Fusion Power  

Angela Merkel switched on the first hydrogen plasma reactor at Germany's Wendelstein 7-X experiment, marking the start of scientific operation of the project. The objective of fusion research is to develop a power plant that derives energy from the fusion of atomic nuclei just as the sun and the stars do. 

The billion dollar Wendelstein 7-X fusion device at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald produced its first hydrogen plasma on February 3rd.

"With a temperature of 80 million degrees and a lifetime of a quarter of a second, the device’s first hydrogen plasma has completely lived up to our expectations."

This marks the start of scientific operation. Wendelstein 7-X, the world’s largest fusion device of the stellarator type, is to investigate this configuration’s suitability for use in a power plant.

Since the start of operation in December last year, Wendelstein 7-X has produced more than 300 discharges with the rare gas, helium. These served primarily to clean the plasma vessel. The cleaner the vessel wall, the more the plasma temperature increased, finally attaining six million degrees.

In addition, plasma heating and data recording were tested, and the first measuring facilities for investigating the plasma were put into operation. This included complex instrumentation such as X-ray spectrometers, interferometers, laser scattering and video diagnostics.

“This makes everything ready for the next step”, states Project Head Professor Dr. Thomas Klinger. “We are changing from helium to hydrogen plasmas, our proper subject of investigation.”

The first hydrogen plasma, which was switched on at a ceremony attended by numerous guests from the realms of science and politics, marks the start of scientific operation of Wendelstein 7-X. At the push of a button by Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel, a 2-megawatt pulse of microwave heating transformed a tiny quantity of hydrogen gas into an extremely hot low-density hydrogen plasma. (see video below, queued to Merkel's big moment).

This procedure involves separation of the electrons from the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms. Confined in the magnetic cage generated by Wendelstein 7-X, the charged particles levitate without making contact with the walls of the plasma chamber. “With a temperature of 80 million degrees and a lifetime of a quarter of a second, the device’s first hydrogen plasma has completely lived up to our expectations”, states Dr. Hans-Stephan Bosch, whose division is responsible for operation of Wendelstein 7-X.

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The present initial experimentation phase will last till mid-March. The plasma vessel will then be opened in order to install carbon tiles for protecting the vessel walls and a so-called “divertor” for removing impurities. “These facilities will enable us to attain higher heating powers, higher temperatures, and longer discharges lasting up to ten seconds”, explains Professor Klinger. Successive extensions are planned until, in about four years, discharges lasting 30 minutes can be produced and it can be checked at the full heating power of 20 megawatts whether Wendelstein 7-X will achieve its optimization targets.

The objective of fusion research is to develop a power plant favourable to the climate and environment that derives energy from the fusion of atomic nuclei just as the sun and the stars do.

As the fusion fire only ignites at temperatures of more than 100 million degrees, the fuel – a thin hydrogen plasma – must not come into contact with cold vessel walls. Confined by magnetic fields, it floats virtually free from contact within the interior of a vacuum chamber. For the magnetic cage, two different designs have prevailed – the tokamak and the stellarator. Both types of system are being investigated at the IPP. In Garching, the Tokamak ASDEX Upgrade is in operation, the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator is operating in Greifswald

SOURCE  IPP

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Lasers  

Recently, scientists at Osaka University in Japan fired a laser capable of producing a 2-petawatt pulse – that’s 2000 trillion watts of energy, released in a short amount of time. What types of scientific applications could this have?

Scientists at Osaka University claim they have fired the world's most powerful laser beam.

The beam instantaneously concentrated energy equivalent to 1,000 times the world's electricity consumption and entered the record books as the most powerful laser beam ever emitted, the researchers said.

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"Our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts."

Although the energy of the laser beam itself was only powerful enough to run a microwave for about two seconds, the team was able to attain the massive output by concentrating the power to 1 pico-second, or one-trillionth of a second.

The team at the university's Institute of Laser Engineering emitted a 2-petawatt, or 2 quadrillion-watt, laser beam using the huge "LFEX" (Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments).

The LFEX is about 100 meters long, including the observation apparatus. The four set of devices to amplify the laser beam were completed at the end of last year.

In the experiment, energy was applied to special glass using devices that were basically lamps resembling ordinary fluorescent tubes, repeatedly amplifying the power of the beam.

The team held experiments continuously and confirmed this month that a record has been achieved.

"With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts," said the institute's Junji Kawanaka, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the university.

The development of super powerful lasers has implications for particle physics, the creation of plasma and even potentially for fusion power.

SOURCE  FW: Thinking

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 Fusion Power  

Lockheed Martin plans to develop a compact fusion reactor (CFR) with potentially huge implications for future space and aircraft propulsion.  CFRs could one day be used to power space craft on deep-space missions to Mars.

At the research department at Lockheed Martin, known as the Skunk Works, a team of researchers has been working quietly on a nuclear energy concept they believe has the potential to meet, if not eventually decrease, the world’s insatiable demand for power.

They call it the compact fusion reactor (CFR), and according to their research, the device is safer, cleaner and more powerful than much larger, current nuclear fission reactors.
Lockheed believes the scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to city power stations. It may even revive the concept of large, nuclear-powered aircraft that virtually never require refueling—ideas of which were largely abandoned more than 50 years ago because of the dangers and complexities involved with nuclear fission reactors.

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Aviation Week was given exclusive access to view the Skunk Works experiment, dubbed “T4,” first hand. Thomas McGuire, an aeronautical engineer in the Skunk Work’s aptly named Revolutionary Technology Programs unit is leading the project. The current experiments are focused on a containment vessel roughly the size of a business-jet engine. Connected to sensors, injectors, a turbopump to generate an internal vacuum and a huge array of batteries, the stainless steel container seems an unlikely first step toward solving a conundrum that has defeated generations of nuclear physicists—namely finding an effective way to control the fusion reaction.

McGuire knows that they are just starting now, but he claims the design is sound and they will advance quickly until its final implementation in just a decade:

"If we can meet our plan of doing a design-build-test generation every year, that will put us at about five years, and we've already shown we can do that in the lab. So it wouldn't be at full power, like a working concept reactor, but basically just showing that all the physics works."

"We would like to get to a prototype in five generations," he says. "If we can meet our plan of doing a design-build-test generation every year, that will put us at about five years, and we've already shown we can do that in the lab. So it wouldn't be at full power, like a working concept reactor, but basically just showing that all the physics works."

Lockheed estimates that less than 25 kg (55 lb.) of fuel would be required to run an entire year of operations. The fuel, deuterium is produced from sea water and is therefore considered unlimited.

So far simulations and experimental results “have been very promising and positive,” McGuire says. “The latest is a magnetized ion confinement experiment, and preliminary measurements show the behavior looks like it is working correctly. We are starting with the plasma confinement, and that’s where we are putting most of our effort. One of the reasons we are becoming more vocal with our project is that we are building up our team as we start to tackle the other big problems. We need help and we want other people involved. It’s a global enterprise, and we are happy to be leaders in it.”

McGuire also realizes that when it comes to nuclear power, the whole concept has an image issue. “That’s another reason to be public and get the message out there. We want to get people excited about all the positives. It’s about education, and when people find out more about it (CFR), it’s hard not to get excited and support it. We have a long ways to go, and there are lots of challenges, but we have a path to do it and a community of fusion researchers and national labs. There’s a collaborative atmosphere and we have got some really good feedback so far. There’s even private capital being employed –- so people seem primed to go for this.”




SOURCE  Aviation Week

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 Fusion  

A milestone of achieving fuel gains greater than 1 has been reached at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) — for the first time ever on any facility.

Ignition -- the process of releasing fusion energy equal to or greater than the amount of energy used to confine the fuel -- has long been considered the "holy grail" of inertial confinement fusion science. A key step along the path to ignition is to have "fuel gains" greater than unity, where the energy generated through fusion reactions exceeds the amount of energy deposited into the fusion fuel.

Though ignition remains the ultimate goal, the milestone of achieving fuel gains greater than 1 has been reached for the first time ever on any facility. In a paper published in the journal Nature, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) detail a series of experiments on the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which show an order of magnitude improvement in yield performance over past experiments.

Image Source - Hurricane et al. / Nature

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"What's really exciting is that we are seeing a steadily increasing contribution to the yield coming from the boot-strapping process we call alpha-particle self-heating as we push the implosion a little harder each time," said lead author Omar Hurricane.

Boot-strapping results when alpha particles, helium nuclei produced in the deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion process, deposit their energy in the DT fuel, rather than escaping. The alpha particles further heat the fuel, increasing the rate of fusion reactions, thus producing more alpha particles. This feedback process is the mechanism that leads to ignition. As reported in Nature, the boot-strapping process has been demonstrated in a series of experiments in which the fusion yield has been systematically increased by more than a factor of 10 over previous approaches.

The experimental series was carefully designed to avoid breakup of the plastic shell that surrounds and confines the DT fuel as it is compressed. It was hypothesized that the breakup was the source of degraded fusion yields observed in previous experiments. By modifying the laser pulse used to compress the fuel, the instability that causes break-up was suppressed. The higher yields that were obtained affirmed the hypothesis, and demonstrated the onset of boot-strapping.

The experimental results have matched computer simulations much better than previous experiments, providing an important benchmark for the models used to predict the behavior of matter under conditions similar to those generated during a nuclear explosion, a primary goal for the NIF.

The chief mission of NIF is to provide experimental insight and data for the National Nuclear Security Administration's science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program. This experiment represents an important milestone in the continuing demonstration that the stockpile can be kept safe, secure and reliable without a return to nuclear testing. Ignition physics and performance also play a key role in fundamental science, and for potential energy applications.

"There is more work to do and physics problems that need to be addressed before we get to the end," said Hurricane, "but our team is working to address all the challenges, and that's what a scientific team thrives on."



SOURCE  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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