[ad_1]
Zap Energy, a fusion energy startup working on a low-cost way to generate electricity commercially, said last week that its researchers took an important step towards testing a system that it believes will eventually produce more electricity than it consumes.
This point is seen as a turning point in solving the world’s energy problem as we move away from fossil fuels. A thriving global industry It pursues various concepts, comprising almost three dozen start-ups and heavily funded government development projects. Seattle-based Zap Energy stands out because its approach – if it works – will be simpler and less expensive than what other companies do.
Today’s nuclear power plants rely on fission, which captures the energy released by splitting atoms. In addition to the intense heat, the byproducts of the process include waste that has remained radioactive for centuries. nuclear fusionOn the other hand, it replicates the process that takes place inside the sun, where gravitational forces convert hydrogen atoms into helium.
For more than half a century, physicists have pursued the vision of commercial power plants based primarily on a controlled fusion reaction that bottled up the sun’s power. Such a power plant would produce many times more electricity than it consumes without radioactive by-products. But none of the research projects came close to the goal. Yet, as fear of climate change grows, there is a growing interest in technology.
“We think it’s vital that fusion become part of our energy mix,” said Benj Conway, president of Zap Energy.
While many competing efforts use powerful magnets or bursts of laser light to compress a plasma to initiate a fusion reaction, Zap is following an approach pioneered by physicists at the University of Washington and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
It relies on a shaped plasma gas, a cloud of energized particles often described as the fourth state of matter, that is compressed by a magnetic field produced by an electric current as it flows through a two-metre vacuum tube. The technique is known as “cut-flow Z-pinch”.
Zap Energy’s “pinch” approach is not new. It may have been observed in the effects of lightning strikes in the early 18th century and has been proposed since the 1930s as a pathway to fusion energy. While compressions naturally occur in lightning strikes and solar flares, the challenge for engineers is to stabilize the electrical and magnetic forces long enough in pulses—measured in millionths of a second—to generate radiation to heat an surrounding curtain of molten metal.
Brian Nelson, a retired University of Washington nuclear engineer and chief technology officer at Zap Energy, said the company has successfully injected plasma into a new, more powerful experimental reactor core. It is currently completing a power supply designed to provide enough energy to allow the company to prove that it is possible to produce more energy than it consumes.
The Zap researchers say that if their system proves to work, it will be much cheaper than competing systems based on magnet and laser confinement. It is expected to cost roughly the same as conventional nuclear power.
Researchers experimenting with the Z-pinch design found it impossible to stabilize the plasma and abandoned this idea, opting for the magnet approach, known as the magnet approach. Tokamak reactor.
Advances in stabilizing the magnetic field produced by flowing plasma, made by physicists at the University of Washington, led the group to found Zap Energy in 2017. The company has raised more than $160 million, including a number of investments from Chevron.
Recent technical advances in fusion fuels and advanced magnets have led to a sharp increase in private investment, according to the Fusion Industry Association. There are 35 fusion companies around the world, and private funding has grown to over $4 billion, including well-known tech investors like Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, John Doerr, Bill Gates, and Chris Sacca. Mr Gates and Mr Sacca have invested in Zap’s latest funding round.
However, there are still skeptics who argue that progress in fusion energy research is largely a mirage and that recent investments are unlikely to translate into commercial fusion systems any time soon.
Last fall, Daniel Jassby, a retired Princeton University plasma physicist, wrote in an American Physical Society news release that the United States is in the midst of another cycle of “fusion energy fever” that has come and gone every decade since the 1950s. He argued that the claims of startups that they are on their way to successfully building systems that produce more energy than they consume have no basis in reality.
“The widespread belief in these claims is only due to the effective propaganda of promoters and lab spokespersons,” he wrote.
Zap Energy physicists and executives said in interviews last week that they believe they have a year to prove their approach can reach the long-sought energy breaking point.
If they do, they will succeed where a series of research efforts dating back to the middle of the last century had failed.
In a series of peer-reviewed technical papers documenting the computer-generated simulations they will soon begin testing, Zap Energy physicists say they advocate the “scaling” power of their approach to produce a steep rise in neutrons.
A power plant version of the system would envelop the reactor core in molten metal moving to trap neutron bursts, resulting in intense heat that would then be converted to steam, which would produce electricity.
Uri Shumlak, physicist and University of Washington professor, co-founder of Zap Energy, said each reactor core would generate roughly 50 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power at least 8,000 homes.
He said their technical challenge now was to verify that they were simulated by the computer. This will include ensuring that the Z-pinch fusion portion of the plasma remains stable and they can design an electrode that can survive the intense fusion environment of the reactor.
Conway said he hopes Zap will be able to quickly prove their concept, unlike large, costly development efforts in the past, such as “building a billion-dollar iPhone prototype every 10 years.”
[ad_2]
Source link