Fusion in 30 years? ITER update [2020]

it is the most powerful machine ever built permit the International thermonuclear experimental reactor Peter has reached yet another milestone on November 7th 2018 the concrete base which will house the reactor has been finished next step is to get the roof going and eventually the reactor itself this is good news for all participating countries in this monumental task paving the way for a future with clean and unlimited energy the roadmap remains unchanged with its first test runs happening at around 2025 but either is only an experiments that will be used to prove 5 main concepts produce 500 megawatts of fusion power demonstrate the integrated operation of technologies for a fusion power plant achieve a deuterium tritium plasma in which the reaction is sustained through internal heating test tritium breeding and demonstrate the safety characteristics of a fusion device why is fusion taking such a long time well recently the eater project has reached a milestone where the last concrete base foundation has been finished a massive building structure that spends 73 meters high and 120 metres wide to house the largest fusion reactor ever created next is the Assembly of the reactor itself which is set to start in 2020 the project should have its first run in 2025 and it's on its way to achieve that nevertheless it has been a bumpy road and costs for the project are only increasing either costs were initially estimated to be around 22 billion arrows until completion but new estimates are around 45 to 65 billion added to that when the next and final phase begins in 2025 so the final estimations are all above 80 billion euros way more than what was predicted back in 2001 when they thought that they could build this machine for only 5 billion euros but that is only one of the problems Fusion has faced since they started research more than 60 years ago as we will see here some of the problems may be solved by either in the near future but a lot of research still needs to be done regardless the questions - remains will it be able to finally make fusion work and solve all of our energy problems while we wait for the answer let us dive into why Fusion is so difficult to achieve and some of the current problems and potential solutions but first what is fusion fusion is the most powerful reaction after fission with fission you gain energy by splitting atoms apart usually done with large unstable nucleons such as uranium or plutonium in its fissile isotope form with fusion you have two lighter elements fusing together to form a heavier element the most common example is using deuterium and tritium fusing together yielding helium and neutron and energy the most potent reaction can yield eight times more energy than fission but to get that you need to use a lot of energy in the first place which is the opposite of fission for instance fission of heavier elements requires in between seven to eight million electron volts to overcome the nuclear force that holds the element together and the energy output is about 200 million electron volts the beauty of the system is that once fission starts it is self sustained and there is little to no need for external energy input to keep things going fusion on the other hand requires an enormous amount of energy to initiate the reaction all of this to overcome the electromagnetic force of positively charged particles called the Coulomb barrier the idea is to get the atoms close enough so the strong force overcomes the electromagnetic force and the atoms fuse together we can visualize this with a game of pool except that you're not trying to pocket the balls instead you are only trying to hit them dead-on with a minimum amount of energy which is a lot of energy by the way so they fuse together now you also have to take into account that with atoms you have magnetic forces acting against the hit making precision particularly more important and then we also have the distance which adds another level of difficulty so imagine that you have a huge table and all you want to do is hit another ball dead center to make them stick together one way to make this easier would be to increase the number of balls available on the table and provide the speed necessary to the balls so the hit happens and they fuse together what a tokamak does is exactly that it uses extreme magnetic fields to put the atoms as close as you can together while heating everything to millions of degrees Celsius and speeding up the atoms on earth the best temperature for this to happen is about 150 million degrees Celsius are 10 times higher than that of the center of the Sun using deuterium and tritium as an example when they fuse what you get is an unstable isotope of helium quickly becoming stable by releasing one Neutron and 17 point six million electron volts the comparison in between fission and fusion energy output is done in terms of total energy released per nucleon taking into account uranium 238 as an example you get 200 million electron volts divided by 238 nucleons yielding 0.84 million electron volts while fusion you get seventeen point six divided by five which is equal to three point 52 million electron volts or about four times more energy per nucleon single proton fusion reaction yields twice as much energy but it's very difficult to achieve whereas deuterium and tritium are the preferred elements to be used by now you know that this is what keeps stars alive for billions of years at every second the Sun transforms 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium at a temperature of 15 million degrees Celsius as you might have guessed this is no easy task and pretty much all problems with fusion starts here first the problem is not with fusion the problem is the amount of energy needed to jumpstart the reaction and sustain it with its own energy output what they call the break-even energy production most projects fail at that point where they cannot sustain the reaction for too long and the amount of energy input is significantly higher than the output as of the making of this video the joint European torus or jet it still holds the world record for input output energy ratio with a 16 megawatt output and a 24 megawatt input of heating and a total of 700 to 800 megawatt input of electrical power this is still far from optimal the problem is that we only know how to achieve fusion by using raw methods which can be divided into two categories electromagnetic confinement or inertial confinement both are being researched but the one that seems to be winning is the first one just like the Large Hadron Collider scientists believe that building a bigger structure with a strong magnet would be the way to achieve fusion but bigger reactor means higher costs and an unprecedent need for precision of materials even the concrete base that has been recently finished needed an absurd amount of specific mixes to achieve certain needs but the biggest problem is the electromagnetic system like I mentioned before 150 million degrees is no joke and keeping all of this container at high pressure you need a really strong M up to now this is still not possible and just to give you an idea of how difficult this is the wiring necessary is around 100,000 kilometers long which can be wrapped around earth 2.5 times it was produced by nine different suppliers which took eight years of manufacturing from 2008 to 2015 if any accidents happen we are looking at years of waiting time to get anything fixed and that is only the beginning the central solenoid has to resist a huge amount of current or 15 mega amps it has to support forces ranging in the 60 mega Newton's which is equivalent to 6 thousand tons of force the NASA space shuttle thrust reaches only 30 mega Newtons the maximum field reached in the center of the solenoid is 13 Tesla that is equivalent to 280,000 times the magnetic field of Earth added to that while the inside of the tokamak is at 150 million degrees the outer part where the reactor is located called the cryostat keeps everything cooled down to extremely low temperatures or less than 10 Kelvin with all of the things I described here it is easy to picture why is taking such a long time to get fusion working every single detail cannot be overlooked or else everything is delayed yet again but most likely there are a multitude of problems that will be solved with itter but like I said here the electromagnets are the most crucial part of the development and everything available is still experimental no scientist knows for sure if it will be able to work however there are some really good new a.m. technologies in the horizon that will significantly decrease power consumption and cost all being more powerful than anything created at this point that is what I will talk about next for the most part of finding a.m. coils that can reach the levels required by fusion reactors was always the main problem scientists were trying to solve the fairly recent discovery of non-conventional superconductors opened the doors to new materials that can be used for fusion in a not so distant future which is the case with MIT in 2018 MIT received an investment of 30 million dollars to build the world's strongest electromagnet using a new super conductive material called atrium barium copper oxide ybco for short this will be at least four times stronger than any electromagnet used currently the reason they are going with this is because the material belongs to a family of crystalline chemical compounds that are famous for displaying high-temperature superconductivity at temperatures above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen at 92 Kelvin or 15 degrees above that this alone will decrease the overall cost of building a tokamak the plan is to use the super electromagnet in a prototype fusion reactor called spark and once again will fall into the research and development loophole eater coils are made of niobium tin or niobium titanium which becomes superconducting at supercritical conditions using helium at 4 Kelvin using this material will make possible to carry higher currents and produce stronger magnetic fields than conventional counterparts all consume less power and being cheaper to operate ybco takes this a step further since temperatures neither are much higher translating into lower energy input for a magnet that is four times stronger than niobium tin but there are some caveats to this technology hence why it needs a lot of research and one of them is that since ybco is a crystal that means it is brittle which makes transforming this material into a wire by any conventional means nearly impossible but not all is bad news the most promising method that they will explore here is a form of ycb or deposition on two wires similar to CVD technology in a technique called coated conductor this will allow for a crystal as brittle as ybco to take the shape of the coil and help it's super conductivity but then again this requires extensive experimentation adding a few more decades to this endeavor all we can do now is wait for air to fire up its reactor which is only 35 years away so I guess the third year cycle will just keep going going alright folks that's it we're done here [Music]

Channel: Subject Zero Science

Views: 967,983

Rating: 4.9037261 out of 5

Keywords: Subject Zero Science, graphene, clean energy, fusion power, lockheed martin, fusion energy, ted talk, graphene technology, graphene strength test, graphene battery, graphene production, fusion energy 2019, fusion energy news, fusion energy explained, fusion energy reactor, nuclear fusion, renewable energy, clean energy technology, renewable energy sources, renewable energy projects, renewable energy 101, nuclear fusion explained, nuclear fusion reactor

Id: XNcGpQCX8a0

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Gilandb]

What gets me is all this technology is really used to heat a liquid to turn a turbine. Basically a modern steam engine, which was invited in 1698. I tried to find the date heat exchangers were invented and I didn't find anything.
A nuclear power plant only uses 30% of the energy from the core to make electricity. The rest is lost. Seems like we need some more science on that side vs new ways to make heat.

[u/artthoumadbrother]

I'm not really a huge fan of ITER, for reasons propounded in the video itself, as if those reasons were just interesting neutral facts about ITER.

When they discuss the size of the machine, the enormous amounts of precisely correct materials, etc, they illustrate the problem. ITER was conceived thusly: "So we have a way that we think might work to generate power with fusion Tokamaks. Lets have a bunch of governments pour 20 billion dollars into our huge experiment that might produce an extremely expensive, sub-optimal, not particularly scalable form of generating power with fusion, based on our current (2007) level of knowledge."

I don't think that's a smart way to approach things. I think it would have been a better idea to have those governments join together to put up a 20 billion dollar prize to whatever organization comes up with a fusion power source that meets certain desirable criteria, with those criteria developed by fusion power experts (nuclear engineers, physicists, not politicians). That way, you could get vastly more private funding poured into many competing attempts using different methods, many of which might be better than what they initially envisioned in the early-mid 2000s.

We still hear about hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into a few scattered projects, some of which sound as promising an eventual route for reaching fusion, many of which have been posted to this sub. What if there were more, and those were backed by billions of dollars in research, mobilizing a larger fraction of the developed world's nuclear engineers and physicists to the effort, encouraging more growth in the sector, etc....

I still almost expect one of the little guys to beat ITER to the punch, and with a better, more scalable method to boot.

Hell, there's another thread on the front page of this sub right now that describes a Ph.D student's paper that confirms that their plasma modeling is incomplete.

Also, the narrator's lack of impatience with the 'oh well, the 30 year cycle continues' is massively depressing. His acceptance of that, and the acceptance of ITER generally, allowing that attitude to be displayed in educational videos that they themselves put out, speaks to their lack of vision. This is important. We can do better. ITER isn't the way.

[u/MesterenR]

Mandatory link to article explaining why fusion likely will never become economically viable.

[u/Mitchhumanist]

Now 30 years, 40 years, 50 years...la la la la.....

What we can do with the Tokamak technology is make fast spaceships and not Commercial Reactors. This is a tech for the 22nd century. Alternatives to this are:

Wind-at-Sea, just, identified to possess a potential of 18 times the global energy consumption of 2018. Lots of work to do, problems, yeah, but doable.

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/wind-power-all-world-iea-report-offshore-uk-china-europe-clean-energy-climate-crisis-a9171086.html

Expanded perovskite solar cells combined with Storage systems (batteries) for home use level electricity making. Work is being done by the Brit Universities and looks to be a big, big, success (Oxford Solar) for the Uk & the world.

https://www.energy.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/solar/

A possibility (maybe?) is some comparatively minor innovation in nuke-fission, that makes it much safer. One is the use of metallic uranium or thorium, rather than the uranium dioxide powder.

https://ltbridge.com/fuel-technology/metallic-fuel-technology/

​

Note: There is always the chance that somebody will tweak fusion, or do laser, or particle beam nuclear fusion, and blow everything out of the water, in the road not taken, an engineering hack, that suddenly makes uncommercial, commercial!