Against the background of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the energy crisis, the world is gradually turning to nuclear energy – new power plants are being built, in particular, in Europe and the USA. However, there is another way to get energy, much more environmentally friendly and powerful than traditional nuclear power plants – it is thermonuclear energy.

The single biggest problem with thermonuclear energy is that there is currently no reactor capable of generating commercial electricity. It is still decades away from launch, but scientists and businesses are working tirelessly to create such a reactor, despite all the crises.

About successes and failures on the path to thermonuclear fusion – later in the material 24 Channels.

Startups, Bezos and the state: What are their projects to create thermonuclear reactors?

As in other areas, there are large-scale projects funded by the state or private initiatives. Among the large ones is the already mentioned ITER, whose participants include India, the EU, China, the USA, Japan and many other countries. And also – the “Global Tokamak for Energy Production” (STEP) announced by the British government in West Burton in Nottinghamshire in 2022. This demonstration reactor is planned to start generating electricity in the 2040s and will be supplied to the British electricity grid.

Fusion Cluster in Culham, Oxfordshire, also operates in Great Britain. Since its founding in 2021, the cluster has grown from a few members to over 200.

Visualization of Tokamak/ITER

In Canada, General Fusion Inc., whose sponsors include the founder of Amazon Jeff BezosThe company, which has raised C$20 million ($14.6 million) from two Canadian government agencies, aims to create technology for a commercial fusion reactor, Bloomberg reported.

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories and the Business Development Bank of Canada each contributed C$10 million in the Series F round for the British Columbia-based company. In total, General Fusion has raised more than C$440 million, with about 75% of that coming from private backers, most notably Bezos.

Where can thermonuclear reaction be used?

In addition to direct energy, thermonuclear reaction is promising for several other areas:

• transport;
• medicine;
• industry;
• nuclear waste.

In transportation, you can use magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) drives, which have been studied since the 1950s. They use an electrically charged fluid to drive a vehicle. The advantage of this technology is that it has no friction and no moving parts, so it does not wear out.

This technology is particularly attractive for maritime transport, as seawater is a much better conductor than freshwater. Since MHD drives are silent, they should significantly reduce noise pollution, which negatively affects the marine environment. In the 1990s, the Japanese company Mitsubishi built the world’s first MHD ship prototype – the Yamato 1. Unfortunately, the program was closed because the ship’s maximum speed was only 15 km/h. However, new technologies should solve this problem.

Yamato 1 / Photo: jpellgen, Flickr

In the 1930s, early atomic scientists discovered that the element boron could be split into lithium and helium by reacting with neutron particles. In 1936, Gordon Locher, a scientist at the Franklin Institute in Pennsylvania, discovered the potential of this reaction to destroy cancer cells. Lithium and helium release energy in the range of about 5 to 9 micrometers, the size of a typical cancer cell. This release of energy destroys the cancer cell.

The challenge for modern technology is to create compact particle accelerators that can be used to produce highly focused neutron beams and thereby destroy cancer cells.In Great Britain, they plan to install experimental devices from the American company TAE Technologies at University Hospitals Birmingham and University College London Hospital.

A spin-off technology from thermonuclear energy could also be used in constructionOne way to induce fusion is to use lasers to compress and heat hydrogen fuel. In the early 2000s, physicist Marcus Roth of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and his colleagues discovered that by pointing lasers at a thin foil, particles in the foil could be accelerated to tremendous speeds.

Markus Roth / Photo: Martina Roth, University of Darmstadt

Roth founded Focused Energy in Darmstadt, Germany, in 2021. His goal is to create a laser system that can accelerate a beam of neutrons to 100 times more intensity than current technologies. This beam can be generated to create an “x-ray” image inside dense materials. The company is in talks with construction companies to use the technology to check concrete structures and bridges for signs of corrosion.

Another Focused Energy Roth project is a contract with the German government to build the first laser neutron source to examine nuclear waste containers.Germany needs to address the decades-long accumulation of nuclear waste after the last nuclear power plant is due to close in 2023. Focused Energy’s visualization system will help identify the contents and condition of waste bins.

I believe that eventually fusion will be a game changer like the steam engine. We will be able to do many things in our society that were never possible before. And it will start by cleaning up a lot of the messes of the Industrial Revolution.
– The Guardian quotes Markus Roth.

What is the purpose of mayonnaise?

In August, the media broke the news about how scientists used mayonnaise to study a thermonuclear reaction. The authors of this experiment are Arindam Banerjee, a professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at Rossin College of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, and his team.

It is useful to explain that fusion is a process that initiates a nuclear fusion reaction by rapidly compressing and heating containers filled with fuel, hydrogen isotopes. Under the influence of high temperature and pressure, these capsules melt and form plasma, which can produce energy.

At these extremes (temperatures), we are talking about millions of degrees Kelvin and gigapascal pressures, which mimic the conditions on the Sun. One of the main problems with this process is that the plasma state creates hydrodynamic instabilities that can reduce the energy output.
Phys.org quotes a scientist.

Banerjee and his team addressed an instability known as the “Rayleigh-Taylor instability” in their first paper on the subject in 2019. It occurs in materials of different densities.

“We use mayonnaise because it behaves like a solid, but starts to flow when exposed to a pressure gradient,” Banerjee explains.

Using sauce also allows you to avoid high pressure and temperature conditions.

For the experiment, Banerjee’s team used a unique, custom-made spinning wheel to simulate plasma flow. As soon as the acceleration reached and passed the critical value, the mayonnaise started flowing. One of the conclusions the scientists got was that the mayonnaise went through various stages of transformation.

If you apply stress to mayonnaise, as in ordinary molten metal, it will start to deform, but if you remove the stress, it will return to its original shape. So there is an elastic phase and then a stable plastic phase. The next phase is when it starts to flow and there is instability.
Banerjee says.

Understanding this transition will help scientists determine when instability might occur, so they can learn to control the state of the plasma so that it remains in a stable plastic phase. The research will also help design fuel capsules that never become unstable.

But more importantly, Banerjee’s team’s efforts should be combined with the results of other researchers.

We are just another cog in this giant wheel of scientists, and we are all working to make nuclear fusion cheaper and more accessible.
– points out the scientist.

By joining forces, scientists from government projects and startups could provide humanity with an inexhaustible source of energy from the stars within a few decades.