The Future of Fusion Energy
by Jason Parisi and Justin Ball · 18 Dec 2018 · 404pp · 107,356 words
just shy of breakeven at Q = 1.39 Figure 4.25:The increase in the tokamak fusion triple product (and the equivalent value of Q) was rapid [21], but has stalled since the early 2000s. ITER, the next big fusion experiment, is due to start preliminary operation around 2025 and should
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factor, governmental funding for fusion research, has been steadily decreasing (until recently). However, the most dramatic and obvious change is ITER, the topic of Chapter 7. ITER is an enormous tokamak currently under construction in the south of France. It is the next big thing for fusion. It has been conservatively designed
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. Typically, the way the world works only partially overlaps with the way we wish the world worked. For the above reasons, nearly all proposed tokamak power plant designs use superconducting coils, as do several current experiments. However, coil design involves other challenges apart from electrical resistivity. One of the
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highest melting point) and have sophisticated cooling systems that pump coolant at high velocities through channels that honeycomb the solid material. In the future, tokamaks may use more advanced divertor designs employing liquid metal or even a thick layer of neutral gas that shields the solid material. 5.5Tritium Breeding
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world was skeptical. They had learned from ZETA. Luckily, Thomson scattering was there to save the day and single-handedly convinced the world that tokamaks were the real deal. While Thomson scattering remains a workhorse of fusion devices, many more sophisticated diagnostics have been developed. Some can directly measure the
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. For this reason, all maintenance within the vacuum vessel will have to be accomplished remotely using sophisticated robotics. Given the precision and complexity of tokamak components, repairs would be challenging even if humans could do them directly. Not only does this motivate flexible and adept robotic maintenance systems, but
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the old materials, high-temperature superconductors can be built with joints, enabling them to be disassembled. This would revolutionize the maintenance schemes possible in a tokamak. Currently, components like the vacuum vessel must be cut into toroidal sections, so they can fit through the gaps between the toroidal field coils.
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The evolution of the cross-sectional plasma shape from T-3, one of the first tokamaks, to ITER, which is due for completion around 2025. Note that, after the construction of JET, tokamaks became overwhelmingly “D”-shaped. The tokamaks represented by the filled black silhouettes are no longer operating. RIP. Figure 6.11:
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itself (not at its center). 35As mentioned in Chapter 4, computation has also been crucial in optimizing stellarators. Chapter 7 The Present: ITER ITER is a huge tokamak and one of the most ambitious science experiments ever. It is expected to be the first device in human history to confine a plasma
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that generates more fusion power than the heating power needed to sustain it. ITER, alongside scientific megaprojects like the International Space Station and
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of fusion energy. While the goals and ideals of ITER are laudable, its implementation has been … complicated. In this chapter, we will discuss ITER’s goals, how it will achieve them, its cost, and where it might lead. Figure 7.1:The ITER tokamak. Note how big the device is compared to the
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person in the bottom left corner. Credit ©ITER Organization, http://www.iter.org 7.1ITER’s Goals ITER aims to be the link that connects existing experimental devices to the first
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engineering endeavor. It will test how well we understand magnetic confinement fusion and illuminate the behavior of large high-performance plasmas. If ITER is successful, a path to a demonstration tokamak power plant will be, for the most part, clear. The important physics would be largely settled, making power plant design
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primarily engineering and economics. However, if ITER fails, it may indicate that the scientific and technological basis of the tokamak is not sound. Thus, the
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stakes for ITER are high. To serve this purpose, ITER is designed to attain the following goals: (1)Achieve a plasma power
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multiplication factor of Q > 10 in 5 minute long pulses. ITER is designed to create deuterium–tritium plasmas
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external heating power needed to sustain it — let alone by a factor of 10! In order to do this, ITER must generate 500 MW of fusion power — thirty times more than any tokamak before it. Additionally, this plasma will be sustained for over 5 minutes — almost a hundred times longer than
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any other D–T plasma.3 Still, these pulses are short enough that ITER can rely entirely on inductive current drive to sustain
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the next two sections. 7.2ITER’s Strategy While we’ve just seen that ITER has lofty goals, it employs a fairly simple strategy to reach for them. The advantage ITER has over existing tokamaks is size. ITER’s performance is expected to be so awesome primarily due to how large it is
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. It dwarfs even the largest of present-day fusion experiments (see Figure 7.2). Figure 7.2:A comparison of ITER’s projected parameters against JET
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, the largest existing fusion experiment. Here are the numbers. The ITER site, including all of the supporting buildings, will cover almost a full square mile (i.e. 2 square kilometers). The tokamak itself will comprise over 18,000 tons of steel and machinery. The external coils used
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melt the surface of the wall. Several of these disruptions could put the tokamak out of action, requiring months to replace the damaged components. So, what will ITER do to avoid disruptions and reduce their severity? Well, first off, ITER will undoubtedly be operated very conservatively, especially during its early days. This
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United States, the Soviet Union, the European Union, and Japan officially signed the ITER agreement, with the aim of designing and building the next generation tokamak experiment. The original goals of ITER were even more ambitious than they are now. ITER would ignite, not merely achieve Q ≥ 10! Given that, at this time,
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promised, citing “concerns about the cost and schedule of ITER.”13 This, of course, only compounds ITER’s cost and schedule problems. On the flip side, there have been painful cuts to the US domestic program. In 2016, the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was shut down
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leaving the US with just two large tokamaks. The US was left
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with a weaker experimental tokamak program than the village of Culham in England.14 Figure 7.9:The first ITER toroidal field coil, which was completed in Italy in 2016. Credit ©ITER Organization, http://www.iter.org Nevertheless, the $25 billion price
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tag of ITER, since it is spread over half
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e.g. months). Moreover, because it operates continuously for so long, it must breed enough tritium to be self-sufficient. Even now, while ITER is still under construction, tokamak designers have been busy planning for DEMO. For the most part, each country is developing their own design with the plan to build
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Korea currently imports over 80% of its energy, one can understand the rush. Chapter 8 The Future: Designing a Tokamak Power Plant Designing a demonstration tokamak power plant, the next step after ITER, is a balancing act. As currently envisioned, it will depend critically on disciplines ranging from material science to electromagnetism,
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would enable smaller power plants with better economics. The potential benefits have been illustrated in a recent tokamak power plant design: the ARC reactor [31]. ARC suggests that high-temperature superconductors could enable ITER-like performance in a JET-sized device (i.e. a burning plasma in a device with one
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device. For all we know, the ultimate fusion power plant could well be a stellarator … or perhaps something more exotic. 9.1Stellarators Stellarators predate tokamaks. They were the brainchild of Lyman Spitzer, a visionary American physicist who founded fusion energy research in the United States.1 However, after the incredible
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different techniques to create the poloidal magnetic field (which is needed to neutralize the particle drifts and keep the toroidal plasma from destroying itself). The tokamak uses an electric current running through the plasma, while the stellarator uses external coils bent into funky shapes. Importantly, you can show mathematically that,
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on our understanding. Humans, with our puny little minds, have much more trouble thinking about the three-dimensional stellarator, compared to the two-dimensional tokamak. Stellarators are just intrinsically more difficult to analyze because the magnetic field is so much more complex. A second disadvantage of breaking toroidal symmetry is
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stellarator that began initial operation in Germany in late 2015. A third difficulty concerns magnetic surfaces, which are vital to achieving good plasma confinement. A tokamak, due to its toroidal symmetry, automatically has nice, nested magnetic surfaces. However, the funky coils of a stellarator can be designed to create all
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The big advantage of high-temperature superconductors is that they can allow very high magnetic fields, effectively removing the second limit. However, since spherical tokamaks have little space for structural support, it seems that the mechanical limit would be more constraining anyways, so high-temperature superconductors wouldn’t be as
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electricity to the grid by 2030 as overly optimistic, we agree with most of Tokamak Energy’s aims. Small tokamaks are desirable as they minimize construction time and cost, allowing you to iterate through design ideas more quickly. Spherical tokamaks definitely deserve further research. Moreover, it is important to develop high-temperature superconductors
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as they present a great opportunity for fusion.16 Lastly, finding clever ways to reduce the diameter of the donut hole, which is a significant challenge for Tokamak Energy,
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damage to permanent solid components. Unfortunately though, the liquid does not shield the central column of the toroidal field coils. Hence, like all spherical tokamaks it seems challenging to ensure their survival. You could always add dedicated neutron shielding, but this would make the device much bigger. Another option that
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if the compression happens quickly enough, this might be tolerable.19 The disadvantage is that they have significantly lower energy confinement times compared to spherical tokamaks. One potential problem with the liquid lithium-lead blanket is that it has enormous potential to contaminate the plasma. One of the most important
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compact D–T tokamak experiment called SPARC using high-temperature superconductors.30 SPARC is envisioned to generate 100 MW of fusion power for 10 seconds at a time and illuminate a path to a demonstration power plant. In essence, you can think of it as a less ambitious ITER. However, instead
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of us could remain for long. In 2012, faced with 10 or 15 years of substantial contributions to ITER, Congress decided to shutdown Alcator C-Mod, one of the three major national tokamaks. This decision, a consequence of dwindling domestic fusion budgets, directly resulted in both of us relocating and many
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of our colleagues leaving the field. This was tragic and symptomatic of a broader trend. Since the 1980s, the epicenter of fusion research has been gradually moving east. The siting of ITER
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in France embodies the near-term dominance of the European program. Despite setbacks, ITER is steadily progressing toward its goal of demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of a tokamak fusion power plant. It’s really hard to overstate its
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importance. The success of ITER would be a milestone of human civilization and could trigger a worldwide race to a demonstration power plant. On the other
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. South Korea already has a date in mind for its own power plant, K-DEMO. China is planning a new domestic tokamak that will be even larger than ITER. Moreover, JT-60U in Japan already holds the record for best plasma performance and will soon be replaced with the even more
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, 28 Solar System, 17, 348 energy flows, 15 space capsules see divertor, 160 space colonization, 349 SPARC, 301 spent fuel current world production, 334 spherical tokamaks, 281 spheromak, 114, 287 Spitzer, Lyman, 113, 180, 263 ST40, 278 Stalin, Joseph, 187 stars, 175 possible fusion reactions, 178 red giant phase,
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, 324 thermotron, 180 Thor, 110 Thomson scattering, 166 thorium, 321 Three Mile Island, 24 tidal, 16, 41 TNT, 304 toast making of, 7 tokamak, 113 Tokamak Energy Ltd., 281 Tore Supra, 141 toroidal torus terminology, 110 toroidal field, 140 toroidal field coils, 198 toroidal symmetry, 264 torsatron, 114 torus, 104
The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet
by Arthur Turrell · 2 Aug 2021 · 297pp · 84,447 words
cash to this scaled-down, simplified approach—though of course no fusion device is without vast complexity. One such efficiency-emphasizing operation is Tokamak Energy. Although Tokamak Energy’s scientists and engineers are following the lead of Culham in using magnets to trap the stuff of stars, they believe their machine
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Hawking, 20101 The star builders we’ve met—Dr. Mark Herrmann at NIF, Professor Ian Chapman at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Jonathan Carling at Tokamak Energy, Dr. Nick Hawker at First Light Fusion, and Professor Sibylle Günter at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics—have many motivations, but
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include building cross-continental power transmitters or smoothing out the uneven supply of electricity using enormous batteries. Unfortunately, those big batteries don’t yet exist. Tokamak Energy CEO Jonathan Carling is skeptical that batteries will ever do the job. “You can have a battery that extends the day a bit,”
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one every half hour. Although JET is less prone to instability than some other designs, there is still a whole menagerie of instabilities just in tokamaks: edge-localized modes, sawtooth oscillations, tearing modes, ballooning modes. And then there are the insidious ways that particles, and their energy, try to escape
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reactor structure, misshaping it and ruining its confining properties. Disruptions are bad news. Fernanda says that predicting disruptions is a big physics challenge facing tokamaks. One large disruption could terminally damage the reactor. Lorne Horton told me that industrial partners who might actually build a fusion reactor are adamant that
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,200 degrees Fahrenheit), while beryllium melts at a comparatively chilly 1,287 degrees Celsius (approximately 2,350 degrees Fahreneheit). A Q greater than one tokamak would see the part of the wall specifically designed to take the biggest pounding, the divertor, exposed to a heat load equivalent to that of
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combinations of temperature, density, and confinement time that would make fusion work. Lawson’s equation says that star power on Earth will work. A tokamak that could reach temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), densities of more than 10,000 billion particles in each
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perpetuity. More important for fusion on Earth, using Lawson’s equation, star builders know exactly what they have to aim for in their star machines. Tokamaks use high temperatures, with plasma confinement times measured in seconds, perhaps eventually in hours, thanks to using magnetic fields. But Lawson’s equation also
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talent will be required—those who can convert scientific ideas into working technologies. Enter the engineers. Engineers like Nick Hawker and Jonathan Carling, CEO of Tokamak Energy. The latter told me that “things like the steam engine and internal combustion engine were invented long before anyone understood how they worked.
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is needed for the same amount of confinement. It also creates a more compact machine, which—given the increasing sizes of each generation of tokamaks and their high costs—would make magnetic fusion power more economical. David enthusiastically explains that there’s a lot of academic work showing that spherical
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million degrees while, a meter away, there is a superconducting magnet at 20 degrees above absolute zero. Magnetic fields provide most of the confinement in tokamaks: the stronger the better. The fusion energy ramps up aggressively, so that an increase in the magnetic field by a factor of two means
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is preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The other star builders felt the same: “Fusion is far, far lower risk [than fission],” CEO of Tokamak Energy Jonathan Carling said, “because it doesn’t involve any fissile material like uranium or plutonium.” There’s no need to have any materials at
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, scientific director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, told me. Sibylle’s list of the breakthroughs begins with the Russian T-3 tokamak that appeared on the international scene in 1969 and completely changed the direction of magnetic fusion research. She also talks about a discovery at her
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. It took them twenty-two years of planning, arguing, design, and preparation to agree to build the new machine: ITER. When it is completed, ITER will be the world’s largest tokamak, and one of its key objectives will be to demonstrate net energy gain. It’s a behemoth. Much of it
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volume usually means more stability. Instead of having a three-meter-radius torus, ITER will have one that is more than six meters. ITER’s engineering is more complex than that of any other machine yet built. The tokamak’s superconducting magnets will need to be formed from one hundred thousand kilometers (
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Most are promising to get to net energy gain (or, at least, net energy gain conditions) in the 2020s or early 2030s—well before ITER. General Fusion and Tokamak Energy see it happening by 2022, Lockheed Martin by the 2020s (revised from 2017), First Light Fusion by within the 2020s, and TAE
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bottom,” Chapman continues. This is the divertor, a part of the tokamak designed to take a beating that’s more intense than what the space shuttle receives during reentry. The bigger the tokamak, the more intense the heat. ITER is designed right at the physical limit of what solid materials in conventional
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tokamaks can endure. For inertial confinement fusion, the geometry of the reactor is much more simple
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s quite another to achieve them together in a working, high-gain fusion reactor. The magnetic fusion star builders are already planning to build another tokamak after ITER that will overcome the final barriers to commercialization and act as a demonstration power plant. This will deliver energy to the grid, and all
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Internal Constitution of the Stars,” Observatory 43 (1920): 341–58. 2. I. T. Chapman, “Modelling the Stability of the N=1 Internal Kink Mode in Tokamak Plasmas” (Imperial College London, 2008). 3. “The Joint European Torus Is Going Out with a Bang,” Science Business (2019), https://sciencebusiness.net/news/joint-
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. 9. J. D. Hunter, “Matplotlib: A 2D Graphics Environment,” Computing in Science & Engineering 9 (2007): 90–95. 10. J. Wesson and D.J. Campbell, Tokamaks, vol. 149 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 11. F. Chen, An Indispensable Truth: How Fusion Power Can Save the Planet (London: Springer Science + Business Media
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General Fusion (2018), https://generalfusion.com/2018/11/timing-everything-pushing-fusion-forward-pistons-cutting-edge-electronics/; M. Laberge, “Magnetized Target Fusion with a Spherical Tokamak,” Journal of Fusion Energy 38 (2019): 199–203; B. Borzykowski, “Why Bezos and Microsoft Are Betting on This $10 Trillion Energy Fix for the
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Plasma Discharges,” Nuclear Fusion 44 (2004): L11–L15; X. Gong et al., “Integrated Operation of Steady-State Long-Pulse H-Mode in Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak,” Nuclear Fusion 59 (2019): 086030; Phys Org, “Korean Artificial Sun sets the New World Record of 20-Sec-Long Operation at 100 Million Degrees” (
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Delage, et al., “Acoustically Driven Magnetized Target Fusion at General Fusion: An Overview,” Bulletin of the American Physical Society 61 (2016); D. Clery, “Alternatives to Tokamaks: A Faster-Better-Cheaper Route to Fusion Energy?,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences 377 (2019): 20170431; R. Mumgard
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Commonwealth Fusion Systems, 2018). 9. J. Wesson and D. J. Campbell, Tokamaks, vol. 149 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 10. M. Claessens, ITER: The Giant Fusion Reactor: Bringing a Sun to Earth (London: Springer Nature, 2019). 11. “ITER FAQ” (2020), http://www.iter.org/faq; E. Cartlidge, “Fusion Energy Pushed Back Beyond 2050,” BBC
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Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 377 (2019): 20170436; T. Tanabe et al., “Tritium Retention of Plasma Facing Components in Tokamaks,” Journal of Nuclear Materials 313 (2003): 478–90. 22. I. T. Chapman and A. Morris, “UKAEA Capabilities to Address the Challenges on the Path
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word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function. acute radiation syndrome, 163 Alfvén, Hannes, 66 Allen, Paul, 12, 147 Artsimovich, Lev, 209 ASDEX tokamak, Garching, Germany, 184–85 Aston, Francis, 56–57 atomic bombs, 8, 54, 165, 166 atomic energy, 53–61 deuterium-tritium fusion reactions and, 55–
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172, 181 Chevron, 12 China fusion funding and new projects in, 14, 192–93, 204 fusion plans in, 192–93 inertial confinement fusion in, 14 ITER tokamak, Cadarache, France, and, 186–87 net energy gain goal and, 192–93 Shenguang III megajoule laser in, 14, 193
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. See Joint European Torus (JET) reactor magnetic confinement fusion at, 24 radiation risk from fusion fuel at, 175–76 robotics technology at, 106, 212 spherical tokamak used by, 157, 196 Culham Science Centre, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, 87–88 Curie, Marie, 171 Daly, Nicola, 13 death stars. See end of life
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energy released in, 55–56, 58–59 energy security and access to, 43 First Light Fusion’s use of, 63, 190 Herrmann on, 55–56 ITER tokamak, Cadarache, France, and, 186–87 neutrons in, 51–52, 55, 57–58 NIF’s use of, 62–63 number of years left for supplies
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of, 63 Didcot Power Station, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, 139 Dinan, Richard, 13, 144 Dyson, Freeman, 82–83, 214 Dyson spheres, 83 Eagle Nebula, 74 EAST tokamak, China, 14, 184, 193 Eddington, Arthur, 15, 49, 56–57, 71, 84 EDF Energy, 174 Einstein, Albert, 57–59, 62 electricity. See also energy
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Etzler, John Adolphus, 46 Euratom, 106–7 Eurofusion, 193 European Environment Agency, 176 European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 52, 66, 202 European Union (EU) ITER tokamak, Cadarache, France, and, 186–87 JET project by, 88 Wendelstein 7-X stellarator and, 156 exajoule, as energy measurement, 30 Extinction Rebellion movement, 28 Fermi
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, 210 reasons for dominance of, 31 France fission power in, 39–40 fusion funding by, 14 international agreement for ITER tokamak, Cadarache, 186–88, 191 Laser MegaJoule in, 14, 192 nuclear waste in, 174 tokamaks in, 184 Fritts, Charles, 46, 47 Fukushima nuclear accident (2011), Japan, 40, 168, 172, 181, 182 funding.
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See also financial backers British government and, 13, 157, 202 crowdfunding used for, 150 General Fusion and, 145 LPP Fusion and, 150 Tokamak Energy and, 139, 154 US government and, 13, 203, 204 fusion. See also inertial confinement fusion; magnetic confinement fusion; nuclear fusion two practical approaches to
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, 13 Goldman Sachs, 12, 13–14, 147 Google, 147 government laboratories. See also specific laboratories MagLIF (magnetized liner inertial fusion) and, 157–58 spherical tokamaks and, 156–57 star builders’ support for efforts of, 160 stellarator designs and, 154–56 governments, and net zero carbon emission goal and, 28, 199
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214 radiation exposure from, 163, 174 Teller’s idea of using to generate electricity, 115–16 HyperJet Fusion Corporation, 143 ignition definition of, 9 EAST tokamak in China and, 193 hotspot ignition, 124 increased temperature and fusion reactions for, 92 JET and, 92 Lawson’s theory and equations on conditions for
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on Climate Change (IPCC), 33–34, 36, 45 International Atomic Energy Agency, 14 International Energy Agency, 205, 206 International Space Station, 202 IPSOS poll, 40 ITER tokamak, Cadarache, France, 186–88, 193, 194, 197, 201 breeding tritium and, 196 construction delays in, 187–88 cost of, 202, 203–4 design of
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international satellite sites for, 187 net energy gain goal and, 191 plasma Q goal of, 188 Japan atomic bombings (1945) in, 154 ITER tokamak, Cadarache, France, and, 186–87 JT-60 tokamak in, 185 Jernigan, Tammy, 78 Joint European Torus (JET) reactor building and shared management of, 88–89, 106–7 confinement of
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of, 186 progress in, 185, 186 Teller’s opinion of, 115 zero meltdown possibility in, 168, 169 magnetic fields plasma confinement with, 95–102, 110 tokamaks with, 141 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, 140–41 magnetized liner inertial fusion (MagLIF), 157–58, 190 MAGPIE plasma machine, 127 Maiman, Theodore, 117
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Mars, spacecraft for exploration of, 215 MAST Upgrade spherical tokamak, 157, 196 Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, 24–25, 66, 67, 154–56, 184–85 megajoule lasers, 14, 192, 193 Merkel, Angela, 13,
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, 214 Proton Scientific, 143 public-private partnerships, 13, 159–60 Pulsar Fusion, 143, 144 Q measure commercial energy production and, 142–43 definition of, 92 ITER tokamak and, 188 JET reactor using, 92, 100, 105, 107–8, 183–84 types of, 92 quenching, 141 Rabi, Isidor, 161 radiation exposure, in hydrogen
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42, 106, 119, 212 Rose, Steve, 131 Rosenbluth, Marshall, 11 Russia fusion funding by, 13, 14 ITER tokamak, Cadarache, France, and, 186–87 laser fusion facility in, 192 net energy gain goal and, 192 T-3 tokamak in, 184 Rutherford, Ernest, 49–51, 52–55, 173 atom model developed by, 50–51, 52
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smashing and, 62, 63 splitting lithium atoms to produce energy experiment by, 53–54 Sandia National Laboratory, New Mexico, 157–59, 190 sawtooth instability, in tokamaks, 103–4 Shenguang III megajoule laser, China, 14, 193 Siemens, Werner von, 133 Sierra supercomputer, 189 simulations, 10, 23, 185, 188 solar power. See
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and superconductivity and, 155 strong force, and energy release in nuclear reactions, 60–61, 96 superconducting, 206 MRI machines with, 140–41 quenching and, 141 tokamak design with, 140, 142, 184, 187 Wendelstein 7-X stellarator with, 155 Suratwala, Tayyab, 118–19 TAE Life Sciences, 147–48 TAE Technologies, 24,
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104–6 mix of temperature, density, and confinement in, 185–86 Soviet design of, 100, 102 spectroscopy for checking conditions in, 104–5 Tore Supra tokamak, 184 toroidal pinch machine, 97–100, 102 tritium attempts at breeding, 195–96, 197 energy security and access to, 43 fusion using, 51. See
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Authority (UKAEA), 88–89 UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, 54 UK Committee on Climate Change, 37–38 United States Green New Deal proposal in, 28 ITER tokamak, Cadarache, France, and, 186–87 US Department of Energy, 20, 144, 189, 191, 205 US Energy Information Administration, 30, 206n uranium, 44, 166–67
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tidal power weak force, and energy release in nuclear reactions, 60, 96 Wendelstein 7-X (W7X) stellarator, 24–25, 154–56, 185–86, 193 WEST tokamak, France, 184 Whyte, Dennis, 46 Wilson, Howard, 67 Wilson, Taylor, 12 wind power. See also renewable energy carbon dioxide emissions and, 42 climate change
The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin · 30 Apr 2019 · 452pp · 126,310 words
programs did advance forcefully between 1960 and 1990, the decision to consolidate all of them into a unified global effort to build the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) has caused nearly all progress to screech to a halt since the 1990s. Lack of funding and drive, not any insuperable technical barrier, has
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stars.) Because the particles of plasma are electrically charged, their motion can be affected by magnetic fields. Thus, various kinds of magnetic traps (such as tokamaks, stellarators, and magnetic mirrors) have been designed that can contain fusion plasmas without ever letting them touch the chamber wall. At least, that is how
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the decision to consolidate them all into a single global project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), removed all stimulus for action. Indeed, it took nearly a quarter century for the bureaucrats in charge of ITER to manage to reach a consensus in 2010 on where to put it, and it will
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investors suddenly became interested. I worked at Los Alamos in 1985 as a graduate student intern on a then-novel fusion concept called the spherical tokamak (ST). I can remember one lunch when our group leader, Robert Krakowski, philosophically told the rest of us, “You know, when fusion power is finally
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’round the world, a whole raft of innovative private fusion power start-ups are getting funded. Here's a bit about some of them. 1. Tokamak Energy. This Oxfordshire, England, venture, started in 2009 by former Culham Laboratory staffers Jonathan Carling, David Kingham, and Michael Graznevitch, has raised $50 million of
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mostly private money to try to develop the ST (the same concept that I worked on in the 1980s, which was too innovative for ITER to adopt) into a commercial reactor. In a magnetic confinement fusion reactor, the amount of power that can be generated rises in proportion to β2B4
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, where β is the ratio of the plasma pressure to the magnetic pressure, and B is the magnetic field strength. An ordinary tokamak like ITER can only achieve a β of about 0.12, but an ST can achieve a β of 0.4. As a result, an ST
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a machine less than one-tenth the size and cost. Figure 6.3. ITER under construction (left); Tokamak Energy's Spherical Tokamak (right). Image courtesy of ITER and Tokamak Energy; reproduced by permission, © 2018 by Tokamak Energy Ltd. 2. Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Founded in 2018, this MIT-based venture has raised $75 million so far, including
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goes back to the 1980s, when the very creative maverick MIT physicist Bruno Coppi proposed achieving fusion in a very small tokamak by the simple expedient of using ultrastrong magnetic fields. Tokamaks are toroidal chambers with a magnetic field running the long way around the doughnut. The magnetic field lines confine particles
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chamber, with the radius of the spirals being inversely proportional to the strength of the magnetic field. Coppi reasoned that the relevant dimension of a tokamak was not its size per se but the ratio of its size to the radius of the spiral, because it is this ratio that determines
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been built, we probably would have achieved thermonuclear fusion ignition in the 1990s. But all of the US Department of Energy funds were committed to ITER, so Ignitor was never built. However, starting around 2014, an MIT group led by Professor Dennis Whyte decided to pick up where Coppi had left
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-temperature superconductor magnets, which require no electric power and can reach twelve tesla. As a result, with more than twice the magnetic field strength as ITER, the CFS reactor, known as SPARC (for Smallest Possible Affordable Robust Compact) fusion reactor, will achieve one-fifth the power hoped for by
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a reactor a sixty-fifth the volume. Furthermore, CFS aims to do it by 2025, achieving in seven years what ITER hopes to do in half a century. 3. Tri Alpha Energy. Founded in 1998 by the late Dr. Norman Rostoker, southern California-based TAE recently
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New Enterprise Associates, and Venrock. TAE's departure from orthodoxy is more radical than the abovementioned start-up in that they do not use a tokamak or toroidal chamber of any kind. Instead, TAE uses a simple cylinder chamber, with the required toroidal magnetic field induced in the plasma itself by
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more promising for creating low-cost commercial systems or fusion rocket drives than tokamaks. But by the 1980s, tokamaks had crowded out all funding within the US fusion budget, and shortly afterward, even the US tokamaks were starved for funds to feed ITER. FRCs were far too avant-garde to even be considered by
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ITER. But private investors are much more daring than international bureaucrats, and TAE is pushing hard, with a goal
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megawatts. Human civilization today uses about 23 TW. TW-year: The total amount of energy associated with the use of one terawatt for one year. tokamak: An experimental fusion power machine employing a toroidal magnetic field and vacuum chamber to confine a high-temperature plasma. W/kg: watts per kilogram. vapor
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antimatter systems, 194–95 laser fusion, plate 11, 190 potential of use of in outer solar system, 172, 173–74 SPARC fusion reactor, 177 spherical tokamak, 175–76 stars as engines of nuclear fusion, 237 proton-proton fusion that powers the sun, 201–202, 237–38 thermonuclear fusion reactors, 73, 160
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; life, search for International Astronautical Congress (IAC), 107, 110 International Space Station (ISS), 45, 47, 51, 132, 329, 330 International Space University, 29 International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) (Tokamak complex), 83–84, 175, 176, 176, 177, 178 Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) (SpaceX), plate 7, 107–10 Mini BFR, 110–12, 339 See also
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, 193–94, 296, 297, 341, 344 ISPP (in situ propellant production), 341, 342 ISS (International Space Station), 45, 47, 51, 132, 329, 330 ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) (Tokamak complex), 83–84, 175, 176, 176, 177, 178 Itokawa (asteroid), 130 ITS. See Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) (SpaceX) Janhunen, Pekka, 204 Japan Aerospace
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, 193, 194 and fusion, 85–86, 159, 160, 176, 178, 179, 180, 188, 344 laser fusion, plate 11, 190 thermonuclear fusion, 190–91 See also tokamaks plasma sail systems, 204–206, 210 and sail devices, 203, 204, 205, 206, 210, 342 Plasma Physics Fusion, 180 platinum group metals, 137–39, 138
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, Elon SPARC (Smallest Possible Affordable Robust Compact) fusion reactor, 177 specific impulse (Isp), 45, 143, 160–61, 163, 193–94, 296, 297, 341, 344 spherical tokamak (ST), 175–76, 176, 180 “spheromak,” 180 spin-offs from space program, 284–86 STEM graduates in US (1960–1990), 285–86, 285 Spire Lemur
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-2 CubeSats, plate 4 Spirit rover (NASA), 106 SPS (solar power satellites), 34, 57–60 Sridhar, K. R., 147 SR-71 (Boeing), 277 ST (spherical tokamak), 175–76, 176, 180 Stapledon, Olaf, 238 Starlink (SpaceX), 53 Star Maker (Stapeldon), 238 stars, travel to. See interstellar travel Starship (rocket) (SpaceX), 11, 12
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, Johann Daniel, 125 Tito, Dennis, 33 TLI (translunar injection), 107, 110, 111 TMI (Trans-Mars injection), 77, 344 Tokamak Energy, 175–76, 176 tokamaks, 84, 344 defined, 176–77 spherical tokamak, 175–76, 176 spherical tokamak (ST), 180 See also fusion, entrepreneurial fusion revolution Tombaugh, Clyde W., 152 Toutatis (near-Earth object), 129 Transcontinental
Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking
by Charles Seife · 27 Oct 2009 · 356pp · 95,647 words
to induce magnetic fields, earning it the cumbersome name toroidalnaya kamera ee magnitnaya katushka (toroidal chamber with magnetic coil). It was called the tokamak for short. But the tokamak was a bottle with a difference. Whereas the Stellarator used external magnetic fields to contain the plasma and the pinch machines used internal
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electric currents to squash it, the tokamak did both. The tokamak has multiple sets of coils. One group of coils sets up a magnetic field that constrains and stiffens the plasma; it’s an
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external magnetic bottle, somewhat similar to the Stellarator’s, although not quite as sturdy. What gives the tokamak an extra bit of oomph is another set of coils that pinches the plasma. When scientists send a current through those coils, it induces a
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, a Stellarator can either have no plasma current or have one in either direction and still, theoretically, be stable. Unfortunately, the current in a tokamak’s plasma is just one more thing that can fail. If an instability causes the current to drop momentarily, things get very bad very quickly
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particularly the physicist Lev Artsimovich, took Sakharov’s design and put it to the test. By the mid-1960s, he was reporting spectacular results. His tokamak was confining a plasma at a given temperature and density ten times longer than could any other machine. Though confinement times were still on the
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order of milliseconds, Artsimovich’s results, if they were to be believed, indicated that Sakharov’s tokamak was blowing its competition away. When Spitzer and the Americans first heard the Russian claims, they were skeptical, in part owing to American arrogance. The
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universal problem with magnetic confinement. If they weren’t succeeding, nobody was. The Americans were dubious that the Russians could do much better with their tokamak. Furthermore, Artsimovich’s measurements of the temperature of the plasma were rather crude. American scientists were relatively quick to disbelieve them. In the mid-1960s
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, Spitzer’s skepticism led him to conclude that tokamak performance was roughly the same as the Stellarator’s—underwhelming. This conclusion was bad news for American fusion research. The enthusiasm of the 1950s had
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of taxpayer money. The space race had officially begun. Fusion energy was no longer in the spotlight, and its budget stagnated, then dwindled. The tokamak had to come to the rescue, but it would be several years before American and British scientists would accept that the Russian achievements were real
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of data; Artsimovich continued presenting better and better results—dense plasmas heated to tens of millions of degrees and confined for handfuls of milliseconds. The tokamak results were still far from those needed for a realistic source of fusion energy, but they were certainly an order of magnitude better than anyone
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being thirty years away. After decades of research, the goal of fusion energy had become ten years more distant. As fusion scientists built ever-bigger tokamaks and lasers for tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, outsiders began to wonder whether there was another cheaper, easier path to fusion energy.
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were able to get higher temperatures and densities in their plasmas, and to hold them for longer times. Physicists were confident that the new, large tokamaks being built would achieve breakeven, and perhaps go beyond. So were politicians. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed into law an act that promised
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known as “ignition and sustained burn.” Unlike laser fusion devices, which have to create individual bursts of fusion energy, a magnetic fusion device like a tokamak can, in theory, run nonstop, producing continuous energy. Once scientists are able to get their magnetic bottles strong enough, they will be able to exploit
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this and keep a fusion reaction running indefinitely. The fusion reactions in the belly of the tokamak should suffice to keep the plasma hot, so after they get it started, the reaction will essentially run itself. All the scientists have to
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of glorious experiments planned in the 1970s began to crumble under increasing financial pressure. As magnetic fusion budgets dwindled, researchers struggled to save their precious tokamaks from the budget ax. A huge magnetic-mirror project that had already swallowed more than $300 million was scrapped just as it finished its eight
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of reach. There was no way, with budgets as they were, that fusion scientists could ever hope to build a magnetic fusion reactor. A tokamak big enough and powerful enough to keep a plasma burning indefinitely would cost billions, and America’s fusion budget could never withstand that sort of
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strain. The story was little different overseas. No single nation could afford to build a tokamak that could achieve breakeven and sustained burn. Perhaps, though, by pooling their resources and joining together in one great effort, fusion scientists around the
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effort to build a fusion reactor. Reagan jumped at the chance, as did France and Japan. Together, the four countries would build an enormous tokamak that would finally achieve ignition and sustained burn. For the first time, humans would be able to harness the power of the sun for peaceful
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$10 billion. The four parties, working together, could cough up the money, but ITER would devour the fusion budgets of all the participating countries.63 Even the big tokamaks—TFTR, JET, JT-60—would not survive. Once the ITER project was under way, there would be no room in the budget for anything
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else. This was a big problem. Princeton scientists did not want their facility to disappear. Other fusion researchers, especially those who thought that non-tokamak machines were still worth exploring, were
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office assistant swiveled about behind a large ring-shaped desk. A circular sofa surrounded a donut-shaped model of the TFTR. Other models of ringlike tokamaks were displayed in the waiting room. Even the auditorium was semicircular. And of course, the heart of the whole facility was the donut-shaped
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the container beyond. Since a deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction produces lots of high-energy neutrons (one for every two fusions), the walls of a tokamak reactor are bombarded with zillions of the particles every moment it runs.66 Neutrons are nasty little critters. They are hard to stop: they whiz
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do damage. They knock atoms about. They introduce impurities. A metal irradiated by neutrons becomes brittle and weak. That means the metal walls of the tokamak become susceptible to fracture before too long. Every few years, the entire reactor vessel, the entire metal donut surrounding the plasma, has to be
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sometimes stick, making the nucleus unstable. The longer a substance is exposed to neutrons, the “hotter” it gets with radioactivity. By the time a tokamak’s walls need to be replaced, they are quite hot indeed. Though fusion scientists portray fusion energy as cleaner than fission, a fusion power plant
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Union and the United States, the four parties, together, agreed to pool their resources to build an enormous tokamak. It was to be the most ambitious international scientific project ever attempted. Not only was ITER supposed to achieve breakeven; it was supposed to attain ignition and sustained burn. In theory, after the
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ones like “spheromaks”) might lead to a working reactor faster than a tokamak would. In their view, cutting off research for these alternatives was shortsighted and premature. The tokamak shouldn’t be the only game in town. Thus, they were against ITER. They didn’t want to wager everything on a single enormous
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tokamak. Moreover, they weren’t alone in their wariness of the international reactor. Even
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tokamak physicists felt threatened, because the domestic fusion program would have to be gutted in
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favor of the enormous international collaboration. The already stretched budgets would have to accommodate ITER. Congress would not provide additional funds for more big domestic experiments
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one big machine in the world, and it would likely be overseas. Thus, by the mid-1990s, ITER had a large number of opponents: non-tokamak fusion scientists who resented the single-minded concentration on tokamaks, tokamak physicists who were afraid of having the domestic fusion program shipped overseas, and most important of all
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nothing beyond the core program of theory and medium-scale experiments ... no contribution to an international ignition experiment or materials test facility, no [new domestic tokamak], little exploitation of the remaining scientific potential of TFTR, and little sense of progress toward a fusion energy goal. With complete U.S. withdrawal, international
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noted angrily that “after ten years and a U.S. contribution of $345 million, the partnership has yet to select a site” for ITER, and slashed all funding for the project. (They even questioned whether a tokamak was the best way to achieve fusion energy.) In July, the United States allowed the
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ITER agreement to expire, refusing to sign an extension that the other parties had signed; in October, the U.S. pulled its scientists out
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hope of a great leap toward fusion energy. And without the United States, even a drastically reduced ITER would be decades away. In the meantime, fusion scientists had to make do with their increasingly obsolete tokamaks. They did their best to put a positive spin on a bad situation. Even as the
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original plans for ITER were dying, European and Japanese researchers finally claimed they had achieved the long-sought-after goal
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a mixture of deuterium and tritium as the fuel rather than pure deuterium. JT-60’s “breakeven plasma conditions” did not really mean that the tokamak had reached breakeven. Instead, the JT-60 had reached pressures, temperatures, and confinement times that, according to calculations, would mean breakeven if researchers had
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,” it was still consuming much more energy than it produced. So much for Japan’s claim. What about Europe’s? JET, the big European tokamak, actually used deuterium-tritium mixtures in attempts to achieve breakeven. In September 1997, scientists loaded up a such a mixture into the reactor, heated it
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breakeven; JET was losing energy, not making it. National magnetic fusion programs are unable to achieve breakeven, let alone ignition and sustained burn. The national tokamaks like JET and JT-60 are reduced to setting lesser records: the highest temperature, the longest confinement, the highest pressure. However, these records are all
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fusion program, in the meantime, was in ruins. There was no big domestic tokamak, just a few lesser ones in Boston and in San Diego. The big domestic tokamak, TFTR, had been shut down in 1997 to make room for ITER. Princeton, once home of the $100 million giants, was reduced to working
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on a tiny, $25 million spherical torus. Plans existed for larger machines, such as billion-dollar tokamaks, but they were just dreams; there was no chance they would
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bottled in a magnetic jar—would liberate mankind from the fear of global warming and from the impending energy crisis. If ITER fails, it will probably mean the end of tokamaks. The likelihood of using magnets to confine and heat a plasma would seem slimmer than ever. However, there’s no
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reason to assume that ITER, like generations of machines before it, will be a disappointment. If nothing goes wrong, ITER will begin experiments in 2018 or
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1949. Dean, Steven O. “Fifty Years of U.S. Fusion Research—An Overview of Programs.” Nuclear News, July 2002, 34-40. ———. “Status and Objectives of Tokamak Systems for Fusion Research.” Journal of Fusion Energy 17, no. 4 (1998): 289-337. ———. “The Decision L Is Yes.” 6 February 1950. Dibble, Timothy, Saibal
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, Brien Maddox, John magnetic fields magnetic fusion budgets for cleanliness of ignition and sustained burn in international collaboration in pinch machines, see pinch machines Stellarator tokamaks, see tokamaks magnetic mirror magnetohydrodynamics Mallove, Eugene Manhattan Project n Manley, John Mao Tse-tung Mark, Carsonn Marx, Karl Mascheroni, Leo Maxwell, James Clerk Mendeleev,
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Hugo Rusk, Dean Russia: International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and see also Soviet Union Rutherford, Ernest Sakharov, Andrein n lasers and sloika design of Teller and tokamak designed by Salamon, Michael Saltmarsh, Michael Sandia Natural Laboratories sausage instability science Science Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship program science journalism, embargo system in Scientific American
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Test Ban Treaty with nuclear weapons moratorium in Program No.in Sputnik launched by Star Wars program and n ZETA and space programn Spitzer, Lyman tokamak and stability: atoms’ desire for see also instabilities stars equilibrium in fusion in pulsars supernovas see also sun Star Wars programn Stellarator stimulated emissions stockpile
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Test Reactor) thermodynamics, laws of thermotron Thirring, Hans Thomson, J. J. Thomson, William, Lord Kelvin thorium Timen tokamaks ignition and sustained burn in ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) JET (Joint European Torus) JT- TFTR (Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor) tritiumn n n bubble fusion and National Ignition Facility and tritium-deuterium reactions Truman, Harry
Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future
by Alan Weisman · 21 Apr 2025 · 599pp · 149,014 words
on a design conceived in 1950 by future Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, who also developed hydrogen bombs for the Soviet Union. Its name, tokamak, was a Russian acronym meaning “ring-shaped chamber with magnetic coils.” The idea is straightforward: Fill the doughnut with hydrogen gas, then heat it until
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it turns to electrically charged plasma. In this ionic state, plasma would be held in place by magnets positioned around the tokamak. To achieve fusion on Earth without the immense pressure of a star’s interior, scientists calculated, would require temperatures nearly 10 times hotter than our
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walls could cause destabilizing turbulence. But the concept was so tantalizing that by the mid-1980s, 75 universities and governmental institutes around the world had tokamaks. If anyone could get fusion—the most energy-dense reaction in the universe—to work, the deuterium in a liter of seawater could power one
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European Union, South Korea, and Russia—agreed to jointly build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor: a $40 billion giant tokamak in southern France. Standing 100 feet tall on a 180-acre site, ITER (Latin for “journey”) is equipped with 18 magnets weighing 360 tons apiece, made from the best superconductors then available
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. If it works, ITER will produce 500 megawatts of electricity—but not before 2035, if then. It’s still under construction. The second obstacle is the biggest: many tokamaks have briefly achieved fusion, but doing so always took more energy than they
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produced. In 2022, instead of using a tokamak, the US’s National Ignition Facility at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory aimed 192 laser beams in an array the size of three football
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another furnace like Venus. Although several experiments around the world were trying variations on the laser technique, most physicists, Dennis Whyte included, considered the simpler tokamak’s design far more likely to provide that. Among other reasons, its plasma’s density was one ten-billionth of the gold-capsuled laser fuel
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—far easier and less energy-intensive to produce. After earning his doctorate in 1992, Whyte worked on an ITER prototype at San Diego’s National Fusion Facility, taught at the University of Wisconsin, and in 2006 was hired by MIT. By then, he understood
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of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Whyte came to work, had originally housed the National Biscuit Company. PSFC’s sixth tokamak, Alcator C-Mod, built in 1991, was housed in Nabisco’s old Oreo cookie factory. Just as copper wire wrapped around a nail and connected
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finally decommissioned, C-Mod’s magnetic fields, 160,000 times stronger than Earth’s, set the world record for the highest plasma pressure in a tokamak. As Ohm’s law describes, however, metals like copper have internal resistance, so it could run for only four seconds before overheating—and needed more
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energy to ignite its fusion reactions than what came out of it. Like the now 160 similar tokamaks around the world, C-Mod was an interesting science experiment that mainly reinforced the joke that fusion energy was 20 years away, and always would
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, Whyte had challenged Ph.D. students in his fusion design classes to conjure something just as compact as C-Mod, one-800th the scale of ITER, that could achieve and sustain fusion—with an energy gain. But in 2013, as he neared 50, he increasingly had doubts. He’d devoted his
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23-year-olds. He saw fewer and fewer interested in fusion. “It’s uncertain what they can accomplish,” he told his wife. “By the time ITER finally comes around, they’d be nearing retirement.” Either he would quit fusion and do something else, Whyte decided, or try something different to get
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them there faster. There was a new generation of ceramic “high-temperature superconductors,” not available when ITER’s huge magnets were being wrapped in metallic superconducting cable, which has to be chilled to 4 kelvin above absolute zero (–452.47°F) to
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Korean—to outdo what 35 nations had been attempting for nearly 30 years. “Let’s see if ReBCO lets us build a 500-megawatt tokamak—the same as ITER, only way smaller.” If superconducting tape could let them make a fusion reactor to fit the footprint of a decommissioned coal-fired plant
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the semester’s end, out popped their design. Just over 10 feet in diameter, it actually looked like a prototype power plant. While ITER had massive shielding, their tokamak would be wrapped in a compact blanket containing a molten salt mixture of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride to absorb the heat of
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and was self-sustaining: producing more energy than what was needed to ignite it. Net fusion energy. The ReBCO magnets, although 40 times smaller than ITER’s, could deliver a magnetic field strength of 23 tesla (a hospital MRI machine typically operates at 1.5 tesla). That was more than enough
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’t broken any laws of physics. He calculated the cost per watt and was astonished. Suddenly their goal wasn’t just building a much smaller ITER. It was being commercially competitive. Stunned, he told his wife, “This can actually work.” * * * — They called it ARC, for Affordable, Robust, Compact fusion reactor design
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would cost around $5 billion. In 2015, that wasn’t much more than the cost of a comparably sized coal-fired plant, and one-eighth ITER’s price tag. That May, Whyte gave a keynote about ARC at a fusion engineering symposium in Austin, Texas. Four of his students attended. When
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fusion first: one of them, or the Chinese, Japanese, or Koreans. During the Atoms for Peace era of 1950s, with programs around the world building tokamaks or laser systems, all agreed that fusion was so complicated they should share data. Everything was open-source. PSFC published dozens of papers detailing their
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its existence to explain why planets, stars, and galaxies behave as they do. *2 And so can you: https://fusor.net. *3 As in most tokamaks, a cross section of SPARC’s doughnut-shaped plasma chamber will be D-shaped, not round, to concentrate peak intensity at the D’s corners
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as his parents have had, but Dan wasn’t blind to what was going on. He knew that this new product, just in its first iteration, was a long way from totally replacing synthetic fertilizer, although Pivot Bio was telling them that the next generation looked to be twice as effective
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for a strong miracle, fusion seemed the best bet, so he began advising a California company, TAE Technologies, that Google had invested in. Unlike the tokamak doughnut at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE accelerates high-energy particle beams into a 30-meter tube of hydrogen-boron plasma.[*1] It’s potentially the
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from Dennis Whyte’s fusion lab at MIT, it occurred to plasma physicist Paul Woskov to take the ultra-high-intensity, laserlike gyrotron used in tokamaks to heat plasma and point it at the ground. Its super-concentrated electron beam, Woskov realized, wouldn’t melt. He’d first had the idea
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/mit-students-contribute-success-historic-fusion-experiment-0906. ———. “New Record for Fusion.” MIT News, October 14, 2016. https://news.mit.edu/2016/alcator-c-mod-tokamak-nuclear-fusion-world-record-1014. MIT News. “3Q: Zach Hartwig on MIT’s Big Push on Fusion.” March 9, 2018. https://news.mit.edu/2018
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M. “3 Questions: Why Fusion Research Is Needed to Help the World Reduce Carbon Emissions.” MIT News, June 16, 2017. https://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/iter/mit/MIT-Fusion-NEWS-20170616-screenshot.pdf. Osborne, Hannah. “China Is about to Fire Up Its ‘Artificial Sun’ in Quest for Fusion Energy.” Newsweek, December
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-for-the-first-time-in-23-years. Videmšek, Boštjan. “Bottling the Sun.” CNN.com, May 30, 2022. https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2022/05/world/iter-nuclear-fusion-climate-intl-cnnphotos. Waldrop, M. Mitchell. “Can the Dream of Fusion Power Be Realized?” Canary Media, January 15, 2024. https://www.canarymedia.com
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coal power, 360 and COP28 meeting, 376 and Dutch water management, 133–34 Great Wall, 47 hydropower projects, 207 and Iraqi oil infrastructure, 24 and ITER project, 90 and Korean DMZ projects, 370 one-child policy, 41 and origins of human civilizations, 9 and Pacific region geopolitics, 346, 350 and seaweed
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Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 302 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 287 International Organization for Migration, 346 International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), 90–92, 93–95 International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 188 Interprovincial Pipe Line Company, 165. See also Enbridge Inc. Iran, 4–5, 25
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, 6, 10–11, 14–15, 22, 26, 28, 392 timber industry, 67–68, 164 Timm, Collin, 55–56, 57 Tohono O’odham people, 73, 253 tokamak reactors, 89–94, 97, 99n, 360, 373 Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative, 316 Topping, Debra, 170 Torres-Freyermuth, Alec, 118, 120 treaties and conventions Convention
Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith · 16 Oct 2017 · 398pp · 105,032 words
well, it’s possible they’ll make it by the end of the decade. ITER The biggest experiment of all, using the most successful and well-studied fusion configuration, is ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. ITER uses a “tokamak” configuration, which is a Russian acronym for toroidal chamber for magnetic confinement. Basically, imagine
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plasma inside the giant donut. Due to the strong magnetic fields, it is extremely hard for the plasma ring to escape. With the plasma confined, ITER uses several methods to heat it: They electrocute it, microwave it, and fire a beam of neutrons at it. As more energy gets transferred into
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methods could be shut off, and the reaction would continue. And bonus, it’s happening inside a huge metal donut. ITER is the biggest, most expensive fusion project today. Unfortunately, ITER (like many science megaprojects) has been fraught with delays and cost overruns. You know how it’s hard to get cats
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to agree on something? Well, imagine if instead of brain-damaged cats, it’s political appointees from many different nations. The current cost estimate for ITER is over $15 billion,* which is a bit of an increase over the initially projected $5 billion. In fairness, they were only one digit off
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. Still, progress continues. As we write this, the actual tokamak portion of ITER is finally being built. The hope is that the full-on fusion reactor experiment will happen in 2027, just in time for the first
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Robot Uprising. ITER is generally considered the best hope for a functional fusion reactor any time soon, and not without good reason. The biggest currently running tokamak, the Joint European Torus (JET), is already hitting 60%–70% of breakeven. Other
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a day care, then turning into a swarm of bats and flying away into the night. This characterization is not, in its particulars, entirely accurate. ITER won’t produce any liquid waste like a fission plant would, and the radioactive tritium will be captured and reused for future reactions. In fact
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, the ITER Web site states that things are so well contained that a fire in the tritium plant wouldn’t even justify evacuating the local population. Yes
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, parts of ITER that are bombarded by the reactions will get irradiated, but these parts won’t qualify as being “highly” radioactive and will cease being radioactive over
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that if containment is lost in the reactor . . . the fusion reaction will be blown out like a candle in the wind.” Since he works on tokamaks, it’s more like a giant plasma-filled donut in the wind, but we take his point. None of the people we interviewed brought up
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material. The house-building truck was built as a proof of concept, but Dr. Keating and Dr. Oxman had some bigger goals for the second iteration. Dr. Keating made a truck that was self-driving and capable of 3D printing while moving, so it could keep moving the nozzle to make
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Reporter of Microbial Gene Expression in Soil.” Environmental Science & Technology 50, no. 16 (2016):8750–59. Cho, Adrian. “Cost Skyrockets for United States’ Share of ITER Fusion Project.” American Association for the Advancement of Science. Science, April 10, 2014. sciencemag.org/news/2014/04/cost-skyrockets-united-states-share
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-iter-fusion-project. Church, George M., and Regis, Ed. Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Clayton, T. A.,
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American, April 1, 2016. scientificamerican.com/article/the-paradox-of-precision-medicine. International Space Elevator Consortium. “Space Elevator Home.” 2016. isec.org. ITER. “The Way to New Energy.” 2016. iter.org. Jafarpour, F., Biancalani, T., and Goldenfeld, N. “Noise-Induced Mechanism for Biological Homochirality of Early Life Self-Replicators.” Physical Review Letters
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, 2016. telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/07/28/hiroshima-anger-over-pokemon-at-atom-bomb-memorial-park. Moniz, E. J. “U.S. Participation in the ITER Project.” Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Energy, 2016. science.energy.gov/~/media/fes/pdf/DOE_US_Participation_in_the
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_ITER_Project_May_2016_Final.pdf. Moravec, H. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Moser, M.-B.,
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recording, 295–99 Iowa State University, 179 iPhone, 216 Iraq, 48, 49–50 iron, 54 irritable bowel syndrome, 206 isopropanol, 208–9 isotopes, 73–74 ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), 88–89, 91–94 ivacaftor, 236, 248 Japan, 136 JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), 65 J. Craig Venter Institute, 214–15
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bioprinting software for, 267 3554 Amun, 53 Throw Trucks with Your Mind (game), 312 thyroid, 60 Tibbits, Skylar, 103–5, 118, 123, 126 titanium, 35 “tokamak” configuration, 88, 92 tornados, 25 touch, sense of, 175 Tourette’s syndrome, 301 transcranial magnetic stimulation, 302, 304 transfer RNA, 193–94, 195 Transformers series
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nuclear power, not that he has nuclear powers. * This doesn’t include U.S. funding for international collaborations. The U.S. government also contributes to ITER, but as you might expect, some American politicians aren’t thrilled about sending money for an over-budget science project being built in France. The
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million dollars, but representatives have repeatedly threatened to block this, as costs have escalated. Even American scientists are a bit concerned about large contributions to ITER, because the large foreign expenditure is crowding out funding for domestic facilities. * Not guaranteed. In fact, Greenpeace is on record as being opposed to
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ITER, though not for the reason you might think. They feel that we should be spending the money on modern renewables, like solar and wind power. *
Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar · 2 Nov 2021
’ idea, what a paradigm shift looks like, exists partly in the eye of the beholder. Many of the most important patents, for example, relate to iterations of the sewing machine; some of the most significant stylistic innovators of the nineteenth- or twentieth-century novel are now forgotten, their language effectively dead
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consistently greater than anyone anticipated. In fusion, hydrogen is heated to hundreds of millions of degrees. Magnetic fields hold it inside what is called a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped ring. At that temperature the hydrogen nuclei collide and fuse to form helium nuclei. This process releases energy – and presents a fiendishly
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difficult engineering problem. Increasing the scale of the tokamak, for example, was understood to make fusion more likely. So you build a bigger tokamak. But this creates a welter of snags. And, of course, costs far more money. Theoretically, fission requires little
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reaction whose power output was 60 per cent of that put in. While an international coalition invests billions in a vast new fusion project called ITER, a 5000-ton behemoth, and new startups like the SPARC reactor at MIT are claiming to drastically speed up the process, many scientists remain sceptical
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of quick progress. Laser compression techniques could proffer a breakthrough, but are still not ready. ITER isn't scheduled to deliver power to the grid until the second half of the twenty-first century. From the beginning
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ITER's vast scale and genesis as part of an international coalition made progress achingly slow. The whole project almost didn't get off the ground,
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Photoshop's codebase grew by over forty times.33 This is typical of a ballooning underlying complexity in software. What's more, evolutionary software self-iterates, automating that process towards incomprehensibility. Over time layers accrete in the system. Various exceptions and edge cases get factored in, whether relating to legal code
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technology or a legal system, necessitates more specialisation, more distance to the frontier. These interlocking systems negate big, bold interventions and demand compromise and careful iteration. They have too many intricate working parts, whether knowledge of a discipline like biochemistry or the regulatory framework around launching a new drug. A more
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than one might expect for a society that has reached this point, but they still exist: SpaceX focused on getting to Mars, SETI finding aliens, ITER chasing fusion. As time goes on, thanks to advances in management and organisational theory and the understanding of innovation, we should – at least on paper
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, you can't always freely experiment with the futures of large groups of children or students, although there is still more scope for RCTs and iterative improvements. Then there is the charge, more difficult to dodge, that learning is excessively instrumental. Teachers teach to the exam, under pressure from governments and
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and patents 97 IP see intellectual property IPOs see Initial Public Offerings iron oxide 89 Islam 133, 340 Islamic caliphate 259, 260 Islamic State 305 ITER 146 Jackson, Andrew 67 Jainism 108 Japan 264, 266, 268, 279, 296, 305 Jefferson, Thomas 211 Jenner, Edward 47 Jesus 24, 216, 303 jet engines
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, 98 thinking 247–8 Third Millennium instruments 239–54 Thomas, Dorothy 39 threshing machines 11 Time (magazine) 59 Tinbergen, Nikolaas 124 Tito, Josip Broz 188 tokamak 145–6 Tolkien, J.R.R. 124, 236 Total Factor Productivity (TFP) 82, 88 trade 23, 24, 26, 177, 213 transhumanism 339 transistors 55, 92
Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made
by Gaia Vince · 19 Oct 2014 · 505pp · 147,916 words
risks of a nuclear fission reaction: fusion, the holy grail of energy sources. I went to France to look at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), humankind’s most ambitious project: to replicate the sun here on Earth. In the dusty highlands of Provence, workers have excavated a vast rectangular pit
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energy from the emitted neutrons and use it to drive steam turbines to produce electricity. They have designed a doughnut-shaped reaction chamber, called a tokamak, which deploys a powerful magnetic field to suspend and compress the high-temperature hydrogen plasma for fusion. Once the reaction is initiated, the heat produced
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’s population. Since then, the budget has trebled, the scale of the reactor halved and the completion date pushed back, but progress is being made. ITER will make the first equipment tests in 2020, and the first fusion tests are planned for 2028. The physicists hope to prove that they can
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times as much energy as the experiment requires: use fifty megawatts (in heating the plasma and cooling the reactor) to get 500 megawatts out. Larger tokamaks should, theoretically, be able to deliver an even greater output-to-input power ratio, in the gigawatts. It is a big gamble. So far, the
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world’s best and biggest tokamak, the JET experiment in the UK, hasn’t even managed to break even, energy-wise. (Although, in 2013, the US National Ignition Facility in California
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managed to produce more energy than was put in, in a fusion experiment lasting a fraction of a second) But, if ITER is successful, the first demonstration fusion plants will be built in about 2040, capable of actually using and storing the energy generated for electricity production
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disappearance that they became inefficient and required continual maintenance. In 2050, the first full-scale fusion power plant opened in Germany (after successful experiments at ITER, in France, in the 2030s), and by 2065 there were thirty around the world, supplying one-third of global electricity. Now, fusion provides more than
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the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) 139–40 International Energy Agency (IEA) 213, 318, 325 International Institute for Environment and Development 98 International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) 328–9 Internet, the 11, 18, 24, 26, 27, 29–34, 136, 322, 367–9 Inuit, the 182 invasive species 250, 252–6 iron 298
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, 211 in Libya 215 solar-powered 211 Isiolo, Kenya 193, 194 Isla Incahuasi, Bolivia 334 Israel: electric cars 373 Itaipu dam, Brazil/Paraguay border 102 ITER see International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor ITO see indium tin oxide Ito, Akinori 326 Ituri Forest, Democratic Republic of Congo 246 ivory trade 198, 246 Jadeja
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mining 299, 301, 310, 316 tin oxides, non-stochiometric 316 Toba, Indonesia: volcanic eruption 2 toilets 20–21, 25, 26, 113, 115, 116, 348, 363 tokamaks 329 tokay geckos 256 Tokyo: population 340 Tomasetti, Roberto 166–7 Tong, Anote, President of Kiribati 174–6, 190 Tonle Sap, Lake 99–100 Torres
How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie · 19 Sep 2016
solar-photovoltaic systems for houses. Michael told Peter that he was working on fusion experiments involving the building of a scaled-down version of a tokamak, a vacuum inside a circular steel tube that used magnetic fields to confine fusion. His project leader was Professor Louis Smullin, who had helped create
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purchased the parts. The breakthroughs of the Internet, personal computer, and smart phones came from a production-efficient method in which failures were expected and iterations were the norm. One day in his office, Carmack found himself studying the exposed ductwork on the ceiling. He thought, Rockets should be made by
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to form a private company that would send a human to the Moon to collect and return lunar samples to sell on eBay. The second iteration of Blastoff replaced the astronaut with a machine—an unmanned robotic rover, equipped with a camera, would land on the Moon and collect the samples
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, months after arriving in sunny Pasadena, the euphoria of Moon missions and Internet time began to dim. Peter was feeling unsettled by the seemingly infinite iterations of Blastoff. The mission statement changed faster than cars pulling in and out of Idealab. During pitches to potential investors, Bill Gross touted Blastoff as
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and worked out hundreds of details in his mind before testing anything in a computer. There was never an epiphany, a single “aha” moment; only iteration after iteration, layer after layer. Aesthetics were a part of performance. If a wing reached its performance goal, it was beautiful. If he put a sweep
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, 6, 7, 344–45, 354, 380, 383, 387, 393 Ting, Samuel, 31 Titanic (movie), 225, 227 Tito, Dennis, 239–40, 299, 315 Titov, Gherman, 48 Tokamak, 28 Tosteson, Dan, 98–99 Transonic corridor, 324, 329–30, 343, 351, 354 Troposphere, 335n Truax, Bob, 55, 184–85, 184n, 234 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 24
The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists
by Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman · 1 Nov 2014 · 336pp · 93,672 words
and producing complex motor patterns, including speech. The neocortex consists of smaller modular units, columnar circuits that reach across the width of the cortex, repeated iteratively within any one cortical area. These modules vary considerably in connectivity and properties among regions. The computational function of a neocortical column—filtering the input
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of data into distributed RAM, enabling rapid access as though the data were on a local machine, as well as supporting complex algorithms involving many iterations. Second, Spark provides powerful abstractions, accessible through its APIs (application programming interfaces) in Python, Java, and Scala, that make it easy to write and prototype
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emerge with only the right analysis, especially when we consider the nearly infinite set of alternative experiments we might have performed. Instead, we need an iterative process by which we move back and forth between using analytic tools to identify patterns in data and using the recovered patterns to inform and
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guide the next set of experiments. After many iterations, the patterns we identify may coalesce into rules and themes, perhaps even themes that extend across different systems and modalities. And with luck, we might
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representation of the latest data and knowledge—with which we can test simplifying hypotheses of brain structure and function. The model becomes a tool to iteratively try different strategies of simplification and validation—always learning what the impact is on brain activity and function when leaving out a particular detail. It
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project seeking significant public funds risks facing the same problem as, say, building a location for the Olympics such as Sochi, Russia, or constructing a tokamak for nuclear fusion. Mustering public support for any science project that requires billions of dollars, and, at least in the US context, requires persuading a
New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
by James Bridle · 18 Jun 2018 · 301pp · 85,263 words
Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive ScrabblePlayers
by Stefan Fatsis · 27 Jul 2001 · 385pp · 25,673 words
99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It
by Mark Thomas · 7 Aug 2019 · 286pp · 79,305 words
Blue Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 23 Oct 2010 · 824pp · 268,880 words
How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper · 15 Jan 2020 · 285pp · 86,858 words