MIT announces vision for “affordable, robust, compact” fusion power plant
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8134
In 2014, Lockheed Martin claimed to be “restarting the atomic age” with a compact fusion reactor in development. An MIT Technology Review article reported skepticism, including by quoting MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering Ian H. Hutchinson: “It seems purely speculative, as if someone has drawn a cartoon and said they are going to fly to Mars with it.” Now MIT itself is making a claim comparable to Lockheed Martin’s.
Hutchinson’s wisecrack and the MIT announcement call to mind the skepticism of Hyman Rickover, the US naval officer who conceived reactors for warship propulsion and brought them to engineering realization. In 1953 he declared that the “academic-reactor designer is a dilettante” who “has not had to assume any real responsibility in connection with his projects. He is free to luxuriate in elegant ideas.”
Is the MIT team doing more than merely luxuriating in elegant ideas? New York Times online science columnist Andrew Revkin answers with a strong Maybe:
A team of researchers, building on work that began as a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has published a design for an “ARC” demonstration-scale fusion energy power plant that could actually live up to the ambitious adjectives behind the acronym: “affordable, robust, compact.”
Revkin’s link leads to a 14 July paper in Fusion Engineering and Design. Later he amplifies the Maybe:
At IFL Science, Jonathan O’Callaghan sets the right tone with this headline: “You can get cautiously excited about this fusion power ‘breakthrough .’”
The July paper, “ARC: A compact, high-field, fusion nuclear science facility and demonstration power plant with demountable magnets,” begins with this list of highlights:
- • ARC reactor designed to have 500 MW fusion power at 3.3 m major radius.
- • Compact, simplified design allowed by high magnetic fields and jointed magnets.
- • ARC has innovative plasma physics solutions such as inboardside RF launch.
- • High temperature superconductors allow high magnetic fields and jointed magnets.
- • Liquid immersion blanket and jointed magnets greatly simplify tokamak reactor design.
A write-up at MIT News amplifies the Maybe:
Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor — and it’s one that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. The era of practical fusion power, which could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource, may be coming near.
Using these new commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils “just ripples through the whole design,” says Dennis Whyte, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “It changes the whole thing.”
The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma — that is, the working material of a fusion reaction —but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned.
So is MIT doing something more than just luxurating in elegant ideas and inviting the practical-minded scorn of hard-bitten veteran reactor engineers like Rickover? An 11 August piece at IEEE Spectrum ends by echoing the optimism of Revkin’s Maybe:
We should point out, as the researchers do, that “a full engineering design is beyond the scope of the ARC study.” However, there’s no theoretical or technological showstopper preventing an engineering design for an ARC reactor to be developed. If it is, we could see a completed one up and running in as little as a decade.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.