Historic Superconductor Deal Brings Commercial Fusion a Step Closer
Canada Fast-Tracks 1 Million-Bpd Pacific Link Oil Pipeline to Asia Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and… A company based in the United States just got one step closer to making nuclear fusion a reality.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), an MIT offshoot, just inked a deal with a Japanese producer of high-temperature superconductors (HTS) in the largest deal of its kind in history.
The contract is going to bring the company’s tokamak fusion device a step closer to commercial reality at a pivotal point in the global race to unlock the technology hailed as the holy grail of clean energy.
This specialized tape is a critical material for making tokamaks – which control plasma with ultrapowerful magnets – durable, effective, and achievable at smaller and therefore more affordable scales.
“HTS tape allows engineers to build stronger electromagnets within a compact footprint,” Interesting Engineering recentlyreported.
“These intense magnetic fields trap high-energy plasma inside a far smaller vessel, dramatically reducing construction costs and engineering complexity.” Nuclear fusion, the process that powers our own sun, has long been touted assomething of a silver bullet for the clean energy sectoras it is essentially limitless, considerably more powerful than nuclear fission, and leaves behind no hazardous nuclear waste.
While scientists have been working toward achieving the process here on Earth for about a century, the technology remained something of a thought experiment ripped from the pages of science fiction until the last couple of decades.
Now, the technological breakthroughs are piling up, and commercial nuclear fusion seems like it finally may truly be just around the corner.
And companies like CFS are a huge part of the reason why.
Historically, nuclear fusion research projects have been so gargantuan and so costly that only rich governments – or coalitions of rich governments, in the case ofITER– could orchestrate and maintain such projects.
Moreover, not only were early fusion experiments extremely expensive, but they were never going to make money.
But as the science behind nuclear fusion has improved to the point where commercially viable nuclear fusion now seems like an issue of when and not if, private enterprises are now getting involved.
| Product | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Brent Crude | $102.14/bbl | +0.34% |
| WTI Crude | $96.90/bbl | +0.21% |
| EN590 Diesel | $846/MT | +0.18% |
| Jet Fuel A-1 | $1090/MT | +0.55% |
| Mazut M100 | $450/MT | -0.15% |
| Bitumen 60/70 | $470/MT | +0.08% |
| Sulphur Gran 99.5% | $470/MT | -0.44% |
| Urea 46% Gran | $650/MT | +1.12% |
| NPK 16-16-16 | $460/MT | -0.28% |
| Nat Gas TTF | $15.42/MMBtu | +0.92% |
Comments
Post a Comment