This Compact Fusion Reactor Is on the Verge of Commercial Energy Production
A privately-owned tokamak in the United Kingdom has reportedly achieved ignition temperature for nuclear fusion, meaning the reactor has reached the threshold for commercial energy production.
Tokamak Energy, an amusingly hard-to-Google company based in Oxford in the south of England, has been working on tokamak reactors since 2009. Even before that, the group was founded as part of England’s national Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, with decades of history as part of the world’s nuclear fusion research efforts. (Private companies like Tokamak Energy, which spin off of research facilities housed at universities or as part of government programs, are surprisingly common. One battery researcher tells Popular Mechanics that the reason is simple: students and public funds should be doing new research, not slogging through the long road of research and development on an emerging commercial product.)
A tokamak is a donut-shaped—or, in this case, spherical—nuclear fusion reactor in which swirling plasma is brought to millions of degrees in temperature in order to begin, well, fusing. The goal is to smash nuclei together and generate energy. Tokamak Energy’s research centers on the ST40 reactor, a spherical tokamak that has made test runs on its way toward the productive ratio known as “ignition” in the field of nuclear fusion. Ignition refers to the point at which the energy produced by a fusion reactor is greater than the amount required to kickstart it up to millions of degrees. In other words: it’s a very, very high barrier.
Publicly-funded reactors like the massive donut-shaped tokamak at ITER in France have set records of 100 degrees Celsius before. But Tokamak Energy’s reactor, which it says has cost a total of $70 million to date, is much smaller than ITER’s, which has cost billions of dollars. The Tokamak Energy reactor assembly is maybe the height of two average-seeming human men, as shown in a corporate video. In contrast—a phrase that feels underwhelming for the purpose—ITER’s tokamak assembly will weigh 23,000 tons.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/this-compact-tokamak-is-on-the-verge-of-commercial-energy-production/ar-AAVL1Dz
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1 MAY 2017
The UK's newest fusion reactor, ST40, was switched on last week, and has already managed to achieve 'first plasma' - successfully generating a scorching blob of electrically-charged gas (or plasma) within its core.
The aim is for the tokamak reactor to heat plasma up to 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) by 2018 - seven times hotter than the centre of the Sun. For this reactor, that's the 'fusion' threshold, at which hydrogen atoms can begin to fuse into helium, unleashing near-limitless, clean energy in the process.
"Today is an important day for fusion energy development in the UK, and the world," said David Kingham, CEO of Tokamak Energy, the company behind ST40.
"We are unveiling the first world-class controlled fusion device to have been designed, built and operated by a private venture. The ST40 is a machine that will show fusion temperatures - 100 million degrees - are possible in compact, cost-effective reactors. This will allow fusion power to be achieved in years, not decades."
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https://www.sciencealert.com/the-uk-has-just-switch-on-its-tokamak-nuclear-fusion-reactor
Perhaps by years they meant 18 or 19 years, which is technically less than decades (20 years minimum).
Commercial fusion power would be a history altering achievement, but we've been hearing about fusion power breakthroughs for decades.
