So far, the Compact Advanced Tokamak that uses compressed plasma is completely theoretical. But, if our computer models are correct it should produce much more energy than it consumes. It won’t be next year but one day we could get fusion power plants.
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Fusion is sadly still more of a dream than reality. But there are a lot of people working on making this dream into reality. For example, the team from General Atomics DIII-D National Fusion Facility – the largest research center for researching fusion in the United States designed a concept of a small compact tokamak that could be the pillar for practical fusion power. The key to the success of this tokamak is compressed plasma.
The Compact Advanced Tokamak (CAT) with compressed plasma from the DIII-D team has a diameter of just 8 meters and could produce up to 200 MW of environmentally clean energy after you subtract the energy required to start and run the fusion. If we turn this project into reality then this would most likely be the first fusion power plant capable of producing more energy than it needs to run. Just to give you an example, the current best fusion reactor only produces 67 % of the energy it produces.
The creators of the CAT tokamak used special modeling of fusion physics that allows to reproduce different parameters the fusion reactor might see in the real world.
The models tell us that the key lies in compressing plasma. Not only does it increase the power of the fusion at the same time it also decreases the energy requirements of the whole system leading to further increasing the amount of energy produced. Thus, the CAT tokamak produces more energy than it consumes.
Of course, all of this is known purely from computer models. Nonetheless, the authors of the study say the results do support the viability of compact tokamaks and show that such tokamaks could be an interesting solution for our massive energy needs. The researchers got massive help from the supercomputer Cori and the experts from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that modeled the complex physics for the DIII-D team.
What needs to be said is that the study is, at least for the time being, quite abstract. The goal was to incentivize further research into compressed plasma fusion. And even if they succeed it will take a good number of years before we see such a tokamak and we aren’t even talking about a true fusion power plant.
Sources:
- https://science.osti.gov/-/media/fes/fesac/pdf/2020/202012/DRAFT_Fusion_and_Plasmas_Report_120420.pdf?la=en&hash=0BC10F27FAFFCDF79867E08ECDF762C16434F8D5
- https://www.ga.com/us-researchers-design-compact-fusion-power-plant
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