The difference between SPARC and ARC (which are not acronyms so technically they don't stand for anything) is "the reliability and the lifetime," Mumgaard said. SPARC is "not a commercial system in the sense that you can rely on it for 30 years to sit there and pump out electricity to people who if it's not running, their lights go out," Bob Mumgaard, the CEO of CFS, said on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. Its first fusion power plant, called ARC, is slated to be online by the early 2030's. "This high-temperature superconducting magnet development is an essential achievement for the future success of the SPARC tokamak project and an important milestone on the pathway for their experiment," Rampal told CNBC. The high temperature superconducting magnet demonstrated on Sunday will be used in CFS and MIT's test fusion device, called SPARC, which is already under construction in Devens, Mass., and is and on track to demonstrate net energy from fusion by 2025, the teams said.īrett Rampal, the Director of Nuclear Innovation at the Clean Air Task Force, noted the importance of the superconducting magnets for the start-up to achieve its goals. But "the difference in terms of energy consumption is rather stunning."ĬSF is pre-revenue and has raised more than $250 million from a handful of investors, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the high-profile sustainability investment fund which counts Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Ray Dalio as backers. "The scale and performance of this magnet is similar to a non-superconducting magnet that was used in the MIT experiment that concluded its experiments five years ago," Whyte said. To build the magnets that are able to reach 20 tesla in their experiment on Sunday, CFS and MIT used high temperature superconductors. With advances from across the fusion industry, we're seeing a new, clean, sustainable, always available energy source being born," Holland said. The performance of these magnets gives Holland confidence that CFS and MIT's PSFC will be able to achieve the goal of commercialized fusion. "This magnet will change the trajectory of both fusion science and energy, and we think eventually the world's energy landscape," said Whyte. The scientists and engineers at CFS and MIT's PSFC said the successful performance of their new magnet technology is a key step in their technological development of commercialized fusion. "Nobody - no companies, universities, national labs, or governments - have achieved the goal of break-even fusion to date," Andrew Holland, Chief Executive Officer of the Fusion Industry Association, told CNBC. So far, all of the energy created by fusion reactions is usurped in initiating and sustaining the reaction. So far, no company has been able to achieve net energy fusion.
The new magnet from CFS and MIT is strong enough that when the team builds a its donut-shaped fusion machine, called a tokamak, with these magnets, it will be able to achieve "net energy," meaning that the fusion machine makes more energy that it takes to initiate and sustain the reaction, CFS and MIT's PSFC said.
0 kommentar(er)
