AI Controllers & Nitrogen Cooled Magnets Small Scale Fusion Power Plants from the Private Sector Coming to a Power Grid Near You
The value of accidents, The necessity of small bites, & What I am reading
Physics is something I can nerd out to, so I want to share my current mouth breather crush this week. Small scale fusion power plants. A power that is less dangerous than atomic energy as we know it.
It is an accidental discovery that started in the last century with E=MC2. Based on that, someone surmised that it explained how the sun works and could be powerful for both good and bad uses. That led to the atom bomb and then the fusion bomb. Later we developed atomic power plants, which led to the current struggle to create fusion power.
Fusion power has been frustrating. We understand the concept, but the practical use is beyond our current engineering know-how. For the last 70 years, there have been many fusion power experiments worldwide, from Moscow to Mexico. They need to put more power into the investigation than it can produce. Producing more power than the experiment consumes is the end goal. We are so close yet so far.
It must have seemed like a good idea when forty years ago, all the agencies worldwide started to pool resources to create one big push. But unfortunately, they instead committed over a billion dollars into an effort that is now decades away from any meaningful results. Enter the private sector.
One hundred years after realizing that this could be a meaningful effort, the private sector has stepped in, creating new experiments on a small scale. Moreover, the private sector has the money to fund new experiments to bring fusion power online to affect global warming. These recent efforts tackle the problems with budgets in the millions rather than the billions, and it has positive results.
Two experiments made me perk up in my chair based on articles I read last week. The first one has to do with magnets. "These magnets should generate four times as strong a magnetic field and tenfold the power output of any existing fusion experiment, according to the team." It appears on www.sciencealert.com. New magnets have been created that don't require absolute zero temperature to work. That means they can be smaller and cheaper to use. A lab in the United States is breaking ground to create a small-scale fusion power plant to take advantage of the better, more affordable, more powerful magnets. A utility anywhere globally could deploy these small-scale plants where more mainline technology would have limited availability to countries with bigger economies. See the article here. Controlling the plasma is hard. Think of trying to make a snowball wearing mittens and a blindfold. These new magnets, discovered by accident, hold promise as a lower-cost option to make the experiment work.
The second story, also from www.sciencealert.com, has to do with controlling the plasma with artificial intelligence. Currently, experiments with fusion power can not maintain the plasma in a containment field provided by the magnets, as mentioned earlier, for more than a brief moment. It's hard to make a perfect snowball when blindfolded. Moreover, powerful magnets are not enough. The magnetic field needs to be adjusted many times a second. "In a joint effort by EPFL's Swiss Plasma Center (SPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) research company DeepMind, scientists used a deep reinforcement learning (RL) system to study the nuances of plasma behavior and control inside a fusion tokamak – a donut-shaped device that uses a series of magnetic coils placed around the reactor to control and manipulate the plasma inside it." See the whole story here.
I think these two teams should have the "peanut butter in my chocolate" moment. Combine the better magnets with the AI controller and watch the lightbulbs go on.
I have read two space travel books in a row. They had one thing in common. The protagonists were unwilling astronauts who embraced their missions despite not being the ultimate captive audience. How many missions in your life are you dutifully embracing despite not being on board with accepting the task initially? Proxima Rising | Brandon Q. Morris and Project Hail Mary | Andy Weir