Transcript
Thank you very much, John. It’s, uh, delightful to be here. I was an undergraduate at Oxford and, uh, I always get sort of weak knees when I come into these lecture theaters and, um, some wonderful memories of, uh, well Sen’s lectures on quantum mechanics. If any of you had those, they were spectacular. Lots of other.
um, wonderful times. Um, I’m mean, I, you know, we, what did we have for few plasma started plasma unleashed. And, uh, now I’m, I’m supposed to talk about plasma TAed. Um, I’ll talk a little bit about where we are. Um, what is the current status, uh, where we expect to be, and some of the lighting things that are happening, because I’m very excited about the relationship with, uh, Oxford, because as you can see, we have.
Some very bright, young theoreticians who are making a big dent, not just in explaining what’s happening, but in proposing ways, in which we might be able to reduce the cost and scale of fusion. And I think if you ask me, are we gonna have fusion power? I’ll be bold here, which is that I think fusion is possible.
I think where we are with jet and where we’ll go with eat, we’ll demonstrate that you can actually have a self sustained fusion burn in a device. What I don’t know is whether we can do it at a cost that you want to pay for your electricity. And that requires some innovation, some steps forward that require both innovation in technology, innovation, in engineering and innovation in, in, in the science.
Um, so I’m gonna talk about that and how it relates to what we’ve already heard this morning. I won’t give you my normal hard sell on why we should do fusion energy. Most of you probably got it 30 years ago. You also will know the joke. I don’t think I have to repeat the joke because you know it so well.
Um, so, um, anyway, so, um, my basic thing is I’ll talk about what the current plan for the first electricity fusion is. Um, that electricity will be expensive electricity and, uh, it will not demonstrate the, the cost effectiveness. I’ll talk about what eater will do, which is the machine we’re building in Southern France.
You saw a picture of it. It’s very large. Um, and some of the challenges, uh, there, and then I’ll talk about what we’re trying to, to make fusion perhaps, um, cheaper, faster, more effective. Um, one of the problems that you have in developing a technology in which every step is going to cost you 10 billion euros, pounds, whatever, um, is how many steps can you actually make?
A lot of innovation happens in that Edisonian way in which you’ve build something it’s not quite right. You tweak it, you build something else, et cetera, and you can’t do that on the 10 billion scale. Um, so a lot has to be driven by theory and very precise understanding of what the next step will actually be.
Um, the 30 year rule about fusion. I can make it worse than that. We can go back to when it really all started. I mean, we, we can go back all the way to in 1920 saying that the, you know, fusion must be happening in the middle of the sun, but we we’ll come a bit forward from that. When people started to think about.
Whether you could actually use fusion as a power source. And there’s a nice piece of history here. So during the, the bomb project in the second world war, of course, they were thinking a little bit about fusion and famously Edward teller, of course, was not doing his job. He wasn’t working on the atom bomb.
He was working on the H bomb. Um, and people kept getting frustrated with him. But part bit was thinking about, uh, they started thinking about whether you could control the fusion reaction and how you confine it. And when I was a, I was an undergraduate here and then I went and did my PhD in Princeton, and there was always stories around Princeton that Firmi had given a lecture on how to make, uh, a fusion reactor with, um, magnetic confinement.
Um, and he gave it at a famous D mob happy conference that they had at Los Alamos in 1946. It’s a classified con uh, conference at this conference, they decided all the big names who were going back to their universities, decided we should have a conference and everybody should give a talk about what they think is gonna happen in the future.
And the issues that the us government should look at in scientifically and what kind of new ideas need to be worked on. And there should be no notes from this conference, cuz a lot of it was highly classified anyway. And uh, we’ll just talk. Now, um, indeed there are no notes from this conference because if you go to Los Alamos and friends of mines who have access to all the classified files in, in Los Alamos, say there is no record of what was talked about at this conference.
But in fact, there is a record that record was held by the British, because in 1946, we knew that the Americans were gonna cut us out of access to secret information. and we wanted to gather as much as we possibly could at that time. Um, and, uh, archive it and make sure that we had it, uh, under our control.
And this was the possibly the last time that we had access to the inner thinking of what was going on at Los Alamos. So there was a guy, I think his name was Philip Moon. He was a professor at Bermingham for many years in nuclear physics. And he was at this conference. And he was at firm’s lecture. And Firmi talked about the nuclear reactions and what you could do with Thermo nuclear reactions.
Um, obviously one of the things you can do with ther nuclear reactions in enhanced explosive power of a bomb, he talked about that. Um, he, but he also talked about how, how you could confine. Firm and nuclear fuel with a magnetic field and a simple, a simple OID field would not be sufficient. When I went to Princeton, this was known as firm’s the, and nobody knew nobody had actually ever seen where Firmi actually wrote this down that you can’t just take a, so I’d bend it into, into tural solanoid put plasma in it and it’ll be stable.
It doesn’t work. The drifts, the party was just drift right out of it. And Firmi proved it in this lecture. And the only notes we have on it were this classified report that moon took during the day and handed to somebody from some organization at nighttime and they took the notes away and typed them up and you can see it was from many, a, a secret report and it was declassified and it was, this was in, uh, Corots.
Uh, archive at Churchill college and, um, Dan Cleary of, uh, science magazine. Um, I, I told him about this and about how we couldn’t ever find any record of this. And he was digging through Corots notes. He found this, um, it’s in Corot’s notes and it’s also in G you Thompson’s. From those times. So this was firmly talking about it in 1946, but actually by 1946, somebody at Oxford was still thinking about it because Peter Toman was at Oxford in those days, young, um, Australian was Australian, not Kiwi.
Um, and he, he was thinking about whether you could do dium dium fusion in discharges and what you would need to do. Toman was, uh, you know, thought with his hands, uh, type of physicist that they can be very productive. I’m not being theoretically snobbish at this point, but, um, and he hadn’t done many calculations.
And so he was probably a little ambitious about what he actually thought would happen by passing a current through, through a, a tube and et cetera at that time. But he gradually worked his way towards an understanding. Of what you need. And, and it was probably really the, the first actual experiments on ly confined, uh, fusion were in McLaren and laboratory in 46, 47.
Um, and then there was a similar group working at Imperial college and where, and, uh, cousins working under GP Thompson at that time. Um, this was the beginning of magnetic confinement. And at that time, people made these simple estimates as, as Alex showed. That if you didn’t have any turbulence, the confinement time of something that wasn’t very big would be sufficient confinement time, by the way, is the time basically it tapes to go from the middle to the outside of the device and I’ll use it all the time and we always give it the symbol towel.
E if you took your. Ally confined plasma, and you turned off all external sources of heat and an infusion heating, and you let it cool down. This is the time it would take to lose half of its temperature, but it’s also the time it takes heat to diffuse from the middle to the outside on jet. That’s about one second on a, uh, each of it has to be about three, three to four seconds and a reactor about four seconds.
Um, is a typical confinement time with conditions that we know at this time. Um, it was understood right at the beginning and people were very optimistic about fusion in the late forties because they did simple calculations like the ones, um, not, not, not that Alex has taught with simple or anything. It was it, but the simple calculation of the diffusion across a device that was done by people, and here is Lyman Spitzer who.
in the, around about 1950, started to think about magnetic confinement at that time, because there was an announcement that somebody in Argentina had actually done fusion. It was in the front page of the New York times. And, uh, he was a bit surprised by that announcement and he started to do calculations and he came up with the, uh, first design of that three dimensional object.
The Stella, uh, here it is, it’s only, um, the di the tube. It’s a figure of eight, the diameter of the tube is a hundred centimeters. So a meter across the actual plasma had a radius of about 40 centimeters inside that tube. Right. 40 centimeters would be much smaller than jet. Right. And he had done, he, he, this wasn’t just sort of.
Uh, without calculation done detailed calculations of what the, what we call classical diffusion in there, non turbulent diffusion. And he’d come up with this as the size of the device. It was very long. This is, uh, you know, 50, uh, meters around, et cetera. And it was twisted into, uh, figure of eight because he wanted to get arm Furies there that are simple to Royal device with just.
Royal field going around it in one direction would not confine the particles. What he did here was cancel the drifts of the particles. So the particles followed the field line and drifted upwards on one half of the figure of eight. And then they drifted downwards on the other half of the figure of eight.
And those two things canceled each other. And this was Spitz’s design in, um, 1951. Um, by this time Toman had built several. Um, uh, pinch discharges here and everything had moved off to Harwell by that time up the street. Um, oh, by the way, for people who don’t know that thing in Spitz’s hand is a slide rule and oh, and these are journals.
Um, and at Harwell in the mid fifties, we built this device, which was called Zita, which was the biggest to Royal. Pinch. And for many years was the best fusion device out. And it’s very, um, as a, as a leader of a large organization and, and I have to do a lot of PR, um, uh, it’s a, it’s a tary, uh, lesson to read about Zita because at some point due to electric field, in the joints, probably of the vacuum vessel, they were getting energy irons generated inside this.
and those high energy S were producing some fusion neutrons. So Cora got on television and told the world that we would make energy that was too cheap to meter. And then they discovered these weren’t Thermo nuclear neutrons at all. And they were just from stray field acceleration and there was an no way that was scaling.
And I think it was probably the worst moment of Corot’s life. And it certainly set back the fusion cause. Because in fact, Zita was a very good machine and we could have learned probably even more from it, but my lab was commissioned before we realized they were not thermal trons, so good things come. Um, so when’s the first electricity, the jet results of, uh, the late nineties.
Where we almost got to energy break even, and the conditions in the middle of the jet device. When we, when we got 16 megawats out of, it were 230 million degrees. Those conditions are almost identical to what you’re gonna need on eater to actually generate a full fusion burn. So we actually, we produced all the conditions necessary for fusion in that device at that time.
Um, it’s uh, what we didn’t do was sustain the reaction by the fusion process itself, um, that has made us feel that we’re on the right track. And this last two years, we have produced a fusion roadmap that the European commission has said we’ll drive forward program at this point. And the point of that fusion roadmap is to deliver a demonstration reactor in the 2040.
Right. This would be actual produce some electricity at probably quite phenomenal cost for the electricity. And it’s a rather large, and I hate to say this clumsy machine in that it uses only at this point existing technology. And there are some serious issues with this machine. We, but the idea is to put a mission in front of us to actually deliver some electricity.
And then I won’t have to stand in front of people who tell me it’s 30 years away in the. always will be. Um, so this is the plan 2040s, right? To get to there. This machine is very large. In fact, eater is six meters from there to the middle of the plasma. This device may be as large as nine meters between there and there.
These are super conducted magnets, which we hope will produce up to about six te in the middle of the device. um, that’s all a little less than double of what a jet currently has. Um, one of the key issues about this device will be all the power loadings on the walls. And on the device, the neutrons crossing the edge of this device will give something like two megawats per square meter of neutron flux on the wall.
That means every atom inside the steel wall will be moved. 10 times to 20 times a year from its equilibrium position in the LA of the steel and the wall.
Um, the first self sustained fusion burn. This is a bit more certain, this would be eater, um, eater.
I’d love not to talk about eat today. Um, eater is suffering, uh, from some real management issues at the moment. It’s a collaboration between seven large, um, international partners. 45% is paid by Europe. Uh, money coming directly from the European commission, actually 9%. Comes from France and the rest of the 45% from Europe.
And you can see if you know your flags, you can see what the other partners are. Um, this machine is designed to get up to a almost self sustained fusion burn. And one of the questions is we get completely selfs sustained fusion burn, or not. I’ll describe of that is in a moment. Um, it is absolutely at the edge of what we could do in terms of technology at the moment.
These super conducting magnets, which you can see wrapped around the yellow hole, which is where the plasma goes. These are I 10 magnets at four degrees Kelvin producing on magnet, a field of 13.5 Tesla. And in the middle of the plasma 5.2 Tesla because of the one over our, a fall off of the magnetic field, that is pretty much as strong as you can get out of NA 10 at this point.
And so it’s right at the edge of technological capability, the plasma current will be 15 megagrams of current and jet goes up. It can go above four. It can even go above five megagrams, but 15 megagrams is a considerable extension from that the energy stored in the magnetic system of eater is about 40 giga jewels of energy.
That’s equivalent to about 10 tons of T T. Um, it’s power amplification. That’s the amount of power going out compared to the amount going in. The baseline. Target is 10. But I’m gonna show you simulations that show it go to full ignition. And a second, uh, the cost is very useful. Use of the greater than sign is somewhere.
you learn things you see as an undergraduate physicist, useful for life afterwards, the official start date is 2020. You, you, you can hear it from me and I’m prepared to stick my neck out on this one. That it won’t be 2020. It’ll be more like 20, 23. It’s very late. It’s very hard to move projects like this forward and, and to manage projects like this.
And I think as a community, we, we need to up our game. Um, just for those of you have who, who don’t understand roughly what happens in a discharge here? Uh, this is a terrible slide. Isn’t it? Um, you have a tube of plasma. and what you do in that tube of plasma is you en to, um, heat, that tube of plasma is you energize these coils that make a OID solenoid.
So you make a field that goes around the OID direction. So this, this field round like this, you do that with super conducting magnets. So it’s all the time. So the beginning of a shot. Well, actually there is no plasma error or anything you puff in your fuels, deuterium and tritium into the, the hole in the middle, the fields already there.
Then what you do is you swing the Mount of magnet flops going down through the middle. This is done on a transformer winding in the in eater. It’ll just be coils going down through the middle that change the magnetic flux through that loop. That induces, of course, an EMF around that loop. And that EMF is enough to break down the gas of dium Meridium.
And what you get is a current flowing around that loop. Now, the great thing about that current is like current attract. And so if you think of it as a wards of current, the basic. The basic force that holds all of this together. The pinch forces it’s called is the fact that the, like the current going around in the uro direction attracts itself, pulls itself in off the wall.
And it’s the self attraction of currents that pulls the plasma away from the wall and supports the gradient because the middle of this plasma is hot. The edge is cold and it’s pushing out. Right. And you’ve got to have a force that’s pulling in. To hold it together. And that’s the fundamental principle of how the Toma works.
Once you can get it into that state, you can start to heat this plasma, um, up to thermal nuclear temperatures. And I’ll show you how that works in a moment with, um, this is just a picture of the magnetic configuration that that current will produce because you’ve got a field going around the long way.
And the current in the plasma produces a twist in that field. And. Felix showed that and feel lines look sort of like that these are terrible slides and now to focus. So I’m sorry about that. Um, so what that feel does to the particle orbits inside the plasma is this is a picture for instance, of the particle orbits.
And this was what firming actually was doing was showing you what these particle orbits would look like inside an a axisymmetric machine and calculating their drift motion to. And a drift motion. Here’s a particle. This is just, you know, this is something, uh, maybe a first year Oxford undergraduate could do, would integrate the equations of motion for the particle in these fields.
And, uh, then plot it on a nice, uh, picture here. You can see, this is actually the motion of, uh, of an energetic, alpha part, um, in alike field here. Um, because it’s got a nice big fat spiral here. And it’s bouncing backwards and forwards inside here, but remaining confined inside the machine. Um, so that those are the orbits.
Once you get now, as, as you heat the plasma up and the temperature goes up, it collides less and less, and a typical mean free path in jet might be several kilometers, um, before it actually collides with another particle. So it’ll go around the machine many, many times before it actually collides.
So inside here’s here’s that pink bit of the plasma again, inside eater, right? You’ve got a field from the magnetic, uh, uh, field of the coils here of 5.2 Tesla. That’s equivalent to a magnetic pressure of about a hundred atmospheres. So forces really quite large in the coils here, the central temperature of the plasma here.
Um, In a indicative eater shot is in the above 20 kilovolts, 20 kilovolts is about 200 million degrees. Um, and the plasma pressure is about seven atmospheres there. So the hot bed of the plasma is pushing outwards and part of the magnetic pressure is pushing inwards and holding that in place. So that’s fundamentally what, um, is happening inside.
There, um, and the reaction you want to do, I’m gonna go over this again, even though, um, Felix did the reaction you want to do. This is a little gift from God. I used to give a lecture when I was teaching at UCLA about fusioned being tantalizingly close, but sometimes not close enough. And one of the tantalizing things is that this reaction has a spectacularly large cross section.
deuterium and tritium. It’s a hundred times the next largest fusion cross section, which is, um, a, a D helium three, um, tritium plus deuterium coming together. Of course, you’ve got to get them together against the cool repulsion. So they have to Ram together hard enough. And, and for an instance, they make helium five in the spin, three hard state.
J three half state and it’s a resonant interaction. And that’s why you have such a large cross section. And that heli five then splits up into heli four natural helium and a neutron. And the point I’m making here is this is charged and this is not. So in your fusion reactor, you have two different particles, four to the energy because of momentum and energy conservation comes out as a neutron and one fifth comes out as the alpha particle, the heli nuclear.
Right now the heli nucleus is charged. So it stays inside the magnetic bottle. It’s confined by the magnetic field. The neutron. On the other hand, doesn’t see the magnetic field crosses the magnetic field and into the wall of your device. Now, the problem with this reaction, I mean, it’s a gift to have such a large cross section, but the problem is this tri.
A really remarkable nucleus, really? When you think about it, I mean, you know, you’ve got one proton and two neutrons it’s, it’s sort of very asymmetric. Um, tritium doesn’t exist in nature. It has a half life of 12.4 years. So you just don’t find it. You’ve got to make it. And the way to make it is to bomb bared, lithium.
Um, if a neutron hits lithium six, you will get helium and tritium out. And you can take that tritium and you can put it back in and do your fusion reaction with it. So tritium actually isn’t a fuel tritium is only an intermediary because your fusion reactor has to do two reactions. It has to do this one and that one and tritium is produced here, consumed here.
And so it’s not actually a fuel. The fuels are lift him and deuterium. There is a 60 billion years worth of, of, uh, deuterium fuel. If we power the whole planet with fusion in seawater, and there is a thousand years worth of lithium in the Indian mountains in lithium, carbonates in salty Brians in the Indian mountains and there’s 30 million years worth of lithium in seawater.
Um, so it’s very abundant fuel. So. Okay, important point here is your has to have this thing going on at about 250 million degrees or between 150,000,200 50 million degrees. And this going on in your walls to produce your Tridium to go around. This happens in something. We call blankets in the wall where you deliberate put a lithium into the blanket and breed your Tridium in the wall, out to the blanket.
So. In eater, the middle is hot enough that that reaction will be going on at around about five megawats of power per meter cubes of the plasma in the middle of eater. Right. And it’s producing the helium and the neutron from that reaction, helium gets trapped and stays in the plasma. And it has 3.5 mega volts of energy.
The plasma has 20 kilovolts. So that heating goes through the plasma. Heating it up just by collision processes and depositing its energy in the plasma. So that’s about a hundred megawats of heating, um, at full power in eater and the power from the neutrons comes into the wall. We will not breed most of the Tridium for eater, but we will have six panels on the wall with what we should call the, um, um, test blanket modules, six panels on the wall, testing out six concepts for the breeding blanket.
On the wall of eater. And so, uh, Europe has two of those panels. The us has decided not to have a panel on the wall. And one of the other partners has decided not to have a panel on the wall, but basically the partners have experiments on the wall to test their concepts for breeding tritium from lithium in the wall.
Key point here, self heating. If you get enough fusion, a fifth of the power will come out as self heating of the plasma. Um, the, a nice, handy dandy formula for the fusion power per meter cubed of plasma can be expressed in these units where that is the pressure of the plasma in atmospheres. And this is megawats per meter cubed in order to make a power station, you’ve got to get at least megawats per meter cubed.
If not more, otherwise, you’re gonna have to build something the size of Wembley stadium in order to get the gig, walk out. Um, so this is a nice, handy dandy formula that works. It’s an approximation to all the cross sections, but a fifth of that fusion power, right. Which is approximately P squared over 50, has to be balanced by the losses which are proportional.
So the energy in the plasma of the pressure divided by this confinement time. The time that it takes for the, for the, um, turbulence to work the heat out. So this would say, if you want to get self heating, you have to get enough fusion to beat the losses due to turbulence. And if you look at that, and this is a time in seconds, it says you’ve gotta have a confinement time of several in order to be in this self sustained kind of, uh, regime.
That’s just estimation. This is sort of state of the art simulation of eater. This is somebody who’s taken all the models of the turbulent, transport, the heating, et cetera, and put in a great big code to model the whole system of eat. Okay. So this is time along the bottom here, um, in seconds. And let’s see, what’s how happening here.
Oh, and, and fusion power up this side. Now what you do in E is the. Magnets are wrong. The, the coils are on, they’re super conducting they’re on all the time. Basically you put in your deuterium and tritium in here, and you induce the current in the plasma by changing the flux through the middle of the TAs.
So by this time you’ve actually got a plasma going right here, but this asthma is at about 10 million degrees. Thereabouts. It’s what we call Oly heated at this point, at this point here, what this is. Is the heater beams going on, the heater beams on eater are beams of neutral particles that come in from the outside.
They slam into the plasma and they heat the plasma up, um, to the temperatures for fusion. They have to be neutral because if they were charged, they wouldn’t get through the magnetic field. So what you have is you have an Excel that accelerates a charge particle. Then he neutralized the charge particle to send it in as a neutral asset.
on jet. We do that by accelerating negative vines, sorry, positive irons. Get it the right way around. I’m looking at Barry right here. Um, positive vines, and then attaching an electron to it by passing it through a gas and then injecting it into the plasma on eater. They will attach an extra electron of the atom and accelerate it as a negative iron and knock that extra electron off and it’ll come in.
As a negative a as a, as a neutral particle. So what you’ve got here is 70 megawats of power coming into the plasma. As those neutral particles, they slam into the middle of the plasma, get ironized and deposit their energy into the middle of the plasma. Then the temperature on, into shoots up, right. And the temperature on shoots up.
And I think in this case, we’re, we’re getting to about 200, 230 minute degrees. So 20 to 23 kilovolts at this point, by this time the deuterium tritium fusion power has gone up at the beginning. It’s exponential. And then it goes up as a power law. So you can see, it really is dramatic how much fusion power comes up as the, as the temperature goes up.
Well, take the red line for obvious reasons. Um, in the red line, you’ll see the modeling here has relaxation oscillations in the middle of the plasma. We don’t model the turbulence directly here, we take the results of those turbulence codes. We fit them to empirical formulas and we put them into these systems codes.
And so at this point, we go through now what’s happening to the heating is we step down to 50 because by the time you’ve got up to here, the fusion reactions are producing enough heat to be part of the self sustainment of the plasma. And actually what you can do in this red, blue and green case. Is, you can turn off the power of 400 and the plasma will self sustain.
That’s a burning plasma. That’s a plasma in which the fusion itself is providing the heat to keep the plasma hot, to keep it going. And that is what eat really has to do. They’ll tell you, they want to get to Q equals. I’ll tell you what I want them to do is to get to a really properly what we call ignited state of self sustainment.
Like this. This according, this is simulations from Princeton group and a scam two was the one that they considered to have the best model, best models. What they did is they degraded that model and they said, okay, if that model and our uncertainty in the theory is not very good, we, what they did is they, uh, lowered one of the boundary values on the temperature.
And, uh, we got scan free here. The scan free would be exciting, not as exciting as that because it’s still self sustained fusion, no energy in basically energy out. So that’s lovely. But, um, scan four would be disastrous. So what happened in scan? Four scan four is interesting as you produce fusion reactions, you make heli that heli heats the plasma, but it is a pollutant.
It’s diluting your fuel. It’s Ash. It’s the result of fusion reactions. So if the heli builds up, you’ll poison the reaction and the Tama will go out. And if it, so if, if the turbulance does not flush the heli out after it’s slowed down and deposit its energy in there, you will get a buildup of Ash and your Toma will go out.
And in the case of scan four, he turned off the turbulent diffusion of the helium. and what happened is it built up? And then you can see it went out even before you turned off the eating power. Right. We don’t know exactly how determinants will interact with the alpha particles. And that’s something we wish to learn from jet more about in the, in the next few years.
So that’s, that’s the dramatic thing that could happen on eat, eat as an experiment. It’s not a demonstration. It’s an experiment. We think that it’s this kind of behavior we will get to, but we have to be aware that we don’t know everything that we’re doing. Hold the time scale is that really 400, 406, it at full power, you’ll be able to do something in the thousand to 2000 seconds before heating of various components will be too much.
And you have to turn the machine up. So, so what was the, the longest sustained time say object. I’m gonna show you that in a second. Sorry. How about this sustaining fusion here? How look at, from point of view with the DT? Yeah. Well, the plasma, right? Is it about 23 KV? And all the reactions are happening in the tail of the Maxwell.
As often happens in these cases, you don’t want to hit the temperature to be at the peak of the cross section of DT, which is what’s about 60 K um, is the peak because one, you get up there, the radiation from the plasma, it, the best place to sit is a bit lower temperature in the peak of the, of the fusion cross section, because the radiation cross sections are really coming up deeply.
By the time you get to 60 K, they. So the optimum temperature to run at is less than the peak of the actual fusion cross section, because you want to keep the radiation down, particularly the Tron radiation. Sorry. The other thing we mentioned, the voice is mm-hmm . What about the atoms, which are also doing check are the neutral atoms are deteriorated, or you can actually inject, uh, treating.
So you’re just injecting fuel. And the other way we put fuel into it is we make frozen pallet. And we fire them in as, as fast as you can. And they cross before they ablate, they cross a certain distance and that’s how you get dium and tritium into the middle of the plasma. One of the questions we don’t know the answer to this is will the turbulence, differential, transport, tritium, and heat and deuterium differently so that the, we would like to keep 50, 50 dium and tritium everywhere in the Plaza.
But if the dium is better transported by turbulence than the Tridium. Then you’ll end up with not 50 50, and then you won’t have an optimal situation. So lots of questions that we really don’t know the answer to, and one of the reasons that we are going to do another blast, a huge blast of dium tritium inject towards the end of this decade.
And I’m about to describe, describe that, uh, how do we know this will happen? . Barry’s smiling at me. do we know it will happen? We know it will happen partly from empirical extrapolation, from where we are partly from the theoretical models that have been being described and partly from dimensionless, uh, dimensionally similar experiments.
So if you, if you write the R answers in dimensional quantities and you try and produce a jet discharge, that looks like at eat discharge, but just the change. it is in, in the scaling, right? You should be able to understand what the scale up is. Eater is twice the size of jet. So the most important machine in the world by far is the next biggest one to eater, which is jet and jet is the only machine in the world that can currently run in Trium.
Uh, we had one other, which was T FDR in the state. And they weren’t as good as us, so they closed their machine down. Um, but, um, it’s very important in the lead up to eater that we use jet as effectively as possible to reduce the risk in the eater program. The eater program has risks in it, and we can make those less by making sure that on jet, we discover everything necessary going into that.
The extrapolation from jet. Two eater is only a factor of two in size, but it is a regime that we’ve not really been into. So, you know, it, we are using physics as much as possible to predict that performance and we hope we’ll get there. Um, I will say in the laser world, the extrapolation to N from the pre machine Nova was a huge extrapolation.
And one of the problems that the NIF program is having at the moment is that they had nothing in between. and it’s very important at the moment to run jet. This is a picture inside jet at the moment. And, uh, three years ago we replaced the inside wall of jet. So it was understood in 2009, a report to the commission chaired by alre Vagner, who used to be the head of Dessy.
Um, all BRT VA’s committee said it is absolutely important to keep jet running right up to the beginning of, of eat, because what we will learn from jet. Will allow us, uh, to have expertise going into eater operation. Um, but a key thing is to change jet so that it has the same warm materials as eater. And what, what we’ve done is this all used to be carbon on the inside of jet, these tiles, et cetera, all used to be carbon fiber composites.
And this is now brilliant. And this is Tungston down here. This is the, what we call the diverter or the, uh, system at the bottom. And this is the robotic arms, which we did all the work with. so we now can maintain jet entirely from externally. And this is important as we go into Tridium operation again, because once you’re operating with Tridium and the inside of, of jet becomes a hazardous environment and you can’t send people in insight.
So this capability that we’ve developed over the last decade and a half in main maintenance of the machine robotically allows us to go forward. And the key experiments go back to those 1997 experiments, which we call DTE one. Um, when we actually did some fusion power out of jet of considerable we’ve run tritium since then in 2003, but they weren’t full power tritium shots.
Um, this was the, uh, famous shot, 16 megawats here, but you can see two seconds and actually let’s be honest about it. It wasn’t the best of shots. I mean, it’s a fantastic amount of. Of fusion power, but something happened to it right there and it plunged right back down again. Um, and, uh, so it was very transitory in that, and there were about 24 megawats of power going in at that time to get that 16 megawats up a much better shot actually.
And something we’ve used in the, in the prediction is this one on where you turn the machine on, you ramp up the power, you get fusion power, 4.5 megawats and you turn it off. At the end of the shot, you cannot run longer than this. We, because the systems won’t, won’t run it full power for longer than about five or six seconds.
And so that’s really all you can do. This was the best the Americans could do say them wrong. but we’ve been permission to do tricking again. So about a month ago, we launched the project to, uh, reengage all of our treating capability. We still have treat team on site. And we we’ve kept our capability through the years, but now the, the plan is to start treating operation in 2017 and to, uh, break our records.
And what the predictions of the codes say is that we can probably get up to about 20 megawats for about five or six seconds. Uh, it says 2015, because I was promised we could start in 2015 and now it’s 2017. um, so sorry about that, but I think it’s very important to do this because there’s a lot of questions that we don’t know about for the, the tritium operation I’m running out of time.
And so I will move on, um, very quickly question. Can we make it small and cheaper? The problems is 10 minutes. The size of jet, the size of eater are set. By being big enough that the time it takes turbulence to move the hot plasma to the edge and the coal plasma to the middle is three to four seconds.
And if we could go back to almost turbulence free operation, the size of the machine would shrink to tens of centimeters instead of many meters. And, um, it would make a lot of difference in the, in the development of fusion. I think it’s crucial to get to electricity as soon as possible. So I’m fully in support of demo.
And of EITA, but what we need to be doing right now with the more academic side of things is looking to ways to make it smaller, cheaper, faster, et cetera. Um, can’t guarantee anything here, but could we go towards more well re at least reduced tox? And what we’ve done, um, with, with Oxford is to a symbol the best.
I think we now have the best theoretical plasma physics. Fusion plasma physics group in the world here. Um, and this collection I could check in para, um, Michael Barnes, who’s joining from Texas Edmund hock. Who’s at, uh, JRF at Morlin really done some absolute terrific work. And I wanted to just highlight what that was and what we were thinking.
Okay. So the, the turbulence is, is really quite small scale compared to the size of the device. In fact, the typical Eddie size is the size of these Lama radio. It’s a few times that, and it means there are about a thousand EDS in the size of eat, but terms is really small scale. It’s not these big turbulent EDS, et cetera.
It’s this small scale stuff. And how can you change that? Because you’ve got this free energy source, which is it’s hot there, it’s cold there. Can you re really reduce that? Well, one of the things, and, and, and I think I’m gonna skip through this because it’s been covered before. But this to is fully can, there are almost no collisions.
It’s not a fluid, it’s it, it, it’s a collection of charged particles in phase space that makes up a plasma. And so it’s truly a 5g problem. And to simulate on, even on the best computers, simulating in 5g, the best way to make progress is through smart theory and not through big computers, because big computers get you a factor of two every now and again, and smart theory can get you a factor of a thousand.
Every now and again. Um, and the key thing here was to average out all the, all the time scales to make the problem as compact as possible. And then it could go on a large computer. Um, and a key one was this averaging around the motion around the feel lines and to produce for distribution function of charged rings, as opposed to a distribution function of part of.
Um, that reduced it from six dimensions to five dimensions, but also reduced the tying scales that we have to solve on. And that was critical. Those simulations, that the second thing that reduced the num and, and that reduction took down the computational problem by a, about a factor of 10 to the three, about a factor of a thousand.
The second one was this idea of simulating, not the whole plasma at once. But only one correlated volume at a time. And this reduced the size of the volume that you had to solve on your supercomputer. Um, this was another factor of a thousand in the calculation. Um, you’ve seen this before, but the key thing here was an observation of what happened.
This, this plasma is rotating. you think it’s rotating like a smoker? You think it’s a OID vortex doing this, but actually it’s an inverse Barb pole effect. It’s really rotating in the long way round. And because of the striations, it looks like it’s rotating the short way round. Okay. And the middle’s rotating one way and the outside is rotating.
The other way. The mean rotation is being taken out. That rotation turns out to be incredibly important. What it does is it Combs out. The large EDS that want to move lots of hot stuff all the way out, back in again, you can see how they’re being sheered apart by the shear and the rotation. And in fact, this region here, there’s so much Shearer.
There’s almost no Turbin. We observe that in jet. We observe that in Mars is that the, the turbines can be suppressed by the shear and the rotation considerably. In fact, this. Everybody seen the big bang theory. The big bang theory is produced in Los Angeles. And I used to be a professor at, uh, UCLA, uh, before I came back to the, uh, at, to, um, run Cullum.
And, um, we were having a conference. I think a actually Alex was there and, uh, the technical advisor to the big bank theory is Dave Salberg. Who’s a particle physicist at UCLA. And every Monday afternoon, he goes to the, the set of the big bang theory and he writes things on the whiteboard for Sheldon to, um, to, to display.
Um, and, uh, we had been thinking about shared rotation in Tomax, um, and talking about sharing apart the Eddie by stretching them out and how much we could suppress the turbulence by doing that. It’s not obvious that by rotating and sh and producing a shed flow that you make the turbulence better, you might make it worse.
And so there’s all kinds of calculations going on here. But anyway, what Dave Salberg did was to take the whiteboard that was sitting in the physics department there copy down what was on it, and then put it on the whiteboard at the big bang theory. And so that’s an actual still
anyway. Um, can we share away the term of. Well, here’s very interesting calculation. So about three or four years ago, when, um, when Phoenix power came here and Michael Barnes was here and, uh, Edmund hight was just a PhD student. We had a project to say, what would be the optimum she rotation we put into the Plaza.
So along here is the rotation shear in unit you don’t have to care about. And up here is the turbulent heat flu, and we are normally working in a plasma that has a temperature grade in. Of about the, the red curve. And so what you can see is as you increase the, um, rotation sheet, you come to a region here with no turbulence, no turbulent, heat, flux, and no turbines.
We’re about here right now on the mass device at column. If we can get down into this spot here, we should see a dramatic increase in the, in the, uh, quality of the confinement. So there’s a sort of optimum sheer rate here that might be there. So there’s there’s little hints and the plasma sometimes does this.
Sometimes it produces she parts of the plasma where there’s almost no turbines, there’s little hints that having a, having a magnetic confinement device without Turbin is possible. And what we, we need from the theoreticians now is to lead somebody earlier, said, you know, other theoreticians, just, yeah.
Okay. I’m done. Are the theoreticians just explaining the experiments or are they leading the experiment? Here. We want them to lead the experiments. We’re building a new machine at Cullum. It’s an assembly right now. It’ll, it’ll be online this time. Next year. It will rotate at mark one. Um, and we’ll hope to hit that sweet spot.
One more thing. We, you have to rotate that by momentum input and what Felix has shown something quite remarkable. Is that turbulence sometimes can produce glossy shear without there being any momentum input. It transports some ULAR momentum, inwards, some the opposite angular, momentum, outwards, and produces a she rotation inside your device with no net momentum input.
That would be fantastic. It because then maybe we can encourage future fusion, reactions, reactors to rotate on their own. So thank you very much.
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