Secretive fusion company claims reactor breakthrough

[n2doc]

By Daniel Clery 24 August 2015 8:15 pm 79 Comments
FOOTHILL RANCH, CALIFORNIA—In a suburban industrial park south of Los Angeles, researchers have taken a significant step toward mastering nuclear fusion—a process that could provide abundant, cheap, and clean energy. A privately funded company called Tri Alpha Energy has built a machine that forms a ball of superheated gas—at about 10 million degrees Celsius—and holds it steady for 5 milliseconds without decaying away. That may seem a mere blink of an eye, but it is far longer than other efforts with the technique and shows for the first time that it is possible to hold the gas in a steady state—the researchers stopped only when their machine ran out of juice.


“They’ve succeeded finally in achieving a lifetime limited only by the power available to the system,” says particle physicist Burton Richter of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who sits on a board of advisers to Tri Alpha. If the company’s scientists can scale the technique up to longer times and higher temperatures, they will reach a stage at which atomic nuclei in the gas collide forcefully enough to fuse together, releasing energy.

“Until you learn to control and tame [the hot gas], it’s never going to work. In that regard, it’s a big deal. They seem to have found a way to tame it,” says Jaeyoung Park, head of the rival fusion startup Energy/Matter Conversion Corporation in San Diego. “The next question is how well can you confine [heat in the gas]. I give them the benefit of the doubt. I want to watch them for the next 2 or 3 years.”

Although other startup companies are also trying to achieve fusion using similar methods, the main efforts in this field are huge government-funded projects such as the $20 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), under construction in France by an international collaboration, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s $4 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, California. But the burgeoning cost and complexity of such projects are causing many to doubt they will ever produce plants that can generate energy at an affordable cost.

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http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/08/secretive-fusion-company-makes-reactor-breakthrough

[Travis_0004]

1. I'll belive it when I see it, but I think Fusion o a large scale will happen within 100 years.

[HassleCat]

2. A step closer

It's a little annoying when some company claims a breakthrough, and then presents an improvement of an existing process, an improvement that's still a long way from the desired result. If I were a cynical person, I might say they do this when they need to attract investors.

[RealistComments]

3. 2 questions naturally follow...

1) 10 million C is nice, but did fusion occur (it is pressure plus temperature that leads to fusion).
2) If fusion did occur, how much energy did it produce? And how much energy was consumed in producing that energy? It is the difference that is important.

[RealistComments]

4. 2 questions naturally follow...

1) 10 million C is nice, but did fusion occur. It is pressure plus temperature that leads to fusion. The particles emerging out of the CERN collider are at a much greater temperature than 10 million C, but they are so far apart from each other (low pressure) that there is negligible fusion.
2) If fusion did occur, how much energy did it produce? And how much energy was consumed in producing that energy? It is the difference that is important.

[bananas]

6. The article indicates no, fusion didn't occur

If the company’s scientists can scale the technique up to longer times and higher temperatures, they will reach a stage at which atomic nuclei in the gas collide forcefully enough to fuse together, releasing energy.

[RealistComments]

7. Thanks

for the clarification.

[MisterP]

5. pssh, Argentina achieved fusion in 1952! they just had to close it down because everyone

kept insisting on "seeing the buildings" and "proof" as though mere words weren't enough!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project