There is at least one good reason for hope: the sheer variety of approaches being pursued to make the technology work in the private sector
General Fusion is not alone. On February 10th Tokamak Energy, a British firm, announced plans for a quarter-scale prototype, the80, also at Culham. And in 2024 they will be joined there by Machine 4, a pre-commercial demonstrator from another British outfit, First Light Fusion.
Persuading nuclei to fuse requires heat, pressure or both. The pressure reduces the space between the nuclei, encouraging them to meet. The heat keeps them travelling fast enough that when they do meet, they can overcome their mutual electrostatic repulsion, known as the Coulomb barrier, and thus allow a phenomenon called the strong nuclear force, which works only at short range, to take over.
Even with deuterium-tritium fusion there are many ways to encourage nuclear get-togethers. The aim is to create conditions that match what is known as the Lawson criterion, after John Lawson, who promulgated it in the 1950s. He realised that achieving power generation means juggling temperature, density and the time for which the reaction can be prolonged.
A conventional tokamak’s torus resembles a doughnut, but Tokamak Energy’s design looks like a cored apple. This was calculated, in the 1980s, to be more efficient than a doughnut. The calculation was done by Alan Sykes, who then worked onThe efficiency and compactness of Dr Sykes’s spherical layout have been greatly enhanced by using high-temperature superconductor tapes for the coils’ windings. . These offer no resistance to the passage of electricity, and thus consume little power.
Once the fuel has been injected into the cavity inside this cylinder, pneumatic pistons will push the metal inward , collapsing the cavity into a small sphere. That compresses and heats the plasma to the point where it starts to fuse. If this system can achieve ignition, the heat generated will be absorbed by the liquid lithium—whence it can be extracted to raise steam.
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