Small Tri Alpha news blurp

[crowberry]

Michl Binderbauer writes in a blog post dated January 6, 2020 an overview of the achievements of TAE Technologies over the past years and about the coming ten years. https://tae.com/the-future-looks-bright/

[crowberry]

Corey S. Powell has written the article The Road Less Traveled to Fusion Energy - This privateer is developing a way to power the world with water and borax published on June 3, 2020. The article is a long interview with Michl Binderbauer.

TAE is currently real-estate shopping in Orange County, with the goal of breaking ground this year and beginning test runs in 2023. Copernicus should be powerful enough to ignite deuterium-tritium fusion, but that is not its job; its real purpose is to scout out those unknown regions of high-temperature physics. If TAE’s take on the field-reversed reactor design keeps delivering as expected, then Binderbauer will go all-in on his biggest bet of all: a “two-ish-billion-dollar” proton-boron fusion reactor called Da Vinci. At last, it should hit the magic 3 billion degrees, keep a proton-boron fuel stable, and produce a healthy output of fusion energy.

Da Vinci is intended to mark TAE’s transition from fusion prototypes to commercial fusion energy. It will not be powering anyone’s home, but it will be designed with electricity generation and mass production in mind. From then on, TAE will be relying heavily on companies like General Electric that have deep experience in designing and constructing power plants. “More important than the money is the industrial-scale support,” Binderbauer says. “You’re not building just one machine. You’re thinking about all the next machines, and they should be built by the industrial sector, not by TAE.

http://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/the-ro ... ion-energy

[Skipjack]

Looks like TAE will (as usual) present a flurry (33) of papers at this year's APS meeting.
Here is one of them that sounds interesting:
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DPP20/Session/VP13.4

No news on Copernicus, it seems. I wonder how that is going.

[Munchausen]

Latest results from Norman:
30 ms steady state plasma, 400 eV electron temperature.
From what I understand they have a density of 5x10^12 to 5x10^14 cm^-3.
That is OKish, but not Earth shattering. I was honestly expecting a bit more, especially temperature wise, but maybe they will push it further.
https://tae.com/research-library/

There is a presentation here:

http://firefusionpower.org/fpa_annual_meet.html

The numbers mentioned are:

Density – ne 1-3×1019 m-3
Temperature – Ttot up to 3 keV

[Munchausen]

Looks like TAE will (as usual) present a flurry (33) of papers at this year's APS meeting.
Here is one of them that sounds interesting:
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DPP20/Session/VP13.4

No news on Copernicus, it seems. I wonder how that is going.

From the same presentation:

Design development ongoing

• 10+ keV ion temperature goal
• Hydrogen only operation

Budget and timing

• $250 MM cap-ex
• Construction to begin in 2021
• Commissioning and ops by 2023

[Skipjack]

Seems a bit underwhelming, spec- wise, considering the timeline and cost for this thing...

[mvanwink5]

Gathering data for proving their models, proving controls, not for 'specs'.

There have been comments about avoiding He3 because of permit delays to a project that its use would cause.

Anyone heard timeline for Helion and LM (or heard anything about LM)?

[Skipjack]

Gathering data for proving their models, proving controls, not for 'specs'.

I get that, but considering how much this costs, it is not really as performant as it should be. Plus at some point I would really like to see some neutrons... So at least a Deuterium campaign would be nice, IMHO and pretty much everyone else is doing that.

There have been comments about avoiding He3 because of permit delays to a project that its use would cause.

He3? Why would they do He3?

Anyone heard timeline for Helion and LM (or heard anything about LM)?

Helion have not released any results since they dropped out of ARPA-E Alpha to build the full scale prototype. David Kirtley says that he does not want to release any results or talk about their plans for now. He wants to avoid too much hype. They go badly burned in the past because forward looking statements that assumed perfect funding (among other things) were presented as "will happen" by the media.
Anyway, I made a post in the Helion Energy thread about this and a few other small news items from Helion. So we are not "polluting" this thread too much

Lockheed gave some presentation at APS a couple of years or so ago, IIRC. Progress has been slow and the device has grown considerably. Been really quiet since then. Lockheed still has the project on their website. Personally I have always been rather skeptical of the design. But we will see. Maybe they will surprise all of us.
IIRC, that was their last presentation...
http://absimage.aps.org/image/DPP19/MWS ... 002042.pdf

[Skipjack]

Interesting presentation from "Developing a Regulatory Framework for Fusion Energy Systems".
TAE starts at page 59:
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2109/ML21090A288.pdf
Da Vinci now set to begin operation in 2028. Length of commercial reactor: 80 meters.

[mvanwink5]

Thank you for that link. TAE has been on schedule so this gives a good idea for utilities and regulatory bodies.

[mvanwink5]

https://tae.com/wp-content/uploads/TAE- ... elease.pdf
News release on TAE reaching milestone and new financing of $286 million.

[Giorgio]

https://tae.com/wp-content/uploads/TAE- ... elease.pdf
News release on TAE reaching milestone and new financing of $286 million.

I believe that they are the first private company to ever succeed in getting enough money to complete all the validation steps for their path to fusion.
I just hope that they will not face any issues when they will need to join together all the tech learned from all these different machines. Than again, they have all the data to take the right decisions, so we can only wish them the best of luck and to spend those $286 millions in a wise way.

[RERT]

Anybody shed any light on the impact of the side reaction B11(p,C12)gamma on radiological safety at these plants? I never see mention of this, don’t know why.

[Giorgio]

Anybody shed any light on the impact of the side reaction B11(p,C12)gamma on radiological safety at these plants? I never see mention of this, don’t know why.

If I remember well the B11(p,gamma)C12 reaction occurs in a higher incident energy range and has a low cross section so that gamma emissions can be considered negligible.

[Giorgio]

Anybody shed any light on the impact of the side reaction B11(p,C12)gamma on radiological safety at these plants? I never see mention of this, don’t know why.

Check here, Page 23 to 25:
https://www.oecd-nea.org/janis/book/book-proton.pdf

See the difference in incident energy levels for the Gamma emitting reaction B11(p,gamma)C12 against the B11(p,alpha)Be8 route.

Edited to fix wrong page number