In St. Petersburg, will present the project of a thermonuclear reactor of the future
American experts will present a new type of reactor project in Russia. Perhaps this project will be a step for humanity in a new era of energy abundance, in which there will be no place for bulky and dangerous nuclear power plants and cars with carcinogenic exhausts.
The presentation of the project will take place as part of the 25-th International Conference on Thermonuclear Fusion Energy (FEC 2014), which opened in St. Petersburg on Monday, October 13. Speaking about the conference opened in the northern capital, the head of Rosatom Vyacheslav Pershukov stressed that 800 participants had registered at the conference in St. Petersburg. On Monday morning, 650 of them arrived in the city, they are representatives of more than 35 countries of the world.
It is worth noting that the Russian Federation for the first time in modern stories hosting this scientific forum. This conference is held once in 2 under the auspices of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and is the main platform for discussing promising areas in the field of thermonuclear energy research. The first such conference was held in Salzburg, Austria in 1961, the USSR hosted it in 1968, then the conference was held in Novosibirsk. The organizers of the FEC 2014 conference are the IAEA, the state corporation Rosatom and the Russian government. In total, scientists from 45 states will take part in the St. Petersburg conference.
The topic raised at the conference is very compelling. The energy of controlled nuclear fusion is seen today as very promising and too good to be true: fast-decaying radioactive waste, zero emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, almost no unlimited supply of fuel. Thermonuclear energy is based on the fusion of hydrogen atoms to form helium. This process involves the release of a huge amount of heat. According to the version, only one glass of water using nuclear fusion is able to produce as much energy as half a million barrels of oil. At the same time, this technology is safer than existing NPPs, the operation of which is based on the splitting of heavy atoms.
In this case, this type of energy today does not develop a very big obstacle: the production of electricity by this method is very expensive. The proposed designs of thermonuclear power plants are not cheap enough to make them more profitable than systems that use fossil resources (natural gas and coal). However, scientists from the University of Washington are ready to change the current state of affairs. They created an innovative concept of a thermonuclear reactor, the scaling of which to the size of a real power plant would not cost more than building a coal-fired power plant of the same capacity.
A team of American scientists from UW published their new-type concept for a fusion reactor in the spring of 2014, after which it conducted a series of experiments using a pilot plant called HIT-SI3. Now scientists are ready to officially present their project to the international scientific community. Scientists are going to talk not only about the technical characteristics and features of their reactor, but also about its excellent economic potential. The design of the thermonuclear reactor represented by them is considerably smaller and simpler than all the previously submitted projects, in which the plasma was held by a magnetic field, the generation of which was carried out by superpower magnets.
The HIT-SI3 reactor they created is based on existing technologies and generates a magnetic field inside a confined space in order to keep the plasma in a stable state. This reactor can generate energy for a long time. The heat of the plasma heats the coolant, which, in turn, drives the turbine of the generator. The peculiarity of the new reactor lies in its design called spheromak. In the present reactor, the main mass of magnetic fields is formed by the use of electric currents in the plasma itself, which drastically reduces the number of electromagnets, reduces the size and cost of the reactor.
Scientists from UW found that the costs of building a spheromak and a modern coal-fired power plant of similar capacity are comparable. A 1 gigawatt reactor can be built for 2,7 billion dollars, and a coal-fired power plant will cost 2,8 billion dollars. At the same time in a fusion reactor the basis for the fuel is hydrogen - one of the most common substances in our entire Universe.
At the moment, the viability of the proposed UW spheromak concept is tested on the HIT-SI3 pilot reactor, whose power and size are approximately 1 / 10 of the output power and size of an industrial power plant. According to American scientists, it will take years to finalize this prototype to the level of its industrial introduction into production, but the ability of a prototype reactor to maintain plasma stability has been successfully proven. For thermonuclear energy, this is a key issue. In the future, scientists are ready to increase the size of the prototype reactor, increase the reaction temperature and, accordingly, significantly increase the output power of the reactor.
It is curious to note that the cost of the new project is approximately 1 / 10 of the cost of the ITER International Experimental Thermonuclear Reactor under construction in France, while the reactor proposed by scientists from Washington can produce more energy in 5. Russia also participates in the implementation of the ITER project. Sanctions against our country did not affect participation in this large international project, said Rosatom general director Vyacheslav Pershukov. According to the head of the state corporation, in 2014, the participation of the Russian Federation in this project amounted to about 5 billion rubles. According to Pershukov, the budget of each of the countries participating in this project is floating and changes every year depending on the equipment that the country must supply for its implementation.
Information sources:
http://zoom.cnews.ru/rnd/news/top/uw_predstavit_v_sanktpeterburge_termoyad_budushchego
https://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=2043127&cid=2161
http://ria.ru/atomtec/20141013/1028065409.html
Information