2030s

Germany is very serious about nuclear fusion. The state of Bavaria, the company specialized in the development of type nuclear fusion reactors stellarator Proxima Fusion, the energy company RWE AG and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) have agreed to collaborate in the development and implementation of the first fusion power plant of type stellarator of Europe. And, presumably, the world. Its strategy seeks to bring this facility into operation in the 2030s with the purpose of demonstrating a net energy gain. This simply means that the reactor should be able to produce more energy than it consumes. Alpha, which is what this demonstration fusion reactor will be called, will be built in Garching, very close to the IPP facilities. However, this is not all. And Alpha will be used to test the technological solutions that will later allow the construction of Stellaris, the first commercial plant of stellarator type fusion energy. The latter will be hosted in the town of Gundremmingen. If the organizations involved in this project achieve their goal over the next decade, Germany will consolidate itself as a world power in fusion energy. Germany firmly believes in ‘stellarator’ fusion reactors Experimental nuclear fusion reactors stellarator They represent a very solid alternative to tokamakas ITER either JET. And they are not exactly the result of recent research. In fact, both designs were designed during the 1950s. He stellarator It was designed by the American physicist Lyman Spitzer and served as the foundation on which the plasma physics laboratory at Princeton University (USA) was built. The design tokamakHowever, it was devised by the Soviet physicists Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm and Andrei Dmítrievich Sakharov based on ideas proposed a few years earlier by their colleague Oleg Lavrentiev. Both reactors were designed with the purpose of confining very high temperature plasmaand, curiously, during the 50s and 60s the design stellarator received great support from the scientific community in the West due to its enormous potential. ‘Tokamaks’ require that magnetic fields be generated by coils and induced by the plasma itself However, when Soviet and American scientists published their results and compared them, they realized that tokamak design performance was one or two orders of magnitude better than that of the stellarator. From that moment on, this latter design was largely marginalized. The most obvious difference between one and the other lies in their geometry, but it is enough to investigate a little about both to realize that the reactors stellarator they still have a lot to say. type reactors tokamak They are shaped like a toroid (or donut), and stellarator They have a more complex geometry that resembles a donut twisted on itself. However, the fundamental difference that exists between these two designs is that the reactors tokamak require that the magnetic fields that confine the plasma be generated by coils and induced by the plasma itself, while in reactors stellarator everything is done with coils. There is no current within the plasma. This means, in short, that the latter are more complex and difficult to build. In Europe we have a type fusion reactor stellarator extraordinarily promising: Wendelstein 7-X. It is installed in one of the buildings of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald (Germany), and its construction was completed in 2015. The first tests carried out in this fusion reactor between 2015 and 2018 went as planned, so in November of this last year an important moment arrived in its itinerary: it was necessary to modify it to install a water cooling system that was capable of more effectively evacuating the residual thermal energy from the walls. of the vacuum chamber, as well as a system that would allow the plasma to reach a higher temperature. The work that required these modifications was successfully completed in August 2022. And in February 2023, the Wendelstein 7-X reactor reached an important milestone: it managed to confine and stabilize the plasma for 8 uninterrupted minutes in which it delivered a total energy of 1.3 gigajoules. During the last two years everything learned in the development and the first tests carried out on this machine has been used by Proxima Fusion. In fact, its founders come from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. If Alpha goes well, commercial fusion energy will be a reality before the end of the next decade. This is the true purpose of Proxima Fusion. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | Interesting Engineering In Xataka | An alternative to ITER in nuclear fusion is being cooked in France: a commercial ‘stellarator’ reactor