The articles, Europapress detailed, explain both the theoretical and empirical basis of the new fusion system. New Energy Times also asked Brandon Sorbom, chief scientific officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. … The UK’s JET reactor achieved an energy gain of 0.67, meaning for every unit of energy put into the system, it generated 0.67 units of energy. If SPARC requires 90 MW of electricity to heat the plasma, and it requires only an additional 10 MW of power to operate the remainder of the machine, the device, at best, will have a net output of zero MW of thermal power from fusion. Superconductor technology for smaller, sooner fusion MIT-CFS team’s demonstration of new superconducting cable is a key step on the high-field path to compact fusion. You may not alter the images provided, other than to crop them to size. "Their publication marks an important milestone on the road to the study of burning plasmas and the first demonstration of net energy production from controlled fusion, and I applaud the authors for putting this work out for all to see. [Note: The second sentence is not true. SPARC is not designed to produce electricity; the output will be measured only in the thermal power produced by the fusion plasma. The plans for the SPARC reactor specify a fusion power output of 50 to 100 MW of heat. MIT and the startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) are currently working to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as … This smaller-faster-cheaper approach is embodied in the SPARC reactor concept, which was developed at the PSFC and forms the foundation of CFS’s aggressive effort to demonstrate energy-gain fusion by the mid-2020s and produce practical reactor designs by the early 2030s. SPARC is planned to be the first experimental device ever to achieve a “burning plasma” — that is, a self-sustaining fusion reaction in which different isotopes of the element hydrogen fuse together to form helium, without the need for any further input of energy. That is unless MIT has secretly developed a revolutionary way to convert electrical power into injected thermal power with a breakthrough level of efficiency. In a June 27, 2019, press release, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a private spin-off from MIT, said it had raised another $50 million from investors, bringing its total fusion reactor funding to $115 million. The new experimental device, called the SPARC (Soonest/Smallest Private-Funded Affordable Robust Compact) reactor, is being developed by scientists at MIT and a … “The big mountain we have to get over is to understand this self-heated state of a plasma.”, "The analysis presented in these papers will provide the world-wide fusion community with an opportunity to better understand the physics basis of the SPARC device and gauge for itself the remaining challenges that need to be resolved," says George Tynan, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California at San Diego, who was not connected to this work. It is designed to achieve a Q factor — a key parameter denoting the efficiency of a fusion plasma — of at least 2, essentially meaning that twice as much fusion energy is produced as the amount of energy pumped in to generate the reaction. European ITER Domestic Agency Removes False Fusion Claims, 46. New Energy Times asked Martin Greenwald, a founding member of the SPARC team and the deputy director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, for that value. Promoters of JET have been guilty of the same omissions.]. The MIT and CFS project is one of the largest privately funded research and development projects ever undertaken in the fusion field. The biggest story in the fusion field these days is the growing amount of money pouring in from private investors. No unexpected impediments or surprises have shown up, and the remaining challenges appear to be manageable. Two and a half years ago, MIT entered into a research agreement with startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant. The first-ever net positive energy gain from fusion. Although the total input electrical power required to operate the SPARC reactor is not evident in any of its public disclosures, the world’s leading engineering university certainly must have a rough idea how much electrical power SPARC is expected to draw before engineers turn the machine on. Senior Market Advisor Falls for ITER Bait-and-Switch, 40. Katie Rae, executive director of The Engine, a program founded by MIT and designed to help spinoff companies bridge the gap between lab and commercial success, explained how that organization’s directors quickly came to unanimous agreement that the fusion project, aimed at developing a demonstration fusion device called SPARC, was worthy of the maximum investment to … Such fusion power plants might significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the power-generation sector, one of the major sources of these emissions globally. The ITER reactor is designed to use 50 MW of injected thermal power to heat the fuel. Greenwald says there is still much to be learned about the physics of burning plasmas, and once this machine is up and running, key information can be gained that will help pave the way to commercial, power-producing fusion devices, whose fuel — the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium — can be made available in virtually limitless supplies. According to the Deputy Director of MIT’s Plasma Science & Fusion Center Martin Greenwald, one of the scientists leading the project, the articles inspire trust in plasma physics and the Sparc performance studies. "The MIT group is pursuing a very compelling approach to fusion energy." MIT and Commonwealth representatives have made public fusion claims that they cannot support. ITER Council Meeting Begins Tomorrow, #59. It was the Italian energy company called Eni. While this is much smaller than the long-predicted perfect fusion reactors, could it be an appealing source of energy? The professors said that SPARC “will carry out the world’s first demonstration of net energy from a fusion experiment — making SPARC the first fusion device to make more power than it consumes.”. The plans specify that the thermal power injected into the center of the reactor, to heat the fuel, will be 30 MW. Two and a half years ago, MIT entered into a research agreement with startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant. The year’s popular research stories include astronomical firsts, scientific breakthroughs, and engineering milestones addressing Covid-19 and other global problems. The first value is the electrical power required to create the 30 MW of thermal heating power. … Net energy gain – where the reactor produces more energy than is put into it – is the end goal of nuclear fusion, with its advocates promising that such a breakthrough would allow for us to produce near-limitless, clean energy at very little cost. New Energy Times asked Greenwald and Sorbom for that value. The SPARC project was launched in early 2018, and work on its first stage, the development of the superconducting magnets that would allow smaller fusion systems to be built, has been proceeding apace. The MIT-led team is developing a “SPARC” compact fusion reactor. The MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center in collaboration with private fusion startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). Sept. 30, 2020. This work is a potential game-changer for the international fusion program​.". The Question Fusion Scientists Don’t Want to Answer, #55. You start with deuterium and tritium, both isotopes of hydrogen. The ARC has a conventional advanced tokamak layout, as opposed to other small … SPARC Underground –IAP 2017 Fusion energy and MIT’s pathway to accelerated demonstration 3 Unfortunately, so does CO 2 production CO2 per person [metric tons] 1 CO2 per person 0.01 100 CO2 per person [metric tons] 0.01 100 0.01 1 100 Many of the fine details are still being worked out on the machine design, covering the best ways of getting energy and fuel into the device, getting the power out, dealing with any sudden thermal or power transients, and how and where to measure key parameters in order to monitor the machine’s operation. The core of the SPARC project was formed over eight years ago during a design course led by Dennis to challenge assumptions in fusion. If SPARC requires 90 MW of electricity to heat the plasma, and it requires only an additional 1 MW of power to operate the remainder of the machine, the device, at best, will have a net output of 9 MW of thermal power from fusion. The SPARC design, though about twice the size as MIT’s now-retired Alcator C-Mod experiment and similar to several other research fusion machines currently in operation, would be far more powerful, achieving fusion performance comparable to that expected in the much larger ITER tokamak being built in France by an international consortium. This series of papers provides a high level of confidence in the plasma physics and the performance predictions for SPARC, he says. Instead, it developed plans for a new reactor that would be funded by private investment. While it will not turn that heat into electricity, it will produce, in pulses of about 10 seconds, as much power as is used by a small city. Starting in 1993, MIT has been running a tokamak reactor called C-Mod only for experi… On the same day as last year’s press release, the Boston Globe published an op-ed article by MIT Vice President for Research Maria Zuber. My Conversation With the Chief Scientist of the ITER Organization, #60. Now she would be working on MIT’s latest fusion experiment, SPARC. On the subject of timescales and commercial viability, SPARC is an evolution of a tokamak design that has been studied and refined for decades, including work at MIT which began in the 1970s. Commonwealth said that, in six years from now, in collaboration with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, SPARC will “demonstrate net energy gain from fusion for the first time in history.”. Limitations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic slowed progress a bit, but not much, he says, and the researchers are back in the labs under new operating guidelines. We believe it’s going to work.”, Writing for The Hill, Martin Greenwald, deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, explores the potential of fusion power. It's … Whyte is the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. The MIT/Commonwealth plan outlines its next two planned reactors, SPARC and its successor, ARC. Dear President Reif, If Dennis G. Whyte, the director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, and Martin Greenwald, the deputy director of the center, had wanted to cheat and use deceptive language to exaggerate their claims of what the next MIT fusion reactor is likely to achieve, they succeeded. Letter to European Commission: False Claims By European ITER Agency, 45. Princeton Lab Anticipates Fusion Breakeven Within Three Years, 51. Fusion Progress and Promises: The First Three Decades, #54. So far, however, the energy put into achieving any form of fusion has been more than the energy that we’ve been able to get out of the system. Avec ITER, Plus ça Change, Plus C’est La Même Chose, 39. Neither of them responded to e-mails or phone messages. The estimated cost of an ARC reactor that matched the ITER-predicted performance was only a few billion dollars—as little as a tenth of ITER’s price tag. The Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) seeks to provide research and educational opportunities for expanding the scientific understanding of the physics of plasmas, and to use that knowledge to develop both fusion power and non-fusion applications. Martin Greenwald, deputy director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. The MIT strategy goes back to June 16, 2017, when the MIT news office published quotes from two of its professors, Dennis G. Whyte and Anne White. During that half-century, MIT had developed a reputation for being a leading plasma fusion research center and had trained many of the world’s plasma physicists. If it works, [SPARC] would be the world’s first nuclear-fusion reactor to show net-positive energy gain. Overall, “we’re still aiming for a start of construction in roughly June of ’21,” Greenwald says. In a particularly newsworthy year, news and views from the MIT community made headlines. Leo Rafael Reif President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. March 11, 2019/Molly Lempriere/Power-Technology.com: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has announced that its SPARC reactor could begin producing energy from nuclear fusion by 2025, but it is a small reactor and likely to produce between just 50 MW and 100 MW of power. “Our research confirms that our concept has every chance of working”, recently stated in the New-York Times (relayed by Futurism) Martin Greenwald, deputy director of the Center for Nuclear Fusion and Plasma Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).The concept is that of a so-called “compact” nuclear fusion reactor, called SPARC. False Fusion Claims by Ian Chapman, Head of U.K. Fusion, #57. Zachary Hartwig joined the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering in January 2017 as an assistant professor and holds a co-appointment at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Days later, MIT removed the article. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) was founded in mid-2018 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. The large multi-institutional team of researchers represented in the new set of papers aimed to bring the best consensus tools to the SPARC machine design to increase confidence it will achieve its mission. Commonwealth said that, in six years from now, in collaboration with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, SPARC will “demonstrate net energy gain from fusion for the first time in history.” MIT is partnering with private industry to build the world’s highest-performance, magnets for fusion energy. The ARC design aims to achieve an engineering breakeven of three while being about half the diameter of the ITER reactor and cheaper to build. "​, Overall, Greenwald says, the work that has gone into the analysis presented in this package of papers “helps to validate our confidence that we will achieve the mission. Nov. 6, 2018/Colm Gorey/Silicon Republic: The researchers plan to use this technology to build magnets at the scale required for fusion, followed by construction of what would be the world’s first fusion experiment to yield a net energy gain. Bob Mumgaard, Commonwealth Fusion’s chief executive and one of the company’s founders, said a goal of the Sparc project was to develop fusion in … The authors used cutting-edge simulations, run on powerful supercomputers, that have been developed to aid the design of ITER. The trickiness of using fusion as a form of energy is that, to date, every experiment has yielded net negative energy — meaning more energy goes into heating [the fuel] than comes out for potential use. Fusion Researchers: New Reactor Will Create Power Comparable to Hoover Dam, 50. Overall, says Martin Greenwald, deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and one of the project’s lead scientists, the work is progressing smoothly and on track. In the absence of public funding from U.S. taxpayers, MIT decided not to continue operating the reactor. However, if the reactor achieves its highest expected output — 100 MW of fusion power — and if the researchers do not have secret plans that will enable them to convert electrical power into injected thermal power at an unprecedented efficiency, and if the remainder of the reactor miraculously requires the input of only one MW of electricity, SPARC will produce, in pulses of about 10 seconds, a grand total of 9 MW of fusion heat. MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Validating the physics behind the new MIT-designed fusion experiment. Department faculty, researchers, and students have provided leadership in the interdepartmental efforts of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, which recently launched the SPARC project and houses the tokamak Alcator C-Mod, one of the three major national magnetic confinement fusion research centers in the US. Bio. CFS has assembled a world-class team working to design and build fusion machines that will provide limitless, clean, fusion energy to combat climate change. SPARC is an evolution of a tokamak design that has been studied and refined for decades. The details of the burning plasma “are really novel and important,” he says. That output would be more than twice the power used to heat the plasma, achieving the ultimate technical milestone: positive net energy from fusion. The seven papers explore the specific areas of the physics that had to be further refined, and that still require ongoing research to pin down the final elements of the machine design and the operating procedures and tests that will be involved as work progresses toward the power plant. Studying the behavior of this burning plasma — something never before seen on Earth in a controlled fashion — is seen as crucial information for developing the next step, a working prototype of a practical, power-generating power plant. Then, they hope to develop a 200-megwatt pilot power plant [ARC] that can export electricity to the grid. Founders of Renaissance Fusion Perpetuate ITER Deception. Nevertheless, the value for the total input electrical power required to operate SPARC is important because it will provide a real indication of the progress toward the ultimate technical milestone: practical net power output from a fusion reactor. In February, the sophomore was starting her first Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) project at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), having spent two semesters more theoretically occupied writing algorithms for self-driving cars. Based on established physics, the device is predicted to produce 50-100 MW … Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license. If the conversion efficiency is the same with SPARC, it will require 90 MW of electricity to heat the fuel. Physicist Protests ITER Organization Claims, #62. Had White and Whyte said “fusion device to make more fusion power than it consumes,” their claim would have been misleading but technically legitimate. Making attractive fusion claims that are not falsehoods is difficult to do. SPARC would be the size of existing mid-sized fusion devices, but with a much stronger magnetic field. says Chris Hegna, a professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not connected to this work. Though privately funded, the MIT SPARC team intends to remain fully engaged with the overall national and international fusion programs. That would be the first time a fusion plasma of any kind has produced more energy than it consumed. Whyte replied and said the details were confidential. "They realized the emergence of high-temperature superconducting technology enables a high magnetic field approach to producing net energy gain from a magnetic confinement system. Now, after many months of intensive research and engineering work, the researchers charged with defining and refining the physics behind the ambitious tokamak design have published a series of papers summarizing the progress they have made and outlining the key research questions SPARC will enable. Founders of Renaissance Fusion Perpetuate ITER Deception, Open Letter to the President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Regarding Deceptive Claims by MIT Fusion Scientists, Lockheed Fusion Reactor Lacks Data and Money, LENR -Independent • Informative • Scientific • Decisive. Sept. 29 (UPI) -- For the last few years, scientists at MIT have been working on a fusion research experiment called SPARC and, according to a series of papers -- … The class called it the ARC (affordable, robust, compact) fusion reactor. MIT continues progress toward practical fusion energy, MIT and newly formed company launch novel approach to fusion power, More about MIT News at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, View all news coverage of MIT in the media, Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license, Paper: “Status of the SPARC physics basis.”, Full story via United Press International (UPI), Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Professor and astrophysicist Sara Seager appointed officer to the Order of Canada, States of growth: When and where entrepreneurship has thrived, 3 Questions: Rona Oran and Benjamin Weiss on the ancient moon’s missing magnetism, Validating the physics behind the new MIT designed fusion experiment. In the June 27, 2019, press release, Commonwealth said that SPARC is designed to generate 100 MW of fusion power. Delbert writes that the researchers may be able to get the SPARC reactor online within 10 years by “improving materials and shrinking costs.”. Removing an article from a Web site is easy. Together, the papers outline the theoretical and empirical physics basis for the new fusion system, which the consortium expects to start building next year. CFS’s Sparc machine could pave the way for the world’s first commercial fusion reactor. Coblentz told New Energy Times that 150 MW of electricity would be required to power the radio frequency and neutral beam injection systems that produce the 50 MW of heating power injected into ITER. Massachusetts Institute of Technology77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, USA. This website is managed by the MIT News Office, part of the MIT Office of Communications. White is the head of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department and associate director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Greenwald examines how recent advances in high-temperature superconductors and recent investments in fusion technology from the private sector could “alter the landscape and offer the possibility of a dramatic speed-up in the development of this new energy source.”, Popular Mechanics reporter Caroline Delbert writes that new research by MIT scientists provides evidence that the compact nuclear fusion design they are developing should be feasible. How the Zero-Watt ITER Reactor Was Misleadingly Sold as a 500 Megawatt Reactor, 52. In a series of new papers, MIT researchers provide evidence that plans to develop a next-generation compact nuclear fusion reactor called SPARC should be viable, reports Henry Fountain for The New York Times. Top MIT executives have been involved in the well-coordinated publicity campaign. Only its planned successor, the ARC reactor, is intended to produce electricity. 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