Peek Inside Tri Alpha Energy, a Company Pursuing the Ideal Power Source (i.e. Fusion)

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601482/peek-inside-tri-alpha-energy-a-company-pursuing-the-ideal-power-source/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Peek Inside Tri Alpha Energy, a Company Pursuing the Ideal Power Source[/font]

[font size=4]A startup in California has raised $500 million to chase the elusive dream of fusion power. Is this crazy, or is the company on to something?[/font]

by Richard Martin | May 20, 2016

[font size=3]No energy technology is more tantalizing than fusion, but no energy technology has proved more disappointing. So how has a fusion company in Southern California raised nearly half a billion dollars from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Paul Allen? Does it actually see a way to build a reactor that could generate vast amounts of clean power, even while other fusion projects have perpetually remained 20 years away from reality?

In search of the answers, I visited the headquarters of Tri Alpha Energy in the spring. The coastal fog was lifting from the rolling hills in Foothill Ranch as I stepped inside the building, which houses both Tri Alpha’s offices and its technology lab. A locomotive-sized plasma generator sat surrounded by a dense tangle of scaffolding, sensors, gauges, magnets, instruments, cables, and pipes.

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Tri Alpha and a handful of other fusion startups are pursuing different designs that could be simpler and less costly. Tri Alpha’s setup borrows some of the principles of high-energy particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider, to fire beams of plasma into a central vessel where the fusion reaction takes place. Last August the company said it had succeeded in keeping a high-energy plasma stable in the vessel for five milliseconds—an infinitesimal instant of time, but enough to show that it could be done indefinitely. Since then that time has been upped to 11.5 milliseconds.

The next challenge is to make the plasma hot enough for the fusion reaction to generate more energy than is needed to run it. How hot? Something like 3 billion °C, or 200 times the temperature of the sun’s core. No metal on Earth could withstand such a temperature. But because the roiling ball of gas is confined by a powerful electromagnetic field, it doesn’t touch the interior of the machine.

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[tonyt53]

2. That temperature is the very reason that cold fusion holds more promise.

To get that crazy high temperature and sustain it, would be near impossible and require a tremendous amount of energy.