Nuclear Fusion

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https://www.notboring.co/i/145088518/fuse-energy

Not Boring newsletter by Packy McCormick goes into a lot of depth with engaging style on dark horse fusion company Fuse Energy. I thought they were a garage project but it sounds like they have a pretty direct path to a major non-fusion market selling radiation services in the manner of NIF and the Sandia Z-Machine.

They claim they'll be able to deliver a much greater volume of shots at a fifth of the cost for testing radiation hardened electronics and, with more powerful fusion producing machines, testing that is relevant to nuclear stockpile stewardship. With a genuine intermediate market they could have a big funding advantage for advancing towards a powerplant.

r/fusion vets will be absolutely thrilled by the prototype step before a pure fusion plant:

Sandia found that the numbers pencil out – 20MW, or 10¹⁹ 14.1 MeV neutrons, of fusion output produces “Actinide blanket output” of 3,000 MWth (megawatts thermal, or heat energy). At a ~30% conversion to electrical, 20MW of fusion output could drive a 1 gigawatt output.

Maybe an actinide blanket has much less decay heat after shutdown than traditional nuclear cores so that there is a genuine passive safety -> less onerous regulation advantage, although it's hard to imagine this beating advanced nuclear with waste burning capabilities and full passive safety characteristics.

Hello! Who are some more independent smaller fusion music journalism accounts either on IG or FB that could help spread the word of new music via paid promotions etc?

I'm about to persue my masters in thermofluids and engineering (CFD and FEA ) . What are the research areas or projects I can work on that might further my chances to work as a thermal design engineer in nuclear fusion reactors/ facility .

I’m a Mechatronics engineer from Australia approaching my final year of study where we do a year long research project. I want to do anything I can to contribute to making commercial fusion happen. I was thinking of doing something in active fluid flow control where you use physics informed machine learning to control turbulence. Is this something the fusion industry would find useful? Or am I completely barking up the wrong tree and focus on something else?

Like if youre Anton Vanko and you have some old Russian schematics that showed you how to make a totally usable net energy fusion reactor, what woukd you do with it?

Start a company? Sell it to a corporation? Make a doomsday cannon and threaten Switzerland?

I know theres probably people here who already work for fusion companies, but Im talking you as an individual.

Hi all,

I am interested in combining fluid mechanics (engineering) and nuclear fusion studies, but would like to know which systems within a fusion power plant would require fluid mechanics knowledge, and or which systems still require research to be carried out in this area.

Thanks

Polaris formation section delivered to Ursa. Quote: "By building sections of Polaris in our Antares facility, and “shipping” them down to Ursa, our team is gaining valuable insight on what assembly and installation will look like in our commercial systems."

Video on X: https://x.com/Helion_Energy/status/1793787652111806488

https://youtu.be/VF9ya-EW1ik?si=iF347Xi_bE972J61

Towards the end of the year is when we're gonna hit a, I'll call it a pretty significant prototyping milestone. We're going to operate an array of HTS coils, a 9x9 grid (note: likely meant nine magnets in a 3x3 grid), and what that in essence is, is your controls problem. If you have one magnet surrounded by eight others they're coupled via inductance, so if you can do it, if we can show that we can make that highly complicated highly precise magnetic field that's required for the stellarator using the array of 3x3 coils, it's the same control system for a hundred. So that's the milestone that we intend to hit later this year, towards the end of the year, and that will be the milestone that indicates that you don't need the wiggly coils, you don't need the very complicated, very precise, very expensive modular coils of prior stellarators, that you can do this with simpler mass-manufacturable pieces of hardware in arrays of HTS. And that's when we'll take a next step to start working towards an integrated machine.

• First fusion spinout from Princeton 70 years after Lyman Spitzer invented the stellarator
• Stellarator's efficiency without major recirculating power allows for lower magnetic field of 12-16 Tesla at the coil greatly reducing the engineering edge cases of higher field such as structural reinforcement
• "Any other stellarator system before, if you have imprecision or a broken piece of hardware the entire system doesn't work. We have a control system on top, and a knob, and we can turn magnets up or down... so that allows for this real world practicality"
• Millimeter precision requirements of other fusion systems greatly relaxed by this. (CFS did say they modeled ARC with (one?) 10 mm TF coil misalignment as ok, but they rely on much higher field to have that margin)
• The stellarator was squarely in the backseat until the breakthroughs in quasisymmetry demonstrated by W7X
• If proof of concept step happens this year a 3 meter major radius prototype will be built for 2030
• Pilot plant after that may be 200 MWe, Nth of a kind 350 MWe with 5 meter major radius. GW scale is not expected: "That's when engineering complexities and even programmatic risks take over... I think that 300 megawatt electric output and billion dollar capital cost are going to be real sweet spots for fusion."
• Neutron producing prototype will have a negative neutral beam injection system, beam target fusion, that JET used to boost output. This may be able to drive D-D fusion that can be used to make and breed tritium. A tritium source relaxes the need to optimize for tritium breeding ratio in full scale pilot plants allowing greater focus on other qualities as a powerplant and could be used to supply other fusion designs

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48415-w

Curious to hear people's thoughts on the significance of this announcement between Kyoto fusioneering and Canadian labs

https://kyotofusioneering.com/en/news/2024/05/22/2337

Have heard about their Unity projects, but am wondering how this JV will fit in