On October 17, a project of a thermonuclear reactor will be presented in St. Petersburg, which will be cheaper than modern coal-fired power plants. This project was developed by scientists from the University of Washington (UW).
American specialists will present a project of a new type of reactor in Russia. Perhaps this project will become a step for humanity into a new era of energy abundance, in which there will be no place for bulky and dangerous nuclear power plants and cars with carcinogenic exhaust.
The presentation of the project will take place within the framework of the 25th International Fusion Energy Conference (FEC 2014), which opened in St. Petersburg on Monday, October 13. Speaking about the conference that opened in the northern capital, the head of Rosatom, Vyacheslav Pershukov, stressed that a total of 800 participants were registered at the conference in St. Petersburg. On Monday morning 650 of them arrived in the city, they are representatives of more than 35 countries of the world.
It should be noted that the Russian Federation is hosting this scientific forum for the first time in modern history. This conference is held every 2 years under the auspices of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and is the main platform for discussing promising directions in the study of thermonuclear energy. The first such conference was held in Salzburg, Austria in 1961, the USSR hosted it in 1968, then the conference was held in Novosibirsk. The FEC 2014 conference is organized by the IAEA, Rosatom State Corporation and the Russian government. In total, scientists from 45 countries will take part in the work of the St. Petersburg conference.
The topic raised at the conference is very attractive. The energy of controlled nuclear fusion is seen today as very promising and too good to be true: rapidly decaying radioactive waste, zero emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, practically unlimited supply of fuel. Fusion energy is based on the fusion of hydrogen atoms to form helium. This process involves the release of a huge amount of heat. According to the version, only one glass of water using nuclear fusion is able to produce as much energy as half a million barrels of oil. Moreover, this technology is safer than existing nuclear power plants, the process of which is based on the fission of heavy atoms.
At the same time, a very big obstacle does not allow this type of energy to develop today: the generation of electricity by this method is very expensive. The proposed designs of fusion power plants are not cheap enough to make them more profitable than systems that run on fossil resources (natural gas and coal). However, scientists from the University of Washington are ready to change the current state of affairs. They created an innovative concept for a fusion reactor that would not cost more to scale up to the size of a real power plant than building a coal-fired power plant of the same capacity.
A team of American scientists from UW published their concept of a new type of fusion reactor in the spring of 2014, after which they conducted a series of experiments using a pilot plant called HIT-SI3. Now scientists are ready to officially present their project to the international scientific community. Scientists are going to tell not only about the technical characteristics and features of their reactor, but also about its excellent economic potential. The design of the thermonuclear reactor they represent is much more compact and simpler than all the previously presented projects, in which the plasma was confined using a magnetic field, which was generated by super-powerful magnets.
HIT-Si3
The HIT-SI3 reactor they created builds on existing technologies and generates a magnetic field inside an enclosed space to keep the plasma stable. This reactor can generate power for a long time. The heat of the plasma heats the coolant, which, in turn, drives the turbine of the electric generator. The peculiarity of the new reactor lies in its design called spheromak. In the presented reactor, the bulk of the magnetic fields is generated by electric currents in the plasma itself, which drastically reduces the number of electromagnets, reduces the size and cost of the reactor.
Scientists from UW found that the costs of building a spheromak and a modern coal-fired power plant of similar capacity are comparable. A 1 gigawatt reactor can be built for $ 2.7 billion, and a coal-fired power plant will cost $ 2.8 billion. At the same time, in a thermonuclear reactor, hydrogen serves as the basis for fuel - one of the most common substances in our entire Universe.
At the moment, the viability of the proposed concept of the UW spheromak is being tested on the HIT-SI3 pilot reactor, the capacity and size of which is approximately 1/10 of the output power and the size of an industrial power plant. According to American scientists, it will take years to finalize this prototype to the level of its industrial implementation in production, but the ability of the reactor prototype to maintain plasma stability has already been successfully proven. This is a key problem for thermonuclear power engineering. In the future, scientists are ready to increase the size of the prototype of the reactor, increase the reaction temperature and, accordingly, significantly increase the power output from the reactor.
It is curious to note that the cost of the new project is approximately 1/10 of the cost of the ITER International Experimental Thermonuclear Reactor under construction in France, while the reactor proposed by scientists from Washington can produce 5 times more energy. Russia also participates in the implementation of the ITER project. The sanctions against our country did not affect the participation in this large international project in any way, said Vyacheslav Pershukov, general director of Rosatom. According to the head of the state corporation, in 2014 the participation of the Russian Federation in this project amounted to about 5 billion rubles. According to Pershukov, the budget of each of the countries participating in this project is floating and changes every year depending on the equipment that the country must supply for its implementation.
