A new 20 Tesla Superconducting magnet reduces the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40. MIT worked with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup with over $2 billion in funding. The funders of CFS include Temasek Holdings (Singpore), the U.S. Department of Energy, Tiger Global Management, Bill Gates, Google and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Commercial nuclear fusion now has a chance of being economical.
In the last few years, a newer material nicknamed REBCO, for rare-earth barium copper oxide, was added to fusion magnets, and allows them to operate at 20 kelvins, a temperature that despite being only 16 kelvins warmer, brings significant advantages in terms of material properties and practical engineering.
Taking advantage of this new higher-temperature superconducting material was not just a matter of substituting it in existing magnet designs.
The team built a 20,000-pound magnet that produced a steady, even magnetic field of just over 20 tesla — far beyond any such field ever produced at large scale.
The magnet assembly is a slightly smaller-scale version of the ones that will form the donut-shaped chamber of the SPARC fusion device now being built by CFS in Devens, Massachusetts. It consists of 16 plates, called pancakes, each bearing a spiral winding of the superconducting tape on one side and cooling channels for helium gas on the other.
There are six peer reviewed papers on this magnet.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I would bet on the Wendelstein 7x Stellarator instead. Reminds me of Young Frankenstein” or Rocky Horror Show”
Any technology that requires helium is not viable in the long term.
Isn’t there a material that could contain helium almost indefinitely? Or is that not possible?
Why bother? These are reactors which produce helium as their “ash” continuously at rates higher than leakage and which must continuously isolate and remove it to avoid interfering with the operating efficiency. Fusion reactors have many problems but this is not one. A 100 MW thermal (~30-40 MWe) reactor will make ~1g He-4 per hour continously.
“Any technology that requires helium is not viable in the long term.”
Helium is a very common and easy to obtain element… just not on Earth.
There was a lot of talk about it and REBCO magnets are not nothing new. Even few years ago they demonstrated such or even greater magnetic field. I think they needed to scale it up and now they build larger version of it. With containment approaches magnetic field strength is very important. Small improvements reduce the reactor size by a LOT and that means faster to build and cheaper for the same output. ITER is total obsolete.
Lockheed Martin skunk works were complaining, that magnetic field is the biggest problem to get small truck size fusion reactor, can they do it now or it was just talk to get more money?
Well, Google’s GNoME discovered over 2 million new chemical structures, and almost 400,000 new materials back in 2023. And AlphaFold predicted the 3D structures of 200 million proteins.
Also, I’m not sure why you think AI answers are “regurgitated”, since LLMs are, in fact, generative, which is to say they are generating answers based on statistical patterns that present in the training data. They are universal function approximators. Can you say that human neurons aren’t doing something similar?
Way to go! Why did it take researchers so long to figure this out? AI should speed these kinds of discoveries up by orders of magnitude. Fusion, of course, would provide enough power for any rollout of AI, so it’s in AI’s interest to do so.
AI isn’t there yet, we still can’t get honest answers, just regurgitated weighted answers that are little better than a parrot talking.
We’re probably years if not a decade away from human levels of understanding and output.
And once we get there, it’ll take decades before it takes less space than a large costly warehouse that puts a stranglehold on supply.
So We’re still decades before volume production, the singularity is FAR off.