Professors Take Big Step to Develop Nuclear Fusion Power

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/2012/06/08/professors-nuclear-fusion-power/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Professors Take Big Step to Develop Nuclear Fusion Power[/font]

Posted on June 8, 2012 11:38 am

[font size=3]Imagine a world without man-made climate change, energy crunches, or reliance on foreign oil. It may sound like a dream world, but University of Tennessee, Knoxville, engineers have made a giant step toward making this scenario a reality.

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The key to unlocking the technology was finding the right material—a glass fiber and epoxy chemical mixture that is liquid at high temperatures and turns hard when cured—and the right process of inserting this material into all of the necessary spaces inside the central solenoid. The special mixture provides electrical insulation and strength to the heavy structure. The impregnation process moves the material at the right pace, factoring in temperature, pressure, vacuum, and the material’s flow rate.

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It took two years to develop the technology, more than two days to impregnate the central solenoid mockup and multiple pairs of watchful eyes to ensure everything went according to plan.

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This summer, the team’s technology will be transferred to US ITER industry partner General Atomics in San Diego, which will build the central solenoid and ship it to France.

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[Ghost Dog]

1. Thanks.

...ITER is building a fusion reactor that aims to produce ten times the amount of energy that it uses. The facility is now under construction near Cadarache, France, and will begin operations in 2020.

“The goal of ITER is to help bring fusion power to the commercial market,” Madhukar said. “Fusion power is safer and more efficient than nuclear fission power. There is no danger of runaway reactions like what happened in nuclear fission reactions in Japan and Chernobyl, and there is little radioactive waste.”...

... Since 2008, UT engineering professors and about fifteen students have worked inside UT’s Magnet Development Laboratory (MDL) located off of Pellissippi Parkway to develop technology that serves to insulate and provide structural integrity to the more than 1,000 ton central solenoid.

A tokamak reactor uses magnetic fields to confine the plasma—a hot, electrically charged gas that serves as the reactor fuel—into the shape of a torus. The central solenoid, which consists of six giant coils stacked on top of one another, plays the starring role by both igniting and steering the plasma current...

[FogerRox]

2. ITER will be run for 500 seconds

They'll get the data and walk away, I do not think Toridial (Tokamak) fusion will ever be practical. In fact the 2 fathers of the US Tokamak program, Bussard and Hirsh both decided the same about 15 years ago.