Major shifts have been taking place in the race to commercialize nuclear fusion, but one high school senior has shaken the fusion world by building a nuclear fusion reactor as a high school science project.
Cesare Mencarini, an Italian studying in the United Kingdom, taught himself to code and how to work with electrical systems. He searched YouTube and the Internet and built a custom-made reactor that was controlled and hosted from a Raspberry Pi system. His reactor achieved plasma, the fourth state of matter, a crucial step in the fusion process, by effectively using high voltage to heat atoms to the required temperatures.
His work has earned him a college scholarship, where he will be working on larger reactors. Mencarini explains that “I had to adapt the design to fit in with the budget and my aim is to encourage other young people to develop ideas and think about how we can improve our world and be innovative.”
Mencarini’s success should be an inspiration to the thousands of scientists affiliated with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the CERN Council in June 2022 decided to end cooperation with Russia, affecting 500 scientists affiliated with Russian institutions.
While about 100 of the Russian-affiliated scientists have found other sponsorship and will continue working with CERN, the Russian government withdrew US$46.8 million from the financing of the upgrading of CERN’s large hadron collider and will no longer supply 4.6% of the LHC’s experimental budget.
On another front, CERN last November signed an agreement with members of EUROfusion, a European consortium of fusion research laboratories, to facilitate collaboration on development of innovative technologies for future colliders and nuclear fusion reactors. EUROfusion’s laboratories are creating a technical design of a fusion demonstration power plant (DEMO) to succeed ITER (the International Fusion Reactor).
ITER, one may recall, was launched in 1985 by a consortium including China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, the United States, and the European Union and supported by the European Atomic Energy Community (which itself was created by the Euratom Treaty in 1957). Its mission was to bring fusion to a point where a demonstration fusion reactor could be designed.
Construction of the ITER tokamak began in 2010, and in May 200 the 1,250-tonne cryostat base was installed at the 42-hectare site. The latest news from ITER is a plan to build a more complete machine than was initially planned, with achievement of full magnetic energy by 2036 and the start of the deuterium-tritium operation phase by 2039. Expect new information at the ITER Council meeting this November.
While the European efforts are slowing down, the hunt for nuclear fusion is escalating in the United States, and notably in Wisconsin.
At the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, a significant advancement in fusion ignition was achieved in December 2022 using 192 lasers concentrated on a minuscule gold cylinder consisting of a diamond capsule loaded with deuterium and tritium. At one moment, hydrogen atoms integrated into helium, emitting energy of 3.15Mj that exceeded the 2.05Mj contribution from the lasers.
The success of this experiment symbolized a model change in the nuclear energy segment. It also prompted renewed curiosity as well as financing in fusion energy, which promises practically unlimited power with no safety hazards with little if any waste issues. The challenge remains to sustain the fragile balance of conditions essential to fusion.
On another front, MIT researchers just published results of a study that addressed the problem of building tokamats that can withstand the incredibly hot plasma. Senior researcher Ju Li described the method for drawing away problematic helium atoms that can wreak havoc on the tokamak’s inner walls by dispersing iron silicate into the bulk metal.
A July survey by the Fusion Industry Association reported that among 45 private fusion companies worldwide, 25 were headquartered in the United States. Perhaps the biggest news on the U.S. fusion front is emerging from three of these firms that were spun out of the University of Wisconsin at Madison – Realta Fusion, Type One Energy, and SHINE Technologies.
On July 15, Realta Fusion scientist Elliot Claveau reported that his team had generated a beam of superheated plasma for the first time at the Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM) project being conducted at the University of Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory in Stoughton.
WHAM was created in 2020 as a partnership between UW-Madison, MIT, and the company Commonwealth Fusion Systems, who had received $10 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as funding support from UW-Madison. WHAM is now operating as a public-private partnership between UW-Madison and Realta Fusion, which was spun out of the university.
Just one week later, scientists at SHINE Technologies in Janesville showcased their FLARE™, billed as the world’s most powerful continuous fusion neutron system at the IEEE Nuclear & Space Radiation Effects Conference and at the Technology of Fusion Energy Meeting (TOFE). FLARE™, an acronym for Fusion Linear Accelerator for Radiation Effects, produced 50 trillion nuclear fusion neutrons per second.
FLARE™ can complete tests in hours that heretofore took weeks. This allows for shorter development cycles and faster iteration in developing radiation-hardened components. As a result, the Department of Defense will be able to much more quickly determine how much radiation our defense systems and withstand before they are disrupted or destroyed.
The third ring came on July 30, when Wisconsin-born Type One Energy, which recently relocated to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, announced it had raised over $82 million in seed funding for a fusion prototype based on work of scientists at its Madison office. Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the extension, with Australia-based Foxglove Ventures and New Zealand-based GD1 also contributing.
Type One’s reactor is a stellarator, whose shape has been called a cronut – a circle that is warped and bulging. The shape is defined by magnets that exert the specially shaped field that confines the superheated plasma necessary for fusion reactions. The stellarator requires a tremendous amount of computing power to fine-tune the design to make it work. Type One was spun out of the University of Wisconsin, which is also operating a stellarator.
CEO Christofer Mowry says the next step is finalizing the core reactor design, then building a prototype reactor called Infinity One as well as designing a pilot reactor by 2030. According to Mowry, “When Infinity One operates and we test it, it’s actually verifying the key design aspects of the pilot plant.”
Wisconsin’s presence in the nuclear fusion industry began with the founding in 1971 of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Realta’s Furlong says, “There’s this huge potential to marry Wisconsin’s manufacturing capabilities with its research capabilities and create this new industry which could just generate a huge economic engine for the state.”
Furlong added, “What Detroit was for the global automobile industry in the 1950s, what Houston is today in the global oil and gas sector … I can see Wisconsin being the global hub for the fusion industry in the 21st Century.” And SHINE CEO Greg Piefer says, “I think the thing we all agree on … is that an advanced society will make its energy from fusion.”
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Thorium Liquid Salts cooled reactors can provide abundant inexpensive safe power…..now.
Yes but it also produces nuclear bomb material. I am becoming convinced that the real reason the West hates nuclear power is that it doesn’t want other nations to develop nuclear weapons…which is inevitable with access to plutonium or enriched uranium.
Breeder reactors, which “recovered” uranium fuel rods, were banned specifically because plutonium was a byproduct.
The west that hates nuclear power is the west that hates itself. It also hates fossil fuels, colonialism, capitalism and limited government, to name a few things.
My understanding of thorium reactors is that they can’t produce bomb material. It’s the U238 in the uranium reactors that can capture a neutron and turn into Pu239 which is used to make bombs. Th232 captures a neutron and is converted to U233 which will fission to produce energy, but is not useful for bombs.
Wiki specifically notes that thorium reactors produce less plutonium, not no plutonium. Less just means you have to run it longer and process more – you still end up with bomb material.
The problems with fusion reactors are many. That is why they have not been brought of the research stage for decades.
One problem is that the high energy neutrons that are produced are not affected by magnetic fields. They poison everything.
Another is that the energy required to make strong enough magnetic fields is huge.
My solution?
Abandon the hope of “no waste” and make a pulse fusion reactor with the radioactive waste blown out of the system at high energy. Generate the magnetic fields by spinning the magnets around the core making an unstable knot of fields. This will briefly make a very tightly and strongly contained region for plasma. At this point blast the three lasers. Light being one of the few things quick enough to reach the target before the fields collapse.
Make a plasma under high pressure then let it all flow out as the fields disperse. Preferably through a long tunnel with water outside to absorb the energy.
Will it work? As a source of power, no-one knows.
But will it work as a source of research funding? Tokomaks have done for decades without ever getting anywhere. Still getting the funding. So probably, yes.
That’s modern science.
Once again Focus Fusion gets ignored in these publications, this version doesn’t produce Neutrons and no waste either here is the website:
Focus Fusion Energy Generator
LINK
So Boron 11 plus one proton is converted to Carbon 12. Correct, no neutrons spare.
Very neat on paper.
However, if we have trouble getting the lowest energy fusion reaction to be contained and occur under control, (eg Hydrogen to Deuterium through Helium), then what chance is there of getting a higher energy reaction to work realiably.
Remember, stars start with the low energy reactions FIRST and only go up to the higher energy, (requiring higher gravity containment forces AFTER all the easy fuel is used up).
Until we can control the low energy reactions, this one might be a little more than the 20 years away that we are usually promised.
The above system gets rid of the need to maintain the plasma in an environment, (a good thing), but it doesn’t get rid of the problem of neutron poisoning of the case material at the point of fusion, (where the lasers focus).
It would be good if the fusion could happen in a media that could be dumped as well. That way the media could be selected to absorb the neutrons allowing the case material to be there just to contain the media which is flowing in at one end and out to the water chamber to recover the heat.
I’m guessing that the media would absorb the laser energy and stop the focus needed to ‘ignite’ the hydrogen/deuterium. Pity.
Or…. we could just wait another 20 years. Someone else will do it in that time.
“It would be good if the fusion could happen in a media that could be dumped as well.”
Well, the Mainstream Media could be dumped without anyone caring.
It is becoming more and more clear that fusion research is just subsidy farming.
Magnetic field control of fusion reactions is futile. The above article talks about helium, but how are you going to block gamma rays? Any fusion reaction produces gamma rays; gamma rays will cause damage to the magnets over time, as well as the materials comprising the reactor. Fission produces gamma rays too, but fission reactors do not use magnetic fields for containment.
The sun avoids this problem by using gravity for containment.
Nor are these “one shot” fusion experiments ever going to go anywhere. The entire point of fusion is self-sustainment – a one shot, by definition, is not self sustaining.
Finally, the “production of plasma using high voltage” – this is nothing more than the Birkeland Eyde process with some magnets around it.
Hate to say it, but you really messed up on the problem with fusion, specifically D-T reactions.
The issue is NEUTRONS not gamma rays. Most of the energy of a D-T reaction ends up in the kinetic energy of the neutron (14 MeV), and that is recovered by the neutron scattering off dozens to hundreds of nuclei before being captured. Each of these nuclei then have to dissipate the energy imparted by the neutron, often getting knocked out of their position in a crystal lattice or molecule. Needless to say, this doesn’t do a lot of good for material properties.
FWIW, my MS degree is in Nuclear Engineering and the last month of the Materials class was devoted to lectures by UofWisc’s professor Kulcinski.
I don’t think fusion research is a waste of time, but it is a very long game. AI was another long game, with more than 60 years of research before it started to pay off.
AI doesn’t exist.
So you are asserting that the helium and gamma ray emissions are not a problem? It is only the neutrons?
Ok, let’s say this is so. Neutrons, by definition, cannot be contained by a magnetic field since they have no charge.
So why the enormous effort, literally decades old and billions of dollars invested, in various magnetic field designs? Why not just surround the fusion reaction or the magnets with control rod material – which is how fission reactors control their neutron problem?
You also did not address gamma rays OR helium. Does the DT reaction or whatever produce both/either? And are these a problem?
If this is the state of fusion nuclear engineering education – I am extremely not impressed.
Next: AI.
AI that exists today is neither intelligent nor useful. What exists today is an algorithm that understands grammar well – it has zero intelligence of any kind as clearly evidenced by numerous examples all over the internet. The only reason anyone thinks it is “intelligent” is because AI/LLM output is primarily plagiarizing off existing internet content.
The problem is that this internet scale plagiarization presumes said plagiarized content is accurate. The scale of LLM use to generate content is quickly becoming a feedback loop of GIGO – Garbage In from LLM hallucinatory and other errors feeding into LLM training data used to train next gen LLMS that then spew garbage out into new content.
This is on top of the already existing GO dynamic of LLMs where they can spew out garbage at any time for any reason because the so called “intelligence” is actually just the interactions of each probability cloud around each part of a sentence – meaning there is literally a statistical guarantee of spewing out garbage, the only question is the rate.
As for useful: LLMs are useful in the sense that dumb lazy people can use it to get error prone results they will blindly accept. Crapification of Google Search encourages this. But the primary use of LLMs is scamming investors out of billions of dollars.
Read Ed Zitron to see some of the more egregious examples, as well as the truly enormous amounts of capital and energy burned to get frankly underwhelming results.
Helium emissions? Helium is an inert non-radioactive gas. The tritium needed for the D-T reactions is more of an issue.
Gamma rays are much easier to shield and they present a much smaller material degradation problem than neutrons. The other problem with neutrons is activation of the materials around the reactor.
While AI is way oversold, there are some useful results coming out of the various forms of AI, which is not just LLM’s.
Another example of a long game is electric motors, the first one was made in 1834, but significant use didn’t start until ca 1880. Having said that, there are a lot more obstacles to overcome for fusion.
One small nit.
The sun does not contain all gamma rays (gravity or otherwise).
One has to wonder what the true definition of subsidy farming is?
Research to gain scientific understanding? Is that a form of subsidy farming?
Grants to develop proof of concept systems? Is that a form of subsidy farming?
Lacking a “pure” definition, I find myself leaning in disagreement to the opening sentence.
That is exactly my point. The sun does not contain the gamma rays but it does not matter because the sun does not use magnetic fields to contain the fusion reactions. As stated, the sun uses gravity to contain the fusion reactions. Thus the gamma rays – which are always emitted and are not at all easily contained – just go out into space.
As for subsidy farming: if there are fundamental structural failures in a line of research, as demonstrated by literally generations of failure combined with tens? hundreds? of billions of dollars of investment – what else should this be called?
Similar phenomena can be seen with cancer research, alzheimer’s research etc etc
Note I am not saying that any and all investment into fusion, cancer, alzheimer’s or other types of research should end. What I am saying is that the demonstrated lack of results shows that there are fundamental errors at the most basic level under existing current paradigms.
In simpler words: there are ample historical examples where massive amounts of money and effort put into fundamentally flawed precepts that guarantee failure. Astrology comes to mind. So do the concepts of “humors” in medicine, “aether” in space, and in the case of Alzheimer’s – the “tangles”.
Unobtanium remains in short supply, so expecting workable power production from fusion remains a distant dream. Don’t get me wrong – in the long run, the depletion of easily extracted hydrocarbons from natural deposits must drive innovation and change. But for now, the more important goal should be to counter the irrational fear of incremental CO2 in the atmosphere. Who knows, maybe fusion will end up being a workable method to directly produce hydrocarbons from CO2 and H2O at low cost. But there are other pathways too.
Energy from burning fossil fuels and fission will afford a rational people ample time and opportunity to develop fusion, or whatever the next advance in energy production might be. Alternatively, an irrational people will exterminate themselves long before the effective depletion of current energy resources. Either way, we’re not going to run out of resources.
Good points. Also, there seems to be more potential for power generation from deep geothermal sources than from fusion. Not that fusion research should be abandoned, though. It may eventually produce a breakthrough.
Since the 1960’s I’ve been hearing that fusion energy was just a couple of decades away
Especially room temperature fusion.
MIke McHenry: “Since the 1960’s I’ve been hearing that fusion energy was just a couple of decades away.”
Progress is being made. Instead of fusion always being twenty years away, recent advancements now indicate that commercial fusion will always be only ten years away.
With many billions of dollars more of investment, it might be possible to reduce the ten-year window to one only half as long, so that commercial fusion is always only five years away.
And, with yet many many more billions of dollars of investment, it might be possible to reduce the five-year window to one only half as long, so that commercial fusion is always only 2-1/2 years away.
And, with yet many, many, many more billions of dollars of investment, it might be possible to ……..
…… disappear up one’s own fundament?
From the 1960s, I’ve been hearing the world will end due to CO2 caused global warming/climate change.
Yes, I know. There was that big excitement about cold temperature fusion as well.
Hyperbole is so addictive, eh?
When I was 24, I got to look in the Ormak reactor. At that time, commercial fusion electricity was 50 years away. I am 74 and it is still 50 years away!
Fortunately, we already know how to boil water. Looking for the fusion energy solution to boil water to spin steam turbines may be a colossal waste of time for energy generation.
ITER is a white elephant. It will never work.
For one man, it began with the explanation and theory behind the Free Electron Laser (FEL) as determined by one Prof. Hermann A. Haus …AND explaining the non-radiation condition of the electron(s) in the shell(s) surrounding the nucleus … one may start with the Hydrogen atom and work from there.
Fusion power
Green hydrogen
Net Zero
Perpetual motion machines
An intelligent and logical leftist
All the above are leftist fantasies.
Science fiction
Move on to the next article.
You left out, the next fantastic solves everything battery.
You forgot CCS.
Touted in the above article:
“. . . but one high school senior has shaken the fusion world by building a nuclear fusion reactor as a high school science project . . . Cesare Mencarini, an Italian studying in the United Kingdom, taught himself to code and how to work with electrical systems . . . His reactor achieved plasma, the fourth state of matter, a crucial step in the fusion process, by effectively using high voltage to heat atoms to the required temperatures.”
Well, good for Cesare, but I highly doubt his device has shaken the “fusion world”. For more than a decade now, people have been able to buy commercial inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) devices that create fusion to in turn provide a continuous stream of high energy neutrons for radiographic inspection and medical purposes (for example, see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306454921002346 and https://indico.ictp.it/event/a13216/session/9/contribution/40/material/0/0.pdf , particularly slides 19, 20 and 54 of this last URL).
Again from the above article:
“Mencarini’s success should be an inspiration to the thousands of scientists affiliated with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) . . .”
Oh, please! . . . this is yet another example of an author failing to do simple background research on a subject he/she is writing about.
BTW, simple commercially-available fluorescent light bulbs also “achieve plasm” (see https://plasmacoalition.org/lighting-plasmas.pdf )
ROTFL
Thought the same thing. “shaken the fusion world” was a bit much. How about “replicated a known process”. In my imagination, Mom and dad payed for the supplies.
I read the whole article carefully and thought “so what’s changed about fusion for energy since 1980?”. Really nothing?
I was thinking 1960’s. I remember the predictions from those days…..
Spent a boatload more money. Moved the event horizon out another 44 years. A lot more “on the cusp” articles that we’re almost there that preceded funding votes.
It now looks as promising as those 100 MPG carburetors in conventional, 1970’s size/weight vehicles. Any day, now! (Before we see the next silly, breathless fusion article.)
Nuclear fusion is the cheese in the m python cheese shop.
they do have some fusion.
(but it’s a bit runny)
Oh, I like it runny! Hand over the fusion with all speed, please, my good man!
I don’t care how excrementally runny it is…
My worry is we will run out of acronyms before fusion is viable.
Not to worry. We can always use fusion concepts to join old acronyms into new ones, thus supplying a near infinite source of new acronyms.
Fusion predictions are just as bad as climate predictions. I remember the fusion prediction when I was a kid, they said there will be fusion in 20 years. That deadline was thirty years ago. I think fusion power generation is a great middle class welfare program.
Yup…fusion energy is only ten years away…as it has been for the past 50 years.
fusion energy, which promises practically unlimited power with no safety hazards with little if any waste issues
No safety hazards?
That much power, that much energy and no safety hazards?
Safety risks can be identified and mitigated through technology, procedures, training and so forth, but never to zero. Minimal, yes. Acceptably low, yes. “Perfection is unobtainium.”
Do not misconstrue this post. I am strongly in favor of nuclear and fusion as energy sources.
While there are lots of points of view on fusion as a technology/solution, what I find the most interesting is the Skunk Works success of Cesare Mencarini.
Truly remarkable what he accomplished. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that many of our most remarkable scientific and technological break throughs came not from organized labs, government funded programs, but from individuals like him.
Back in 2008 another kid (Taylor Wilson, age 14) did the same thing. PopSci said he was the 32nd individual to have built a working fusion reactor at home.
Now you can buy them on-line for under $6,000 USD.
A molecule of deuterium contains 2 protons, 2 neutrons, and 2 electrons. This is the same as one atom of helium. Therefore, I ask this question: How can a molecule of deuterium be changed into an atom of helium with the release of the energy of fusion?
Suppose we have chamber containing a mixture of deuterium (FW=4) and argon (AW=40). We then heat the chamber up to give the argon atoms lots of kinetic energy. A high velocity
argon atom then collides end on with a deuterium molecule and “knocks” one deuterium atom into the other deuterium atom of the molecule forming an atom of helium with the release of the energy of fusion. This would heat up the gas. The hot gas is then pumped through a heat exchanger to generate steam for the turbine which the runs the electrical generator to produce electricity.
Do you guys think we can convince governments and investors to give us a many millions of dollars to develop this process?
Naaah.
The masses are correct but it fails the sensibility test. If you think of the energy released by thermal atoms, eg hot argon, it’s like the energy available from two dodgem cars bumping into each other. Even if you managed to get a golf ball, (hydrogen), directly between them as they collide you wouldn’t have enough energy to lift the golf ball into orbit.
And that’s the problem, the energy required to bring the nucleus of two atoms together is much, much, much higher than the energy needed to bring the electron shells together.
But I do like the idea of applying for grants. We could all draw a salary and drive dodgem cars around with golf balls scattered on the track for hours. All while some grad students map and record the reactions.
Bring on the grants.
emitting energy of 3.15Mj that exceeded the 2.05Mj contribution from the lasers.
While this may be true, and maybe something was learned from it, it certainly is not a path to a fusion reactor. I don’t recall the exact numbers but a very much larger amount of energy went in than came out. Charging those lasers required something like 300 times the energy of the “fusion” reaction output.
Don’t forget the energy to create the vacuum, nor the energy to run the magnets.
I wonder what’s up with these guys:
https://www.helionenergy.com/technology/