Fusion energy starter Zap Energy, which is working on a low-cost path to produce electricity commercially, believes it will eventually produce more electricity than researchers consume last week. He said he had taken an important step towards testing.
That point is seen as a milestone in solving the world’s energy problems away from fossil fuels. An emerging global industry, consisting of about 30 start-ups and heavily funded government development projects, is pursuing different concepts. Seattle-based Zap Energy stands out because its approach is simpler and cheaper (if it works) than other companies do.
Today’s nuclear power plants are based on fission, which takes in the energy released by splitting atoms. In addition to the intense heat, by-products of the process include waste that remains radioactive for centuries. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, replicates the process that occurs inside the Sun, where gravity fuses hydrogen atoms to helium.
For more than half a century, physicists have pursued a vision of a commercial power plant that essentially bottles the power of the sun on the basis of controlled fusion reactions. Such power plants, without radioactive by-products, produce many times more electricity than they consume. However, none of the research projects are approaching their goals. Still, as the fear of climate change grows, so does the interest in this technology.
Benji Conway, President of Zap Energy, said:
Zap was pioneered by physicists at the University of Washington and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where many competing efforts use powerful magnets or bursts of laser light to compress the plasma and initiate fusion reactions. I am pursuing an approach.
It relies on a shaped plasma gas (often a cloud of energized particles, often described as the state of matter 4), which is compressed by a magnetic field generated by an electric current as it flows through a 2 meter tube. I am. This technique is known as “shear flow Z pinch”.
Zap Energy’s “pinch” approach is nothing new. It may have been observed in the 18th century due to the effects of lightning strikes and has been proposed as a path to fusion energy since the 1930s. Pinch occurs naturally in lightning strikes and solar flares, but the challenge for engineers is to stabilize electrical and magnetic forces with pulses long enough (measured in one millionth of a second) to heat the surrounding molten metal curtains. Is to generate radiation to do.
Bryant Nelson, a former nuclear engineer at the University of Washington and chief technology officer at Zap Energy, said the company has succeeded in injecting plasma into a new and more powerful experimental core. Today, power supplies designed to provide enough energy to prove that the company can produce more energy than it consumes are in place.
If their system proves to work, Zap researchers say it will be orders of magnitude cheaper than competing systems based on magnet and laser confinement. It is expected to cost about the same as traditional nuclear power.
Researchers who attempted the Z-pinch design realized that it was impossible to stabilize the plasma and abandoned the idea in favor of the magnetic approach known as the tokamak reactor.
With advances in stabilizing the magnetic field generated by flowing plasma generated by physicists at the University of Washington, the group founded Zap Energy in 2017. The company has raised more than $ 160 million, including a series of investments from Chevron.
According to the Fusion Industry Association, recent technological advances in fusion fuels and advanced magnets have led to a surge in private investment. There are 35 fusion companies around the world with $ 4 billion in private funding, including funding from renowned technology investors such as Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, John Doerr, Bill Gates and Chris Sacca. It is over. Gates and Sacca have invested in Zap’s latest funding round.
However, skeptics still argue that advances in fusion energy research are largely mirages, and that recent investments are unlikely to be immediately converted to commercial fusion systems.
Last fall, retired plasma physicist Daniel Jasby of Princeton University told the American Physical Society newsletter that the United States is following the “fusion energy heat” that occurs and disappears every decade since the 1950s. I wrote that it was in the middle of the round. He argued that the claim that startups are well on their way to building systems that generate more energy than they consume is unfounded in reality.
“These claims are widely believed only because of the effective promotion of promoters and laboratory spokespersons,” he writes.
Zap Energy physicists and executives said in an interview last week that they believe their approach is within a year of proving that they can reach the long-awaited break-even point.
If so, it will succeed where a series of research efforts dating back to the middle of the last century failed.
Zap Energy’s physicists said in a series of peer-reviewed technical papers that documented computer-generated simulations, they asserted the “scaling” power of the approach that produces a sharp increase in neutrons.
The power plant version of the system covers the core as it moves molten metal, capturing bursts of neutrons and generating intense heat, which is converted into steam to generate electricity.
Uri Shumlak, a physicist and professor at the University of Washington, co-founder of Zap Energy, says that each reactor core produces about 50 megawatts of electricity. This is almost enough to power at least 8,000 households.
He said their technical challenge was to see what they simulated on their computer. This includes allowing the Z-pinch fusion section of the plasma to remain stable and design electrodes that can survive the intense fusion environment of a nuclear reactor.
Conway says he hopes Zap can quickly prove their concept, unlike past large-scale, high-cost development efforts such as “creating a $ 1 billion iPhone prototype every 10 years.” Stated.
