is only the size of a van. Other fusion reactors are much bigger, some even attack the size of a football field. To get such high temperatures, ST40 is using a technology known as merging-compression. Using this technology you use a spherical tokamak to create two rings of plasma that are later merged into a single radially compressed ring using magnets.
At the moment two main types of fusion reactors are being used. But both use powerful magnetic fields to keep super-hot plasma at its designed place. First are tokamaks – which are shaped like a donut. The second are stellarators – which are shaped like a very abstract donut. Tokamak Energy is pretty obviously using tokamaks.
Their first prototype – ST25 was built in 2013, their second was done by 2015. Now they have their third prototype – the ST40 and soon they want to attack temperatures of up to 100 million degrees Celsius. And in 2025 they want to start using their reactor for industrial purposes and by 2030 they would like to start delivering electricity into the grid. And while that is still a long way ahead it seems we are on the right road towards fusion energy.
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What if it creates a black hole and sucks us all in?
luckily that isn't how fusion reactors work
Hopefully we don't go to the dreaded planet of the apes
I think we will actually
Gosh. What kind of power can it generate?
As far as I know, it isn't current capable of producing more energy than you need for the fusion reaction to start. It is just a prototype that they use to test how hot their plasma can get.
First of all. I don't exclude anything. If I find it to be an interesting topic, I'll write about it.
When it comes to cold fusion, the problem is that I've never seen anybody making something that would be later on replicated either by external scientists or often even by the people claiming to have cracked the puzzle in front of a public audience.
If you give me evidence of real replicable experiments that we can talk cold fusion.
Yes, one of the base principles of the scientific method is that experiments need to be replicable by external scientists. If they aren't, history shows that in the vast majority of cases it is just a fake.
The evidence for hot fusion is the fact that many scientific teams over the world have been capable of getting elements to fuse for decades now. We even have two tokamaks here where I live. They aren't commercially viable, but they are capable of fusion.
And the last part isn't an argument as attacks on character are one of the most common logical fallacies.
Now, this may be a logical fallacy as well, and if it is, I apologize.
You seem to think that I don't like cold fusion or that I wouldn't love for it to be real. I honestly would. But I have just not seen any evidence towards the existence of a sustainable cold fusion reaction existing.
As far as I know, the only real kind of cold fusion is muon-catalyzed fusion, but that requires a constant supply of muons and doesn't produce a self-sustainable reaction. Maybe there is some team that found a way to create self-sustaining muon-catalyzed fusion and if there as that would truly be a revolution in energy production. But until I see evidence for it, made in accordance with the scientific method, I will not be writing about it.
And to your second comment. Yes, I didn't exclude anything. I just found an article that I liked so I wrote about it. That doesn't mean I excluded anything.
I think you are mistaking sustaining itself with being able to produce more energy than we put it.
Sustain itself means that once you get the initial reaction going it produces energy as long as it has fuel. We have been capable of doing that for a pretty decent amount of time. Technically ever since we dropped the first hydrogen bomb.
The problem is that we need to put in more energy to start the reaction than we get out of it in the end. Though I think I've heard of at least one fusion reactor that got more energy out than it put in, but only in a short burst of a reaction.
On the other hand, cold fusion, as far as we know it today, can't sustain itself because you the reaction isn't creating enough energy to create additional reactions.
The link you provided me had 0 scientific articles in it. It was just yeah, we saw a slew of people doing it, but no scientific papers, no real evidence.
In the end, I can't see a way to convince you that cold fusion is currently not a thing. Maybe it will be in the future, but it certainly isn't now.