Scientists and entrepreneurs have long made promises about fusion being just around the corner, only to encounter insurmountable problems. Having demonstrated that the Sparc device can theoretically produce more energy than it requires to run in the research papers published in September, the next step involves building the reactor, followed by a pilot plant that will generate electricity onto the grid. “What we’ve really done is combine an existing science with new material to open up vast new possibilities,” Greenwald said Through the use of cutting-edge, ultra-strong magnets, the team at MIT and Commonwealth Fusion hope to make a tokamak reactor that is compact, efficient and scalable. This would be far faster than existing major fusion power initiatives.Įxisting reactor designs are too large and expensive to realistically generate electricity for consumers. If their timeline goes as planned, the reactor, called Sparc, will be capable of producing electricity for the grid by 2030, according to researchers and company officials. MIT scientists and a spinoff company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, began designing the new reactor, which is more compact than its predecessors, in early 2018, and will start construction in the first half of next year. To work around this, scientists developed a donut-shaped chamber with a strong magnetic field running through it, called a tokamak, which suspends the plasma in place. Harnessing this form of nuclear power, though, has proven extremely difficult, requiring heating a soup of subatomic particles, called plasma, to hundreds of millions of degrees – far too hot for any material container to withstand. Fusion seems like one of the possible solutions to get ourselves out of our impending climate disaster Martin Greenwald Moreover, fusion produces no greenhouse gases or carbon, and unlike fission nuclear reactors, carries no risk of meltdown. Since it was first discovered last century, scientists have sought to harness fusion, an extremely dense form of power whose fuel – hydrogen isotopes – are abundant and replenishable. Nuclear fusion, the physical process that powers our sun, occurs when atoms are pushed together at extremely high temperatures and pressure, causing them to release tremendous amounts of energy by merging into heavier atoms. “Fusion seems like one of the possible solutions to get ourselves out of our impending climate disaster,” he said. Martin Greenwald, one of the project’s senior scientists, said a key motivation for the ambitious timeline is meeting energy requirements in a warming world. While the new reactor still remains in early development, scientists hope it will be able to start producing electricity by the end of the decade.
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