The biggest question in fusion power generation remains unanswered: How can we ensure that the cost of starting a fusion reaction is not higher than the price at which we can sell the power?
Many people have ideas, but no one has solved it yet. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, for example, is confident enough that it is building a huge nuclear reactor that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But for now, the question remains open, as the device won’t be powered on until next year.
Other recently formed companies, such as Pacific Fusion, see an opportunity to build fusion power plants at lower costs. Today, the company announced the results of a series of experiments conducted at Sandia National Laboratories that it says eliminate some of the costly parts of its approach. The company shared its results exclusively with TechCrunch.
Fusion power generation promises to generate large amounts of electricity 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and deliver power in a manner familiar to today’s grid operators. Most fusion startups are targeting the early to mid-2030s to have their first commercial fusion power plant online.
Pacific Fusion is pursuing an approach known as pulsar-driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF). In essence, it is similar to the experiment conducted at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The company compresses small fuel pellets in succession, and the compression causes the atoms in the fuel to fuse and release energy.
But while NIF uses lasers to initiate compression, Pacific Fusion wants to use massive electrical pulses. These pulses create a magnetic field that surrounds a fuel pellet the size of a pencil eraser, compressing it in less than one hundred billionth of a second.
“The faster you can detonate it, the hotter it gets,” Keith LeChien, co-founder and CTO of Pacific Fusion, told TechCrunch.
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One of the challenges with pulsar-driven ICFs is that the process typically requires a bit of a kickstart to work properly. To create conditions hot enough for fusion within fuel pellets, researchers have used both lasers and magnets to pre-warm the pellets. “It’s just a little bit of energy to give it a little bit of a boost before it compresses,” Lucien said, adding that it’s about 5% to 10% of the total energy.
However, the added lasers and magnets add up-front complexity, cost, and maintenance requirements to the machine, making it very difficult to sell power at a competitive price.
So in experiments at Sandia, Pacific Fusion tweaked the design of the cylinder that houses the fuel pellets and adjusted the electrical current delivered to it. Before the big electrical pulse that starts the fusion reaction, the company leaked some of the magnetic field into the fuel before compressing it, warming it in the process.
“By making very subtle changes to the way this cylinder is manufactured, we are able to allow the magnetic field to leak into or penetrate the fuel before compression,” Lucien said.
Pacific Fusion’s fuel is loaded into a plastic target wrapped in aluminum. By changing the thickness of the aluminum, the company can adjust the amount of magnetic field that reaches the fuel. The cartridges have to be manufactured to a certain degree of precision, Lucian said, but not unreasonably, about the precision required for .22 caliber ammunition cases. “This is a process that has been honed, manufactured and perfected over 100 years,” he added.
This adjustment does not significantly change the amount of energy that Pacific Fusion needs to deliver to the target. “It doesn’t take much energy to actually put a magnetic field into the center of the fuel,” he says. “It’s a small portion, much smaller than 1%. It’s a very, very, very small portion of the total energy in the system, so it’s virtually unnoticeable.”
Eliminating the magnetic system would simplify the system and its maintenance requirements, which would have some impact on overall costs, he said. However, eliminating lasers would significantly reduce costs. “Laser scale” [needed] Preheating this type of system with high gain costs over $100 million. ”
Lucien said experiments like this also help the company refine its simulations to ensure they match what happens in the real world. “A lot of people simulate things and say, ‘Oh, this works, that works,'” he said. “It’s a whole different game to simulate something, build it, test it, and make it work. It’s hard to close that loop.”
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