“And that means you can build them faster, you can learn more, and you can build power plants sooner.” US, Chinese defense chiefs speak briefly after Beijing rejected meeting request Jordan, GOP ask DOJ to turn over details on FBI’s role in Trump investigation It takes advantage of the fact that magnetic fields and electric currents are two aspects of the same phenomenon - or more specifically, that disruptions in a magnetic field, caused in this case by a series of tiny fusion explosions, creates outpourings of electricity.īecause that approach doesn’t require a stable, self-sustaining reaction, “we’ve been able to build fusion systems that are much, much smaller than any of the other approaches to fusion,” Kirtley told The Hill last week. Helion’s approach seeks to cut out the middleman by an unconventional means: generating electricity directly off the fusion reaction itself. Helion CEO David Kirtley has also long argued that it is unnecessary - and, he has sometimes implied, a bit unimaginative. “I thought, ‘You’re catching a star and you’re using it to boil water?’” he told Rolling Stone in 2017. That’s the form of electricity generation that has run fossil fuel- and nuclear-powered “thermal” power plants for more than a century. Instead, their fusion reactions release a flood of radioactive neutrons, which batter the metal walls of their container, releasing heat that can be tapped to boil water for a steam turbine. Tokamaks and stellarators can’t generate electricity directly. Somewhere between the steady power of a tokamak or stellarator and the flash-in-the-pan intensity of a laser is the hybrid approach Microsoft invested in last week: Helion’s fusion engine. That was the approach seen in the landmark results from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in December, in which a fusion reaction for the first time ever released more energy than had been put in. “So the density can be rather modest, and energy confinement time needs to be larger,” he said.Īt one extreme, the sun burns (relatively) slow and cold at the other are pulses and lasers, in which a pocket of plasma 10 million times denser than that in a tokamak is fused over a period 10 million times shorter. For it to burn quickly, “the wood can’t be spread over half an acre: it has to be together, so each log burns the one beside it.”īy contrast, if it’s spread across the yard, the wood may still burn - but it will take a lot longer. To see this principle in action, imagine a bonfire, Whyte said. The particular physics of fusion represents an almost infinite number of methods to release power, Whyte told The Hill.įusion is the product of two factors: the speed of the reaction, and the density of the available fuel. In 2018, the publicly funded Wendelstein 7-X fusion in Germany achieved a record three seconds of fusion, inaugurating a new era in stellarator research that Type One plans to piggyback off. That makes it much easier to maintain a protracted fusion reaction and ultimately get power out.īut modeling the complex physics to produce a stellarator was impossible “until the last 20 years when supercomputing really came forward, and based on that, they were actually able to start designing these machines,” Mowry said. In theory, the twisted shape cancels out the instabilities in the circulating plasma, giving the magnetic “cage” that contains it far more stability than it would have in a tokamak, Type One CEO Christofer Mowry told The Hill. If the tokamak is like a glazed donut, the stellarator - which twists around itself like a Mobius strip - is more like a cruller, a Type One spokesperson said. Type One’s approach is built around the stellarator, an attempt to build fusion power designed at Princeton in the 1950s but largely abandoned in favor of tokamaks. (Gates was also a funder of Commonwealth fusion.) In March, Breakthrough Energy Ventures - an investment firm owned by Microsoft founder Bill Gates - provided $29 million in initial funding to Type One Energies.
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