In a commercial warehouse overlooking the ocean in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, Australia, a startup is trying to recreate the power of a star on Earth Using an “from the inside out” reactor with a powerful levitant magnet at its core. The intention is to advance in the attempt to market unlimited clean energy.
Its goal is to produce nuclear fusion, an Falmost unlimited orma of clean energy Generated by the reaction exactly opposite to the current nuclear energy of the world is based-instead of dividing atoms, nuclear fusion proposes to merge them, resulting in a powerful explosion that can be obtained using the most abundant element of the universe: hydrogen.
Earlier this month, the company opensing Technologies announced that it was able to create overheated plasma at temperatures of about 300,000 degrees Celsius – a necessary step in a long way to produce melting energy.
The company greeted this as a breakthrough. “The first plasma is a really important moment,” said Ratu Mataira, founder and CEO of OpenStar, is “the moment you know everything works effectively.”
The company took two years and about $ 10 million to get here, he told CNN making it cheap and fast compared to many of the government’s efforts led by the government that dominated the space of melting energy.
OpenStar is one of several startups that are leading the world toward the arrival line of the nuclear fusion, Looking for ways to market the futuristic energy source, even before its viability is proven.
They come with great promises and investment packages – melting companies attracted more than $ 7.1 billion in financing, according to Fusion Industry Association. But experts warn that there is still a long and complex path ahead.
The fusion – the same process that makes the sun and other stars shine – is often called the Holy Grail of clean energy: it is almost unlimited, it does not produce pollution that heats the planet and does not have the problem of long -term radioactive waste that plagues fission, the nuclear technology that the world today uses.
It’s a moonshot, that is, a bold project, to deal with the growing climate crisis a base load energy capable of using existing network infrastructure, it offers what people want: a climate solution that involves little change in the world as it is now.
But recreating it on earth proved terribly complicated.
The most popular technology involves a donut -shaped machine called tokamak which is fed with two forms of hydrogen gas – deuterium, found in seawater, and tritio extracted from lithium.
The temperature within Tokamak reaches 150 million degrees, 10 times warmer than the sun’s core. Under this extraordinary heat, hydrogen isotopes collide within a plasma, causing them to be based on a process that creates huge amounts of energy.
Strong magnetic coils in Tokamak confine plasma, a task that scientists describe as something similar to keeping gelatin together using elastics.
OpenStar technology reverses this, essentially turning to Tokamak inside out. Instead of having plasma inside magnets, he has a magnet inside the plasma.
Its reactor has an extremely powerful magnet by levitating inside a 16 -foot wide vacuum chamber that looks like a steel donut with legs. The design is modeled from plasma in planetary magnetic fields, including Earth’s.
Physicist Akira Hasegawa emerged with the concept in the 1980s, based on his study of plasma around Jupiter. The first machine using these principles was built in MIT, in collaboration with Columbia University, and linked in 2004. But closed in 2011.
“It wasn’t going to climb with the technology they had,” said Mataira. By changing part of this technology and using new types of magnets, OpenStar says they have solved the problem.
The advantage of this reactor is that it is easier and faster to project than a Tokamak, Mataira said. This “allows you to itere quickly and improve performance very, very quickly.” He is also less complex than a Tokamak – which he compares to “building a ship in a bottle” – which means it’s much faster to fix if something goes wrong.
OpenStar, which has raised $ 12 million ($ 69 million) and is now embarking on a much larger financing round, plans to build two more prototypes over two to four years to find out how to climb it and make it viable.
OpenStar is one of several merger companies that have emerged in the last five years, seeking different technologies, said Gerald Navratil, professor of fusion energy and plasma physics at Columbia University.
“The maturity of the countryside is such that now private risk capitalists are willing to invest money to try to see if they can get to the merger a little faster,” he told CNN.
One of the largest commercial ventures, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which uses high temperature superconductors within a tokamak, raised more than $ 2 billion.
Others, such as opening, are exploring more unusual technologies. Seattle -based Zap Energy is trying to build a compact and scalable reactor that doesn’t use magnets, but instead triggers energy pulses into a plasma flow.
The one billion dollar question is still: When will the melting energy ready? OpenStar says six years. Commonwealth Fusion says it can provide the network’s melting energy in the early 2030s. Zap Energy foresees a similar deadline.
Other players are more cautious. UK Atomic Energy Authority, a fusion -developing government, said the merger will probably not become a commercial reality until the second half of this century due to significant scientific and engineering challenges.
Sometimes startups “tend to be a little aggressive in what they promise,” said Navratil. There is a big difference between producing energy from fusion and having a practical system that puts energy on the network and is safe, licensed and operational, he added.
Mataira remains optimistic and confident in the ability of agile startups to take the world farther and faster toward a clean, tempting energy, which for decades seemed out of reach.
“Not all melting companies will be successful, OpenStar can be one of them,” he said, “But we, as a society, we will learn faster.”
This content was originally published in startup advances in an attempt to market unlimited clean energy on the CNN Brazil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
