mefi
09.03.2021, 08:07:06
Does the wandering of the fusion desert continues?
A startup chasing the dream of plentiful, safe, carbon-free electricity from fusion, the energy source of the Sun, has settled on a site, timetable, and key technology for building its compact reactor. Flush with more than $200 million from investors, including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy, 3-year-old Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced today that later this year it will start to build its first test reactor, dubbed SPARC, in a new facility in Devens, Massachusetts, not far from its current base in Cambridge. The company says the reactor, which would be the first in the world to produce more energy than is needed to run the reaction, could fire up as soon as 2025.
A startup chasing the dream of plentiful, safe, carbon-free electricity from fusion, the energy source of the Sun, has settled on a site, timetable, and key technology for building its compact reactor. Flush with more than $200 million from investors, including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy, 3-year-old Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced today that later this year it will start to build its first test reactor, dubbed SPARC, in a new facility in Devens, Massachusetts, not far from its current base in Cambridge. The company says the reactor, which would be the first in the world to produce more energy than is needed to run the reaction, could fire up as soon as 2025.
he next few months are critical for the two companies. Following years of modeling and experiments, they are both constructing test magnets to demonstrate the 20-tesla fields they need for a compact device. Commonwealth is in the process of winding a single 2.5-meter-tall, D-shaped magnet, slightly smaller than what’s planned for SPARC. Still, Mumgaard says, when completed in June it will be the largest high-temperature superconducting magnet ever built.
he next few months are critical for the two companies. Following years of modeling and experiments, they are both constructing test magnets to demonstrate the 20-tesla fields they need for a compact device. Commonwealth is in the process of winding a single 2.5-meter-tall, D-shaped magnet, slightly smaller than what’s planned for SPARC. Still, Mumgaard says, when completed in June it will be the largest high-temperature superconducting magnet ever built.
Zdroj: By Daniel CleryMar. 3, 2021 , 7:00 AM,
Physics, doi:10.1126/science.abh3426