ENERGY
An American fusion company says it has reached a milestone after a successful test of a large magnet. The company hopes to resolve the merger issue and start supplying electricity to the grid in the early 2030s.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is an American start-up company that, like several other players around the world, wants to solve the energy issue with an energy type no one has so far managed to master – fusion.
They are currently building their reactor, called Sparc, in Devens, Massachusetts. Sparc is a tokamak, a bath ring-shaped metal construction that will enclose the fuel plasma itself in which the fusion will take place.
The company has now reached an important milestone, they write in one press release. They have tested a large magnet called the Central Solenoid Model Coil (CSMC) with good results.
Fusion involves combining light atoms into heavier ones, which can release large amounts of energy. Most people trying to achieve this want to fuse the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. For the fusion process to begin, a plasma of the isotopes needs to be heated to a high temperature, over 100 million degrees Celsius.
The plasma needs to be controlled by strong magnetic fields at the same time as it is heated. In a tokamak, there is both a large magnet in the center of the reactor, and surrounding magnets that surround the metal structure in which the plasma is held in place.
It is the CSMC magnet, a model of the one that will be at the center of the Sparc reactor, that the company has now tested. The magnet is an electromagnet built with what the company calls high-temperature superconductors.
The temperature to which the magnet was cooled during the test in order for the conductors to become superconducting is not clear from the press release. During previous tests, the company’s magnets have been cooled down to 20 Kelvin.
The tests by CSMC must have gone well, among other things, a magnetic field strength of 5.7 tesla was reached, which is around 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field, the company writes.
The magnet was tested by employees of the company together with experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Previously, they have carried out tests of the second type of magnet needed for the Sparc reactor, i.e. those that are to be around the bath ring-shaped metal structure.
Now that the second important magnet test has been completed, the company is proceeding with the construction of Sparc. They hope to produce a first plasma in the reactor in 2026 and deliver electricity to the grid in the early 2030s.
Source: www.nyteknik.se
