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Feature: The new shape of fusion
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/05/feature-new-shape-fusion[font face=Serif]
© CCFE
A plasma glows inside MAST, a spherical tokamak.
[font size=5]Feature: The new shape of fusion[/font]
By Daniel Clery
21 May 2015 2:00 pm
[font size=3]ITER, the international fusion reactor being built in France, will stand 10 stories tall, weigh three times as much as the Eiffel Tower, and cost its seven international partners $18 billion or more. The result of decades of planning, ITER will not produce fusion energy until 2027 at the earliest. And it will be decades before an ITER-like plant pumps electricity into the grid. Surely there is a quicker and cheaper route to fusion energy.
Fusion enthusiasts have a slew of schemes for achieving the starlike temperatures or crushing pressures needed to get hydrogen nuclei to come together in an energy-spawning union. Some are mainstream, such as lasers, some unorthodox. Yet the doughnut-shaped vessels called tokamaks, designed to cage a superheated plasma using magnetic fields, remain the leading fusion strategy and are the basis of ITER. Even among tokamaks, however, a nimbler alternative has emerged: a spherical tokamak.
Imagine the doughnut shape of a conventional tokamak plumped up into a shape more like a cored apple. That simple change, say the idea's advocates, could open the way to a fusion power plant that would match ITER's promise, without the massive scale. “The aim is to make tokamaks smaller, cheaper, and faster—to reduce the eventual cost of electricity,” says Ian Chapman, head of tokamak science at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Abingdon, U.K.
Culham is one of two labs about to give these portly tokamaks a major test. The world's two front-rank machines—the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey and the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) in Culham—are both being upgraded with stronger magnets and more powerful heating systems. Soon they will switch on and heat hydrogen to temperatures much closer to those needed for generating fusion energy. If they perform well, then the next major tokamak to be built—a machine that would run in parallel with ITER and test technology for commercial reactors—will likely be a spherical tokamak.
…[/font][/font]
© CCFE
A plasma glows inside MAST, a spherical tokamak.
[font size=5]Feature: The new shape of fusion[/font]
By Daniel Clery
21 May 2015 2:00 pm
[font size=3]ITER, the international fusion reactor being built in France, will stand 10 stories tall, weigh three times as much as the Eiffel Tower, and cost its seven international partners $18 billion or more. The result of decades of planning, ITER will not produce fusion energy until 2027 at the earliest. And it will be decades before an ITER-like plant pumps electricity into the grid. Surely there is a quicker and cheaper route to fusion energy.
Fusion enthusiasts have a slew of schemes for achieving the starlike temperatures or crushing pressures needed to get hydrogen nuclei to come together in an energy-spawning union. Some are mainstream, such as lasers, some unorthodox. Yet the doughnut-shaped vessels called tokamaks, designed to cage a superheated plasma using magnetic fields, remain the leading fusion strategy and are the basis of ITER. Even among tokamaks, however, a nimbler alternative has emerged: a spherical tokamak.
Imagine the doughnut shape of a conventional tokamak plumped up into a shape more like a cored apple. That simple change, say the idea's advocates, could open the way to a fusion power plant that would match ITER's promise, without the massive scale. “The aim is to make tokamaks smaller, cheaper, and faster—to reduce the eventual cost of electricity,” says Ian Chapman, head of tokamak science at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Abingdon, U.K.
Culham is one of two labs about to give these portly tokamaks a major test. The world's two front-rank machines—the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey and the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) in Culham—are both being upgraded with stronger magnets and more powerful heating systems. Soon they will switch on and heat hydrogen to temperatures much closer to those needed for generating fusion energy. If they perform well, then the next major tokamak to be built—a machine that would run in parallel with ITER and test technology for commercial reactors—will likely be a spherical tokamak.
…[/font][/font]