The SPARC experiment would be … White is the head of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department and associate director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. MIT began operating its first experimental nuclear fusion reactor in 1972, funded by and under the auspices of the Department of Energy. That would be the first time a fusion plasma of any kind has produced more energy than it consumed. Study shows ambitious U.S. startups are not in decline — but timing and location matter. The SPARC design, though about the twice the size as MIT's now-retired Alcator C-Mod experiment and similar to several other research fusion reactors currently in operation, would be … Now, after many months of intensive research and engineering work, the researchers charged with defining and refining the physics behind the ambitious tokamak design have published a series of papers summarizing the progress they have made and outlining the key research questions SPARC will enable. The ITER reactor is designed to use 50 MW of injected thermal power to heat the fuel. Physicist Protests ITER Organization Claims, #62. European Commission Leads the Way with Accurate ITER Promises, 47. Studying the behavior of this burning plasma — something never before seen on Earth in a controlled fashion — is seen as crucial information for developing the next step, a working prototype of a practical, power-generating power plant. According to its press release on March 9, 2018, Eni thought its $50 million would go toward the “realization of an experimental net energy fusion device.”, MIT had claimed that SPARC would “produce, in pulses of about 10 seconds, as much power as is used by a small city.”. ITER Is a Suicidal Plan That Would Discredit Nuclear Fusion, Scientist Says, Again, Open Letter To the Chair and Heads of Delegation of the ITER Council, #63. Limitations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic slowed progress a bit, but not much, he says, and the researchers are back in the labs under new operating guidelines. Department faculty, researchers, and students have provided leadership in the interdepartmental efforts of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, which recently launched the SPARC project and houses the tokamak Alcator C-Mod, one of the three major national magnetic confinement fusion research centers in the US. below, credit the images to "MIT.". A credit line must be used when reproducing images; if one is not provided Greenwald examines how recent advances in high-temperature superconductors and recent investments in fusion technology from the private sector could “alter the landscape and offer the possibility of a dramatic speed-up in the development of this new energy source.”, Popular Mechanics reporter Caroline Delbert writes that new research by MIT scientists provides evidence that the compact nuclear fusion design they are developing should be feasible. The SPARC design, though about twice the size as MIT’s now-retired Alcator C-Mod experiment and similar to several other research fusion machines currently in operation, would be far more powerful, achieving fusion performance comparable to that expected in the much larger ITER tokamak being built in France by an international consortium. While it will not turn that heat into electricity, it will produce, in pulses of about 10 seconds, as much power as is used by a small city. “The physics effort is well-integrated with the engineering design. Letter to European Commission: False Claims By European ITER Agency, 45. Delbert writes that the researchers may be able to get the SPARC reactor online within 10 years by “improving materials and shrinking costs.”. New Energy Times asked Martin Greenwald, a founding member of the SPARC team and the deputy director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, for that value. ITER Council Meeting Begins Tomorrow, #59. While it will not turn that heat into electricity, it will produce, in pulses of about 10 seconds, as much power as is used by a small city. The SPARC project was launched in early 2018, and work on its first stage, the development of the superconducting magnets that would allow smaller fusion systems to be built, has been proceeding apace. Omitting the ITER Input Power – Cardozo’s Role, #53. They provided the projected input value for the injected heat into SPARC but not the input electrical value to create that heat or the input electrical value to operate the reactor. In a June 27, 2019, press release, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a private spin-off from MIT, said it had raised another $50 million from investors, bringing its total fusion reactor funding to $115 million. According to the Deputy Director of MIT’s Plasma Science & Fusion Center Martin Greenwald, one of the scientists leading the project, the articles inspire trust in plasma physics and the Sparc performance studies. Such fusion power plants might significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the power-generation sector, one of the major sources of these emissions globally. Fusion Researchers: New Reactor Will Create Power Comparable to Hoover Dam, 50. This work is a potential game-changer for the international fusion program​.". March 3, 2018/Hannah Devlin/The Guardian: The experimental reactor is designed to produce about 100 MW of heat. MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Validating the physics behind the new MIT-designed fusion experiment. Superconductor technology for smaller, sooner fusion MIT-CFS team’s demonstration of new superconducting cable is a key step on the high-field path to compact fusion. Although the total input electrical power required to operate the SPARC reactor is not evident in any of its public disclosures, the world’s leading engineering university certainly must have a rough idea how much electrical power SPARC is expected to draw before engineers turn the machine on. Omitting the ITER Input Power – Martin Greenwald’s Role, 49. If SPARC requires 90 MW of electricity to heat the plasma, and it requires only an additional 10 MW of power to operate the remainder of the machine, the device, at best, will have a net output of zero MW of thermal power from fusion. On the same day as last year’s press release, the Boston Globe published an op-ed article by MIT Vice President for Research Maria Zuber. Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license. Many of the fine details are still being worked out on the machine design, covering the best ways of getting energy and fuel into the device, getting the power out, dealing with any sudden thermal or power transients, and how and where to measure key parameters in order to monitor the machine’s operation. Neither of them responded to e-mails or phone messages. Martin Greenwald, deputy director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Together, the papers outline the theoretical and empirical physics basis for the new fusion system, which the consortium expects to start building next year. Starting in 1993, MIT has been running a tokamak reactor called C-Mod only for experi… SPARC is a tokamak that has been proposed for construction by Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), with funding from Eni, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Temasek, Equinor, Devonshire Investors, and others. “The big mountain we have to get over is to understand this self-heated state of a plasma.”, "The analysis presented in these papers will provide the world-wide fusion community with an opportunity to better understand the physics basis of the SPARC device and gauge for itself the remaining challenges that need to be resolved," says George Tynan, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California at San Diego, who was not connected to this work. It's … Investors in the MIT initiative include Future Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lowercase Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures, Safar Partners, Schooner Capital, Starlight Ventures, Eni, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The MIT/Commonwealth plan outlines its next two planned reactors, SPARC and its successor, ARC. The ARC has a conventional advanced tokamak layout, as opposed to other small … No unexpected impediments or surprises have shown up, and the remaining challenges appear to be manageable. MIT and the startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) are currently working to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as … If SPARC requires 90 MW of electricity to heat the plasma, and it requires only an additional 1 MW of power to operate the remainder of the machine, the device, at best, will have a net output of 9 MW of thermal power from fusion. is developing a conceptual design for SPARC, a compact, high-field, net fusion energy experiment. The calculations at this point show that SPARC could actually achieve a Q ratio of 10 or more, according to the new papers. MIT is partnering with private industry to build the world’s highest-performance, magnets for fusion energy. The first-ever net positive energy gain from fusion. Omitting the ITER Input Power – Bigot and Coblentz’s Roles, #58. During that half-century, MIT had developed a reputation for being a leading plasma fusion research center and had trained many of the world’s plasma physicists. At least the first investor in MIT’s Commonwealth appears to have taken the bait. ITER Claims: Corrections and Retractions, 48. The plans for the SPARC reactor specify a fusion power output of 50 to 100 MW of heat. If the conversion efficiency is the same with SPARC, it will require 90 MW of electricity to heat the fuel. Nov. 6, 2018/Colm Gorey/Silicon Republic: The researchers plan to use this technology to build magnets at the scale required for fusion, followed by construction of what would be the world’s first fusion experiment to yield a net energy gain. Simulations rule out plasmas caused by meteoroid impacts as the source of lunar magnetism, supporting the proposal that the ancient moon generated a core dynamo. Then, they hope to develop a 200-megwatt pilot power plant [ARC] that can export electricity to the grid. It is designed to achieve a Q factor — a key parameter denoting the efficiency of a fusion plasma — of at least 2, essentially meaning that twice as much fusion energy is produced as the amount of energy pumped in to generate the reaction. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, founded in 2018 by MIT scientists, will soon begin its search for construction and engineering firms to help build SPARC… This website is managed by the MIT News Office, part of the MIT Office of Communications. In February, the sophomore was starting her first Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) project at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), having spent two semesters more theoretically occupied writing algorithms for self-driving cars. SPARC is not designed to produce electricity; the output will be measured only in the thermal power produced by the fusion plasma. MIT continues progress toward practical fusion energy, MIT and newly formed company launch novel approach to fusion power, More about MIT News at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, View all news coverage of MIT in the media, Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license, Paper: “Status of the SPARC physics basis.”, Full story via United Press International (UPI), Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Professor and astrophysicist Sara Seager appointed officer to the Order of Canada, States of growth: When and where entrepreneurship has thrived, 3 Questions: Rona Oran and Benjamin Weiss on the ancient moon’s missing magnetism, Validating the physics behind the new MIT designed fusion experiment. My Conversation With the Chief Scientist of the ITER Organization, #60. SPARC would be the size of existing mid-sized fusion devices, but with a much stronger magnetic field. On the subject of timescales and commercial viability, SPARC is an evolution of a tokamak design that has been studied and refined for decades, including work at MIT which began in the 1970s. This series of papers provides a high level of confidence in the plasma physics and the performance predictions for SPARC, he says. SPARC Underground –IAP 2017 Fusion energy and MIT’s pathway to accelerated demonstration 3 Unfortunately, so does CO 2 production CO2 per person [metric tons] 1 CO2 per person 0.01 100 CO2 per person [metric tons] 0.01 100 0.01 1 100 Founders of Renaissance Fusion Perpetuate ITER Deception, Open Letter to the President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Regarding Deceptive Claims by MIT Fusion Scientists, Lockheed Fusion Reactor Lacks Data and Money, LENR -Independent • Informative • Scientific • Decisive. Two and a half years ago, MIT entered into a research agreement with startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant. Katie Rae, executive director of The Engine, a program founded by MIT and designed to help spinoff companies bridge the gap between lab and commercial success, explained how that organization’s directors quickly came to unanimous agreement that the fusion project, aimed at developing a demonstration fusion device called SPARC, was worthy of the maximum investment to … However, if the reactor achieves its highest expected output — 100 MW of fusion power — and if the researchers do not have secret plans that will enable them to convert electrical power into injected thermal power at an unprecedented efficiency, and if the remainder of the reactor miraculously requires the input of only one MW of electricity, SPARC will produce, in pulses of about 10 seconds, a grand total of 9 MW of fusion heat. MIT has not disclosed to the public, and perhaps not to its investors, two other crucial values. … The UK’s JET reactor achieved an energy gain of 0.67, meaning for every unit of energy put into the system, it generated 0.67 units of energy. Two years ago, New Energy Times spoke with Laban Coblentz, the spokesman for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). Founders of Renaissance Fusion Perpetuate ITER Deception. 2016 Survey of Professors on ITER Power Claims, 43. You may not alter the images provided, other than to crop them to size. Top MIT executives have been involved in the well-coordinated publicity campaign. A fusion startup today only needs to show that it has a reactor able to achieve net-positive energy gain—it doesn’t even need to build a full-fledged power plant—to prove itself. The MIT strategy goes back to June 16, 2017, when the MIT news office published quotes from two of its professors, Dennis G. Whyte and Anne White. The ARC design aims to achieve an engineering breakeven of three while being about half the diameter of the ITER reactor and cheaper to build. The authors used cutting-edge simulations, run on powerful supercomputers, that have been developed to aid the design of ITER. Two and a half years ago, MIT entered into a research agreement with startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant. In a particularly newsworthy year, news and views from the MIT community made headlines. That is unless MIT has secretly developed a revolutionary way to convert electrical power into injected thermal power with a breakthrough level of efficiency. CFS’s Sparc machine could pave the way for the world’s first commercial fusion reactor. MIT and Commonwealth representatives have made public fusion claims that they cannot support. “Our research confirms that our concept has every chance of working”, recently stated in the New-York Times (relayed by Futurism) Martin Greenwald, deputy director of the Center for Nuclear Fusion and Plasma Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).The concept is that of a so-called “compact” nuclear fusion reactor, called SPARC. UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that a series of papers by MIT researchers finds that the designs for the SPARC compact nuclear fusion experiment should be viable. Sept. 30, 2020. Days later, MIT removed the article. Leo Rafael Reif President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Had White and Whyte said “fusion device to make more fusion power than it consumes,” their claim would have been misleading but technically legitimate. … The researchers are working towards the goal of having SPARC operational by 2025, with an output of between 50 MW and 100 MW. That output would be more than twice the power used to heat the plasma, achieving the ultimate technical milestone: positive net energy from fusion. Commonwealth said that, in six years from now, in collaboration with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, SPARC will “demonstrate net energy gain from fusion for the first time in history.”. Overall, says Martin Greenwald, deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and one of the project’s lead scientists, the work is progressing smoothly and on track. Nobel Laureate Foresaw ITER is Bait-and-Switch, 2004 Article Reveals, 44. Princeton Lab Anticipates Fusion Breakeven Within Three Years, 51. Promoters of JET have been guilty of the same omissions.]. Pioneer in exoplanet research helped transform the burgeoning field into one of the fastest-growing and most exciting in space science. The large multi-institutional team of researchers represented in the new set of papers aimed to bring the best consensus tools to the SPARC machine design to increase confidence it will achieve its mission. The class called it the ARC (affordable, robust, compact) fusion reactor. Coblentz told New Energy Times that 150 MW of electricity would be required to power the radio frequency and neutral beam injection systems that produce the 50 MW of heating power injected into ITER. Images for download on the MIT News office website are made available to non-commercial entities, press and the general public under a The estimated cost of an ARC reactor that matched the ITER-predicted performance was only a few billion dollars—as little as a tenth of ITER’s price tag. The core of the SPARC project was formed over eight years ago during a design course led by Dennis to challenge assumptions in fusion. In a series of new papers, MIT researchers provide evidence that plans to develop a next-generation compact nuclear fusion reactor called SPARC should be viable, reports Henry Fountain for The New York Times. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) was founded in mid-2018 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “There’s always the question of a little more of this, a little less of that, and there’s lots of things that weigh into that, engineering issues, mechanical stresses, thermal stresses, and there’s also the physics — how do you affect the performance of the machine?”, The publication of this special issue of the journal, he says, “represents a summary, a snapshot of the physics basis as it stands today.” Though members of the team have discussed many aspects of it at physics meetings, “this is our first opportunity to tell our story, get it reviewed, get the stamp of approval, and put it out into the community.”. The year’s popular research stories include astronomical firsts, scientific breakthroughs, and engineering milestones addressing Covid-19 and other global problems. 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