TAE Technologies Claims Landmark In Fusion Energy, Sees Commercialization By 2030 (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0144856754
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/04/09/2255224/tae-technologies-claims-landmark-in-fusion-energy-sees-commercialization-by-2030
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/08/claiming-a-landmark-in-fusion-energy-tae-technologies-sees-commercialization-by-2030/
> For TAE Technologies, the achievement serves as a validation of the life's work of Norman Rostoker, one of the company's co-founders who had devoted his life to fusion energy research and died before he could see the company he helped create reach its latest milestone. "This is an incredibly rewarding milestone and an apt tribute to the vision of my late mentor, Norman Rostoker," said TAE's current chief executive officer, Michl Binderbauer, in a statement announcing the company's achievement. "Norman and I wrote a paper in the 1990s theorizing that a certain plasma dominated by highly energetic particles should become increasingly better confined and stable as temperatures increase. We have now been able to demonstrate this plasma behavior with overwhelming evidence. It is a powerful validation of our work over the last three decades, and a very critical milestone for TAE that proves the laws of physics are on our side."
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> Rostoker's legacy lives on inside TAE through the company's technology platform, called, appropriately, "Norman." In the last 18 months that technology has demonstrated consistent performance, reaching over 50 million degrees in several hundred test cycles. Six years ago, the company had proved that its reactor design could sustain plasma indefinitely -- meaning that once the switch is flipped on a reaction, that fusion reaction can continue indefinitely. Now, the company said, it has achieved the necessary temperatures to make its reactors commercially viable. It's with these milestones behind it that TAE was able to raise an additional $280 million in financing, bringing its total up to $880 million and making it one of the best financed private nuclear fusion endeavors in the world.
[1] https://tae.com/
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/08/claiming-a-landmark-in-fusion-energy-tae-technologies-sees-commercialization-by-2030/
Breakeven (Score:2)
Call me when they reach breakeven. My guess is ITER or a Laser-Maglif system (either in the US or in China) will get there first.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> Call me when they reach breakeven.
I'll deliver the news in my flying car.
Re: (Score:2)
If glossy websites were the secret to technological breakthroughs, maybe.
Re: (Score:2)
ITER might technically be able to get Q > 1 in the 2030s (schedule keeps slipping, but deuterium tritium operation is now around mid 2030s I believe), but it is not designed to put energy on the grid. It's a science experiment and frankly it doesn't translate well to a commercial reactor; they have taken the "volume scaling" approach that leads to a temperamental reactor ten times the size of a fission reactor of comparable output. It's simply not economical.
Same thing with laser fusion - Q might be >
For one, this is not "traditional" fusion. (Score:5, Interesting)
The energy released from this reaction is when the unstable boron-11 + proton nucleus splits into 3 alpha particles. They can capture the positively charged alphas and generate electricity directly. No neutrons to deal with, either. In theory anyways.
The downside is it takes far higher temperatures to puncture the boron nucleus' Column barrier than lighter nuclei. Plasma confinement has got to be crazy to manage at those energies.
All that said, I've watched this company for over a decade now, and I'm highly skeptical of their claims and likelihood of commercial success. However, it does seem to be a fantastic vehicle for attracting venture capital.
Re: For one, this is not "traditional" fusion. (Score:1)
Sorry..."Columb barrier". Stupid autocorrect.
Not close, where are they a Lawson criteria (Score:5, Informative)
If you read carefully though, what the claim is 50M degree plasma temperatures, no mention of density. If you look at [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] The Princeton torus reached 60M degrees in 1978 and 75M degrees around 1980 Of course H-B fusion (which is what the press release describes) requires a lot higher temperature, something like 10X D-T, [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] So 600M – 1.2B is the right range, 50M isn’t nearly enough What matters is Lawson criteria: [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Pressure * time at that temperature. They don’t give that. They say a “positive relationshipbetweenplasma confinement and reactor temperature, meaningthatthe company’s compact linear configurationimprovesplasma confinement as temperatures rise”. Which is nice words, but no data at all, or what regime they are in. No info on pressure at all. Note that their next machine will “that will operate well in excess of 100 million degrees Celsius to simulate net energy production from the conventional Deuterium-Tritium (D-T) fuel cycle” *simulate* - that machine is not intended to be net producing power. They give no idea of their target Q. If I go to their article at [4]https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com] I don’t see any temperature above 1 KeV listed (ion + electron, a somewhat weird measuremn) that is only 12M degrees. (just a quick read, maybe I’m missing something) Their density is around 1e19 Lawson is about 5e20 density * seconds at 50M degrees. But they are only 10M degrees, so their pressure is 5X lower. In terms of pressure they are 250 X lower than breakeven for a 1 second run. But its worse than that, their containment time demonstrated is only milliseconds. So, the existing machine misses Lawson by a factor of about a million which puts them in the same ballpark as Farnsworth fusors There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the field reversed configuration. What is missing here is any data to suggest that it scales better than a Tokomak to get to a production machine. They say they have raised 880M$ but even their next generation machine doesn’t reach break-even for D-T. I see no indication that a break even machine will cost less than ITER. If you look at the papers on their site [5]https://tae.com/research-libra... [tae.com] their magnetic fields are sub kilo-gauss. The ITER field is ~50KG. But ITER has a density around 1e20, at 8KeV (8X the temperature) so about 80X the pressure with 50X the field. It all holds together – the Tri Alpha Energy system gets similar performance per field strength – exactly as expected. It might be 2X better or 2X (or much more) worse, but nothing really exciting going on here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Large_Torus
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion
[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7897.pdf
[5] https://tae.com/research-library/
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, copy / paste turned into wall of text, cant edit
Re: (Score:2)
What is your take on scaling up stellarators as a competition for the ITER? Your take was very informative.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
Re: (Score:2)
I'm an investor in TAE, so I get somewhat more detailed reports. They are doing development on two fronts: "long enough" and "hot enough". They demonstrated the "long enough" approach with their previous machines, the current machine is designed to be the "hot enough" demonstrator.
It seems that they have validated the scaling laws for their approach and the next step is to actually do the scaling. Their next machine (to be finished around 2023) would be energy-positive if fueled with D-T, which is not the
Re: (Score:2)
Tokamak technology is close to scientific break-even, and given the well proven scaling for these systems ITER will operate at engineering break-even. Another factor 10 after that will make it possible to produce (unaffordable) commercial power. So these people are six orders of magnitude behind tokamaks that are already operating.
Still, much better than ICF, as the most advanced and expensive ICF system in the world, the National "Ignition" Facility is about 20 orders of magnitude short of commercial power
Here's the one I look out for (Score:2)
[1]https://generalfusion.com/tech... [generalfusion.com]
But I have no idea how credible this is, it just appeals to my sense that something mechanical has a better chance of working, yet there is the same plasma instability problem in the center of this device.
[1] https://generalfusion.com/technology-magnetized-target-fusion/
Re: (Score:2)
How do they solve the rayleigh taylor instability? [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] that is the bugaboo of implosion machines. (and why NIF couldn't get to breakeven).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh%E2%80%93Taylor_instability
Re: (Score:2)
If I was in charge (haha), I'd say "more power", lots of power... H-bombs work...
Re: (Score:2)
In fusion bigger certainly is better. Once you get to stellar mass, pretty much anything will fuse.. Sadly I think lily-livered environmentalists might object to detonating millions of H bombs to generate power. Too bad, because nuclear winter would help reverse global warming.
Re: (Score:2)
> If I was in charge (haha), I'd say "more power", lots of power... H-bombs work...
They do, which is why there were two classified test programs called Centurion and Halite that experimented with scaling down nuclear explosions, using underground nuclear tests as the driving energy to see how low they could go with ICF.
The plasma parameters achieved, and the scaling law they thought they established, are still classified, but were used to pitch the National Ignition Facility. This system was expected to be three times above the lowest level of break-even, but it fell an order of magnitude
Re: (Score:2)
> Sort of like how the reaction rate of muon catalyzed fusion turned out to be an order of magnitude below what was needed to make that technology possible.
> Nature doesn't always help us do what we would like to be able to do.
> I'll see you in my flying hover car.
Maybe they just need larger [1]magnets? [sciencemag.org]
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/particle-mystery-deepens-physicists-confirm-muon-more-magnetic-predicted
more information on the pB11 fusion (Score:2)
[1]https://www.physics.uci.edu/si... [uci.edu]
They fuse a proton with B11 to make 3 He4's, some xrays for energy, and no extra neutron to contain. Seems they need to solve remaining problems like He4 buildup?
TFA: "The company isn’t generating energy yet, and won’t for the foreseeable future," and, paradoxically, "Sees commercialization by 2030"
[1] https://www.physics.uci.edu/sites/physics.uci.edu/files/P20-FRC-reactor-Rostoker-08-18-2015-final.pdf
Re: (Score:2)
> Seems they need to solve remaining problems like He4 buildup?
They are planning to use He4 nuclei to generate electricity directly by passing them through a reverse particle accelerator ("decelerator?"). There's no "buildup" to speak of, as the plasma in the core will be extremely tenuous in any case. In practice, the reactors are likely to work in cycles of a few days with maintenance in between.
Degrees (Score:2)
Is that Celcius or Fahrenheit degrees...
It makes a big difference when you are talking about millions...
only 50 years off (Score:2)
So, they are able to get a core to temperature and keep it running? Now they just need to keep everything around it from melting/fusing for the 50 year lifespan of a power plant, and we will have limitless energy.
Re: (Score:2)
There is no "core" in a fusion reactor. The fuel is an extremely tenuous plasma, less than a milligram for the whole reactor. It's extremely hot but it doesn't actually touch the reactor walls.
Re: (Score:2)
However it's also radioactively hot, and that *does* touch the reactor walls. It'd be interesting to know how they plan to deal with that. One of the common ideas is to use lots of lithium in the walls so they generate hydrogen to feed the reactor, but I've never tried to follow that up. I don't even know whether what is generated is deuterium (or possibly tritium).