MIT News March 4, 2024 The SPARC Toroidal Field Model Coil (TFMC) Program was a three-year effort between 2018 and 2021 that developed novel rare earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconductor technologies and then successfully utilized these technologies to design, build, and test a first-in-class, high-field (∼20 T), representative-scale (∼3 m) superconducting toroidal field (TF) coil. The program was executed jointly by the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) as a technology enabler of the superconducting high-field pathway to fusion energy, and as a risk retirement program for the no insulation (NI) TF magnet […]
Tag Archives: Fusion energy
Scientists Achieved Self-Sustaining Nuclear Fusion… But Now They Can’t Replicate It
Science Alert August 16, 2022 For more than half a century, researchers around the world have been engaged in attempts to achieve fusion ignition as a proof of principle of various fusion concepts. Following the Lawson criterion, an ignited plasma is one where the fusion heating power is high enough to overcome all the physical processes that cool the fusion plasma, creating a positive thermodynamic feedback loop with rapidly increasing temperature. In inertially confined fusion, ignition is a state where the fusion plasma can begin “burn propagation” into surrounding cold fuel, enabling the possibility of high energy gain. While “scientific […]
Nuclear Fusion Can Unleash Even More Power Than We Realized, Scientists Say
Science Alert May 26, 2022 The research led by physicists from the Swiss Plasma Center has determined that the maximum hydrogen fuel density is about twice the Greenwald Limit – an estimate derived from experiments more than 30 years ago. The exact value depends on the power. But as a rough estimate, the increase is on the order of a factor of two in ITER. Although scientists had long suspected the Greenwald Limit could be improved upon, it has been a foundational rule of fusion research for more than 30 years, a guiding principle of the ITER design. The key […]
Calling all ‘fusioneers’! New US fusion energy website launches
Phys.org November 8, 2021 The U.S. fusion community has just completed a two-year strategic planning process to focus on a bold new direction: the construction of a prototype fusion power plant by 2035. Following a recommendation from the consensus reports created by researchers a diverse committee of stakeholders from the U.S. fusion energy community has collaborated to build usfusionenergy.org. The website will feature the latest fusion news and informative articles, events, and resources that will help anyone, anywhere, understand the promise of fusion energy. The National Ignition Facility in California announced a significant step forward for laser-driven fusion this August. […]
Physicists Have Successfully Advanced a Key Device For Producing Fusion Power
Science Alert September 2, 2021 An international team of researchers (Germany, Belgium, Spain, USA – Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, MIT, University of Wisconsin, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Auburn University, University of Maryland, Los alamos National Laboratory, Hungary, Australia, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, France, Russia, Poland, Japan, Austria, Ukraine, Finland, UK) sought to shape the magnets in W7-X to try and reduce the effects of neoclassical transport. Measurements, taken using an instrument called an X-ray imaging crystal spectrometer (XICS), have shown very high temperatures inside the reactor. These are supported by charge exchange recombination spectroscopy (CXRS) measurements. With both data […]
National Ignition Facility experiment puts researchers at threshold of fusion ignition
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory August 18, 2021 On Aug. 8, 2021, an experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) National Ignition Facility (NIF) made a significant step toward ignition, achieving an yield of more than 1.3 megajoules. This advancement puts researchers at the threshold of fusion ignition, an important goal of the NIF, and opens access to a new experimental regime. The experiment was enabled by focusing laser light onto a target that produces a hot-spot the diameter of a human hair, generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second. While a full […]
Discovery of 10 faces of plasma leads to new insights in fusion and plasma science
Phys.org July 13, 2021 Researchers at Princeton University systematically mapped out all the topological phases of cold magnetized plasmas and established the bulk-edge correspondence. They found that for the linear eigenmodes, there are 10 topological phases in the parameter space of density n, magnetic field B, and parallel wavenumber kz, separated by the surfaces of Langmuir wave-L wave resonance, Langmuir wave-cyclotron wave resonance, and zero magnetic field. For fixed B and kz, only the phase transition at the Langmuir wave-cyclotron wave resonance corresponds to edge modes. A sufficient and necessary condition for the existence of this type of edge modes […]
New concept for rocket thruster exploits the mechanism behind solar flares
Science Daily January 28, 2021 Current plasma thrusters that use electric fields to propel the particles can only produce low specific impulse. The device proposed by researchers at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory would apply magnetic fields to cause particles of plasma to shoot out of a rocket and propel the craft forward. The particles are accelerated using magnetic reconnection which also occurs in tokamaks. They showed that the new plasma thruster concept can generate exhaust with velocities of hundreds of kilometers per second, 10 times faster than those of other thrusters. According to the researchers the new concept provides the […]
Giant lasers pass new milestone towards fusion energy
Physics World June 18, 2018 An international team of researchers (USA – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, industry, University of Rochester, MIT, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Germany) has shown that the fusion energy generated by the laser implosion of a deuterium-tritium fuel capsule is twice that of the kinetic energy of the implosion. They changed the shape of the laser pulses to create much more stable implosions. In 2014, these “high-foot” pulses each yielded up to 17 kJ of fusion energy (and later 26 kJ) – exceeding the roughly 10 kJ created in earlier experiments. They say they will be close […]