New high-temp superconducting magnets for fusion
Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson. |
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Well, I hope they don't run into to some unforeseen issue.
I remember talking to a PHD student at MIT in 1962 who was involved in a fusion project. I don't know how intense fusion research has been, but getting more energy generated than is consumed has been a problem. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov |
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Incremental progress is good.
That story is a bit over the top, though. I did some looking around after seeing a version of that story. Japan has the record for magnetic fields at 1200T. MRI magnets are typically 30T. HTS magnets are certainly important, and this is good and important, but they're burying a lot of the context in chasing clicks. It's still not clear what - if any - fusion concept will actually work, and if that concept will actually be economical. Stronger magnetic fields have previously been achieved in outdoor experiments using chemical explosives, but this is a world record for magnetic fields generated indoors in a controlled manner. That greater control means the discovery could open new frontiers in solid-state physics, perhaps allowing scientists to reach what is known as the "quantum limit," a condition where all the electrons in a material are confined to the lowest ground state, where exotic quantum phenomena may appear. The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory has several magnets over 20T. Lots more work to do! Keep at it boffins!!1 Cheers, Scott. |
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The title is a bit imprecise.
This new magnet was HTS, not low, so it can operate in a much smaller space. It only used 30 watts to get to 20T. It's the size and the energy draw for both the magnet and the coolant that's so revolutionary. The folks at MIT seem to think that this is going to be enough once it's ramped up. ITER's magnets run at 13T. With respect to the record of 1200T, that's for explosive compression and it only lasts a few dozen microseconds; not terribly useful for sustained fusion. :-) I think you might have misread something: MRIs run around 3T and the largest approved for medical usage is 7T. The big research ones are around 10T and they require enormous magnets to work. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson. |
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Touche'.
My division cells are not as quick as they used to be. ;-) Progress is always good, but there are still vast unknowns. Superconductors, and HTS, are flighty beasties, even without gigantic forces and neutron fluxes trying to destroy them. And it's great that people are working on alternatives to ITER. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3994 (from 2018) CFS estimates that its burning-plasma device, SPARC, will cost around $400 million; the price tag for TE’s as-yet-unnamed device will be “a bit higher,” says Kingham. ITER will cost anywhere from $22 billion to $65 billion—the estimates provided by ITER’s management and the US Department of Energy, respectively. While the YBCO (yttrium-barium-copper-oxide) superconductor works below 77K (liquid nitrogen temperature), in practice they operate it at 20K for various reasons, so they needed more than 30W to run this beasty (for the refrigerators - though to be fair it's much more for conventional (non high-Tc) superconductors). (Those two cylindrical things hanging off the flattened donut plane look like converted cryopumps - they typically get down to 10K and are well understood and off-the-shelf items. But they only have about 20-50W of heat capacity while requiring kW of electrical power themselves for the helium compressor. So it probably takes a long time to cool that thing down to 20K (and probably uses LN2 in other parts to speed the cooling).) Neat stuff. But could still be another 30 years before we're getting power from fusion. Thanks. Cheers, Scott. |
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Yep, most of the power is for coolant.
2 weeks to cool it down. There are definitely a lot more engineering problems to solve but this was one of the bigger ones. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson. |
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Wonder how long it took to get that backronym
-- Drew |
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Didn't they buy that ready-made from Sun?
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Stark Industries
-- Drew |