Owning a commercial reactor is a matter of generations, not years. This is how César Huete Ruiz de la Lira, a researcher at Carlos III University, sums up the industrial prospects for nuclear fusion. The scientist recalls that the current milestone was initially announced for 2003, then postponed to 2012, and finally reached 10 years later. “However, it’s worth a try. It’s something that could radically change the energy landscape,” he confirms.
Reaction fuels are not uncommon resources: deuterium is extracted from seawater and tritium is from lithium, but small amounts of both will be needed and represent an almost endless supply.
The timeframe given by Kim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore Federal National Laboratory, is as follows: decades. The European fusion roadmap envisions the first prototypes of grid-connected reactors by the middle of this century.
what in the next few years difficulties Will technologies be the most important when it comes to developing this type of energy?
Challenge 1: electricity costs
The most obvious obstacle to the US system is the enormous amount of electricity used to charge the experiment’s lasers: 300 megajoules, so they discharge only 2.01 megajoules on hydrogen. That’s almost 100 times more than the 3.15 megajoules produced by the merger.
LLNL’s lasers are based on ’80s technology tammy mom, researcher at the centre. Newer lasers, especially diode lasers, can achieve much higher efficiency. But there will always be a loss in installing them. Therefore, fusion must generate tens or hundreds of times more energy than lasers to compensate for this electricity cost.
Challenge 2: The price of the capsules
this hydrogen capsules they are the secret of the experiment. Huete estimates that the cost of each is approx. 10,000 dollars. Its production must be perfect so that its contents do not escape during compression. For industrial production, a pellet with a large number of capsules will be needed, which requires a radical reduction in its cost.
The third challenge: the walls of the reactor
During nuclear fusion, a large number of neutrons are released, which bombard the walls of the reactor. Also, hydrogen reaches higher temperatures than inside stars. “If the reaction takes longer, the container will melt,” he says. Jose Aguilar Medinacoordinator IFMIF-GIFTSAn international center located in Granada that aims to solve this problem.
continuous operation
In the LLNL experiment, fusion was induced a hydrogen capsule for a few billionths of a second. In an industrial reactor, such reactions must be produced continuously, with the rapid reloading of lasers and the constant supply of new capsules. This requires high-power pulsed lasers, full-speed capsule production or synchronization systems that are not currently available.
Source: Informacion
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