It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, September 09, 2021
Climate-Driven Impacts Present Risks to Infrastructure Constructed on Permafrost
By Christopher Stevens, in collaboration with The Northern Miner DOWNLOAD PDF
PUBLICATION INFO
Author(s): Christopher Stevens, in collaboration with The Northern Miner
Date: April, 2021
First Presented: The Northern Miner
Type: Article
Mineral exploration and mining companies need to adopt a “proactive approach” to managing the climate-driven impacts on infrastructure built on permafrost, says Christopher Stevens, senior consultant at SRK Consulting (U.S.).
Surface infrastructure, including roads, airstrips, buildings, and tailings dams often relies on permafrost’s frozen state for stability. These structures, however, are becoming increasingly vulnerable to ground warming that causes the permafrost to thaw, which can lead to ground settlement and soil creep.
“Permafrost is not a static condition; it's dynamic and constantly changing,” explains Stevens, a geocryologist with over 18 years of experience working on mining, transportation, and oil and gas projects in the U.S., Canada, Russia, and Greenland.
“It has complex temperature-dependent properties that alter the hydraulic and mechanical properties of the soil. At some sites, ground warming is degrading the permafrost, resulting in deeper seasonal thaw and changes in ground stability.”
Scientists and engineers widely accept permafrost is changing due to climate-driven impacts. Less understood is what these changes could mean for operating mines or the long-term closure of projects located in permafrost settings.
Author(s): Chris O'Brien, Victor Muñoz, Samantha Barnes, and Philippa Burmeister
Date: May, 2021
First Presented: Mining Journal | www.diggingforclimatechange.com
Type: Article
This co-authored article addresses critical risks and opportunities to the mining industry in developing a greener economy.
When the history of the 21st Century is written, the struggle against COVID-19 will take a chapter. After all, it has changed, if only temporarily, the way we live and work. The book, however, will focus on climate change and the action taken to not only save the planet, but humanity.
If history was to judge that action as meaningful and effective, it would show that policy and decision-makers of today in government, industry, and finance understood three critical points.
First, the climate does not respond to emissions immediately. If humanity ceased all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2050, as many countries have committed to, the planet will continue to warm and the climate will continue to change for about 30 years.
Second, unlike almost all other environmental considerations, the impact of GHGs is not local, it is global. The climate does not respond to emission intensity, only total emissions.
Third, the greatest impacts from climate change will be felt in the developing world, jurisdictions with developing infrastructure and burgeoning mining. Successful mining depends on contented stakeholders. Although climate change may open new opportunities, it will also increase risk in the industry as storms intensify and weather patterns destabilise.
With the latest advances in battery technology, fast charging capabilities, and other technologies such as regenerative braking and more efficient battery electric systems, the use of Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) in the mining industry is becoming more advantageous. In 2019, SRK Consulting, performed a BEV analysis for a mine in Colombia. The purpose of this study was to consider an alternative ventilation system design for a previously completed feasibility study in which an all-diesel fleet was planned to be used for the mine. For this study, the mine requested that only the haul trucks and load-haul-dump loaders (LHD) be considered for conversion from diesel to battery electric. All other equipment would be left as diesel as in the previous study. This paper presents the ventilation assumptions which were made to complete this analysis and a discussion of the results. The results of the study showed significant reductions in the ventilation system power and infrastructure requirements with battery electric haul trucks and loaders compared to their diesel equivalents, but these savings depend on the changes implemented and the level of risk willing to be taken for a switch to BEVs.
Climate change remains a critical risk to a wide variety of sectors. To address the concerns many international protocols and agreements have been established to manage climate change and set internationally binding emission reduction targets. The policies and targets are continually being reviewed in line with the latest technical input, but the intent remains to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and mitigate the impacts of climate change through adaptation.
‘Tiger on my farm’: Indian coal mining hub brings new dangers for villagers
Reuters | September 8, 2021 | 8:36 pm EducationAsiaCoal Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve. Credit: Wikipedia
The hillocks dotting the coal hub of Chandrapur are a green oasis in the central Indian region pockmarked with coal mines, where even rain puddles are black and a coal-fed thermal power plant belches smoke into the sky.
Yet locals live in fear of these hills – dunes formed with the sand removed from coal mines and covered by a blanket of green – as they have created a new habitat for tigers and other wild animals responsible for a string of devastating attacks.
Coal mining is more commonly criticised by environmentalists for polluting air and water, degrading landscapes and fuelling climate change than for creating new wildlife habitats.
But Santosh Patnaik, who manages programmes aimed at securing a green and fair transition with New Delhi-based Climate Action Network South Asia, noted the coal industry “has outcomes we don’t really know about yet”.
India is the world’s second-largest coal producer after China, yet supplies are falling short for the needs of its domestic industry and the government is ramping up production.
WITH A DENSE POPULATION OF 1.3 BILLION, INDIA IS VULNERABLE TO HUMAN-ANIMAL CONFLICT AS PEOPLE ENCROACH ON WILDLIFE HABITATS
The impacts are mostly negative for local communities, said Patnaik – from increased poverty and health damage to the human-animal conflict now happening in Chandrapur.
“Human interference is the main reason behind disturbance in the environment – and fossil fuel extraction is posing an existential threat to the entire ecosystem,” he added.
With a dense population of 1.3 billion, India is vulnerable to human-animal conflict as people encroach on wildlife habitats, with Chandrapur especially at risk as its mines are close to a forest, experts said.
Bandu Dhotre, a member of the wildlife board of western Maharashtra state where Chandrapur is located, said the area had seen leopards, bears and now tigers, whose numbers are rising in tandem with species protection efforts.
“They have a conducive habitat, access to water and prey. But people are not foreseeing the future… This will be a big problem,” said Dhotre, founder and president of environmental organisation Eco-Pro, pointing to the hills on a rainy morning.
Chandrapur is home to the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve – one of 50 such reserves in India – and its tiger and leopard populations have doubled to about 85 and 105 respectively in the last decade as conservation efforts bore fruit, officials said.
There is no mining activity in the forest or its buffer zones but mines and power plants have been built on the natural corridors the animals once used to move between forest areas.
Meanwhile, the tree plantations mandated by India’s environmental laws on the dunes – spread over about 2,300 acres (928 hectares) in Chandrapur alone – have inadvertently provided a new habitat for migrating wild animals as their numbers rise.
Villagers living near the hillocks, called overburdens by the mining industry, dare not venture out alone or after dark following attacks on them and their livestock in recent months.
“We feel scared all the time. We have lost cows and buffaloes to tiger attacks on our farms,” said Pankaj Dhingare, a farmer and council member in Khairgaon village, which is located next to an overburden.
“We are bearing losses, when the miners are making a profit. They should compensate us financially, or at least give us work,” said Dhingare, showing a video on his phone of a tiger on a village road the previous night
Not afraid of humans
Less than a mile from Khairgaon, Nisha Umashankar Dandekar, 38, spoke softly of how a leopard pounced at her five-year-old a year ago, digging its claws into her tiny neck and killing her.
“I fainted when I saw her. They took her to the hospital, but she was gone,” said her mother. “This is such a dense forest. I keep thinking if I had not allowed her to play that day, she would have been alive.”
Dandekar lives in the residential complex of the Chandrapur Thermal Power Station (CTPS), its rain-soaked streets lined with vegetation and sign-boards with tiger images, cautioning residents to stay alert.
Following Dandekar’s daughter’s death, trees and shrubs were cleared, street lighting improved and cameras installed to capture animal movement, said CTPS officials.
“This could be a first in the world that tigers are moving in industrial premises. They are moving even in the thermal power plant,” said chief engineer Pankaj Sapate. “We don’t know what to do.”
Local environmentalists said they had only heard stories of tigers and leopards as children.
“Now the tiger is sitting in people’s farmlands,” said Suresh Chopane, president of the Green Planet Society, a Chandrapur-based nonprofit.
“Half the tigers now live in the overburdens. And these tigers are used to jeeps and cars and human presence. They are not scared.”
‘Black gold’
Locals refer to Chandrapur as a hub for “black gold” due to its rich coal reserves – but the name is losing its sheen as livelihood problems mount amid the wildlife attacks.
Daily wage worker Sunil Govinda Lengure, 32, resents the hillock facing his village after a bear attacked him in February, tearing at his skull.
His head still hurts when he tries to lift heavy loads.
“I used to earn 300 rupees ($4) a day but I am unable to do any work now,” Lengure said, standing in front of his one-room shack where he lives alone.
He received 5,000 rupees from local officials to help with his treatment, even as another bear-attack victim in his village was forced to sell his cattle to raise money for his treatment.
In Payali Bhatali village, meanwhile, Suresh Shankar Khiradkar, 59, sat on a cot, his face a mesh of gashes after losing one eye to a bear attack on his farm last month.
His family blamed his predicament on the mining in their backyard, as their village is near a sand hill whose rehabilitation has been stuck in disputes for about a decade.
Manmade habitat
Concerns run deep in Chandrapur, as officials said animals born in manmade habitats could not adjust to forests, meaning a plan to relocate them to parks or tiger reserves may not work.
N.R. Praveen, Chandrapur’s chief forests conservator, said those settled in the overburdens would not find the cattle and prosopsis trees they now rely on for food and shelter elsewhere.
Officials with state-run Western Coalfields Limited (WCL) – which operates 10 mines in Chandrapur – said coal extraction from its four highly productive opencast mines required huge amounts of sand and rocks to be removed and dumped 2-5 km away.
The trees planted on the resulting dunes help curb soil erosion and air pollution, they added.
WCL did not respond to questions on what steps it is taking to prevent human-animal conflict, but officials speaking anonymously said the issue was not related to mining activity.
Dandekar, meanwhile, moved to another block a few months after her daughter’s death but still spots wild animals often.
“We can stay alert, but children will play, right?” she said, calling her 13-year-old son in from the terrace. “This should not happen again, to anyone.”
($1 = 74.2310 Indian rupees)
(By Roli Srivastava; Editing by Megan Rowling)
Li-Cycle to build EV battery recycling plant in Alabama Reuters | September 8, 2021 Construction of Li-Cycle’s Spoke & Hub facility. Credit: Li-Cycle Holdings
Li-Cycle Holdings Corp said on Wednesday it will build a recycling facility in Alabama to process a rising volume of lithium-ion battery scrap in the U.S. Southeast for reuse by electric vehicle manufacturers.
The facility, to be built in Tuscaloosa, aims to tap into an increased focus from EV and cathode manufacturers across the U.S. Southeast, including Daimler AG’s Mercedes and others, on the so-called circular economy in order to recycle battery metals and rely less on new mines. Roughly 5% to 10% of the EV battery manufacturing process produces waste that the Alabama facility will primarily recycle, said Ajay Kochhar, Li-Cycle’s chief executive.
“In the past 5 months alone there has been this emergence of additional battery cell manufacturing plants in the U.S. southeastern corridor, and there’s really no recycling solution in that region yet,” Kochhar said.
Li-Cycle said it has partnered with Univar Solutions Inc to collect battery scrap, including a Mercedes plant also in Alabama, and supply it to its recycling facility, where it will be broken down into component metals. The Toronto-based company plans to spend about $10 million on the facility, which is expected to open by mid-2022 and will be its fourth on the North American continent. Li-Cycle also operates recycling facilities in Ontario and upstate New York. Earlier this year the company announced plans to build a recycling facility in Arizona.
The facility will initially process 5,000 tonnes per year of battery material, bringing the company’s total capacity to about 25,000 tonnes. In time, the Alabama facility’s capacity could double, Kochhar said.
(By Ernest Scheyder; Editing by Richard Pullin)
TEAL PERHAPS; A MIX OF BLUE & GREEN
BP looks to repurpose former oil refinery site for green hydrogen production Energy transition: BP is looking to use the site of its old oil refinery in Kwinana, Western Australia, as a renewable fuels plant that will include the production of green hydrogen Photo: BP
Feasibility study forms part of wider plan to develop a renewable fuels plant at Western Australia's largest industrial cluster
UK supermajor BP is looking at producing green hydrogen at the site of a recently closed oil refinery in Western Australia.
The company revealed Tuesday it is carrying out a feasibility study into the production of green hydrogen at the Kwinana site, south of Perth, which ceased operations as an oil refinery in March this year.
The study forms part of BP's plans to repurpose the former refinery site as an integrated energy hub, with the company looking to develop a renewable fuels plant at the site, also producing sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel.
The Kwinana Industrial Area is the largest industrial cluster in Western Australia, with BP claiming the green hydrogen feasibility study will help progress the decarbonisation of industrial processes in the area by integrating green energy alternatives for existing industrial uses. Demand remains key hurdle to hydrogen's upstream investmentRead more
“For more than 65 years, BP’s Kwinana site has played an integral role in the Kwinana Industrial Area, which is comprised of a diverse range of high emission producing industries, including mineral refineries, power stations, chemical plants and cement works,” BP Australia president Frederic Baudry said.
“We are excited by the role BP’s Kwinana energy hub will play in close collaboration with our partners. BP has a strong track record as an energy provider to the industrial area and has readily accessible land, existing infrastructure including storage and distribution facilities, and a team with extensive operational capabilities and experience.”
The feasibility study is being carried out in partnership with Macquarie Capital, with the company’s co-head for Australia and New Zealand, John Pickhaver, adding: “We are delighted to be partnering with BP in this project as part of our greater commitment to supporting the transition to a low-carbon economy. 'Regional powerhouse': BP sees Australia as ideal location for large-scale green hydrogenRead more
“We believe Australia — and Kwinana in particular — has a number of use cases that support a meaningful green hydrogen industry.”
The Western Australian government is also backing the feasibility study with a A$300,000 (US$223,498) contribution.
“BP's proposal to convert the old Kwinana oil refinery into a green hydrogen hub will help to revitalise Kwinana and bring this facility into a low-emissions future,” Western Australia’s Hydrogen Industry Minister Alannah MacTiernan said.
"We've seen real success off the back of previously funded studies, including our A$375,000 investment into feasibility of ATCO's Clean Energy Innovation Park in early 2020, which went on to secure a A$28.7 million Australian Renewable Energy Agency grant."
The feasibility study at the Kwinana site follows hot on the heels of the findings of a study completed by BP earlier this year which found the production of green hydrogen and green ammonia using renewable energy was technically feasible at scale in Western Australia.(Copyright)
Biden administration waiting for legal opinion before Twin Metals decision
Sunset over Pose Lake, a small lake located inside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on Wednesday he is waiting for a legal opinion before deciding whether to approve Minnesota’s Twin Metals copper mining project, which labor unions support but environmentalists strongly oppose.
“We continue to wait for the Department of the Interior. They have to issue a legal opinion before we know what direction we need to take” at the Agriculture Department, Vilsack told a White House news conference.
The U.S. Forest Service, part of the Agriculture Department, controls the surface land at the site. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, part of the Interior Department, controls the underground copper deposit and must approve plans to extract minerals.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland declined to discuss the project when asked at a congressional hearing this year by U.S. Representative Pete Stauber, a Minnesota Republican whose district includes the mine site.
The proposed underground mine would, if built, be a major U.S. copper supplier as President Joe Biden aims to build more electric vehicles, which use twice as much of the red metal as those with internal combustion engines. Opponents fear the project would permanently mar the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on the U.S.-Canada border.
Twin Metals has said the project can be constructed safely and in a way that boosts the region’s economy.
Vilsack had blocked the Twin Metals project when he served as agriculture secretary under President Barack Obama, only to see that decision reversed by President Donald Trump’s administration.
Vilsack in June said that as part of his deliberations he was trying to balance environmental concerns and economic potential.
Twin Metals, controlled by Chile’s Antofagasta Plc, said in a statement it “looks forward to continuing to constructively engage the administration and advance the environmental review of the project.”
Vilsack has the power to block mining in the region for 20 years, though a bill introduced in the U.S. Congress this year could permanently ban it.
(By Trevor Hunnicutt and Ernest Scheyder; Editing by Matthew Lewis and David Gregorio)
Potash majors interested in reviving Argentine mine, owner says
Bloomberg News | September 8, 2021 | Rio Colorado potash project in Mendoza province. (Image from archives)
Argentina’s Mendoza province is in talks with some of the world’s top producers of potash to revive a mine that requires an investment of as much as $5 billion.
Mendoza — better known for its exports of Malbec wine than its vast mineral wealth — took over the Rio Colorado potash project several months ago after years of wrangling with Vale SA. The Brazilian company pulled the plug in 2013 after spending $2.2 billion to build almost half the mine.
Provincial officials have since spoken to several would-be partners to finally put Rio Colorado into production, signing non-disclosure agreements with five of the world’s biggest producers of the crop nutrient, said Emilio Guinazu, director general of province-owned PRC SA, which holds the asset.
Luring investment to Rio Colorado 15 years after Rio Tinto first sought to develop it would be big win — not only for Mendoza, which has struggled to spur new mines because of environmental opposition, but for the whole country, where onerous business rules including capital controls have scared off investors. Guinazu says now is the time because prices of potash are rallying along with other fertilizers as strong demand from farmers collides with a slew of supply disruptions.
“A window of opportunity has begun to open that we don’t want to waste,” he said in an interview Wednesday.
U.S. sanctions against Belarus potash producers are jeopardizing mine expansion there, while pandemic- and hurricane-related shipping disruptions are slowing fertilizer trade. A decision last month by BHP Group to proceed with the $5.7 billion Jansen project in Canada after years of hesitation underscores the market’s buoyant long-term prospects.
Rio Colorado has potential to produce 4.5 million metric tons a year, similar to Jansen, which would require roughly $5 billion. This version of the project needs 500 miles of train track to be built or upgraded to get the potash to an Atlantic port for export to markets like Brazil.
A more likely scenario, Guinazu said, is to attract $1 billion for annual output of 1 million tons, which could be transported by truck, though Mendoza would be prepared to scale down even further just to get the project off the ground. An investment of $200 million would produce enough fertilizer for Argentina and its small neighbor Uruguay, he said.
The province wants to find an investor that would take a majority stake and operate the mine within 18 months. It’s currently looking for an adviser to guide the search.
Because of risks in Argentina, where markets are often intervened, investors need a strong stomach. But they can also be drawn in by specially-designed benefits. For instance, federal and provincial governments are in talks for legislation for oil and gas drillers in the Vaca Muerta shale patch to be able to increase sales abroad and to free some of those export revenues from capital controls. A similar mechanism is under discussion for miners, Guinazu said.
“Without a doubt, some of the benefits in the oil and gas bill are being studied for mining too,” he said.
MINING.COM Staff Writer | September 7, 2021 | A drilling contractor is facing weather and staffing challenges at Trilogy’s Arctic copper project. (Image courtesy of Trilogy Metals.)
Trilogy Metals (TSX: TMQ; NYSE America: TMQ) says lower than expected drilling productivity due to adverse weather and staffing shortages at its Arctic copper project in remote northwestern Alaska will not detract from the project’s permitting and development timeline.
The project, part of the Upper Kobuk Mineral Projects (UKMP) being managed by the Ambler Metals joint venture between the company and South32 (ASX: S32; LSE: S32; JSE: S32), opened the Arctic exploration camp in May in preparation for a start-up of drilling in June.
THE COMPANY DOES NOT EXPECT THE SHORTFALL IN THE DRILLING PROGRAM TO INFLUENCE THE PERMITTING AND DEVELOPMENT TIMELINE OF THE ARCTIC PROJECT
The drilling contractor deployed three diamond drill rigs in June to conduct 7,600 meters of drilling at Arctic. Most of the drilling targeted infill areas to improve the confidence of the mineral resources and geotechnical and metallurgical drill holes to further de-risk the project. An additional 7,000 meters of exploration drilling was planned at targets near the Arctic deposit and elsewhere in the Ambler Mining District.
As a result, Ambler Metals is unlikely to achieve the drill meters planned at Arctic for this field season. Notwithstanding the lower-than-expected drilling productivity, Ambler Metals has recovered sufficient mineralized material to complete the planned metallurgical program at Arctic, says Trilogy.
All the planned geotechnical drilling was completed, and the company does not expect the shortfall in the drilling program to influence the permitting and development timeline of the Arctic project,” it said in a media statement. In consultation with joint-venture owners Trilogy and South32, Ambler Metals will keep the camp open longer than initially planned to complete as much of the regional drilling program as possible. The timing of camp closure this season will be weather-dependent.
In response to the slower drilling this season, Ambler Metals has also redeployed some of the geological staff at the site to focus on regional mapping and soil sampling around satellite deposits near the Arctic project and at the earlier-stage Bornite project. Information gathered during this season will assist with future exploration activities, including identifying drill targets for next year’s field season.
The summer field season for the Ambler Access project is underway with cultural heritage work along the proposed 340-kilometre, east-west-running controlled industrial access road that would provide industrial access to the Ambler Mining District in northwestern Alaska. The partnership, formed in 2019, seeks to eventually develop the Upper Kobuk Mineral Projects (UKMP) in Alaska’s Ambler mining district. Building an access road to the deposit is one of the first steps to achieving that goal.
The UKMP projects have a combined resource of 8 billion pounds of copper, 3 billion pounds of zinc and 1 million ounces of gold equivalent.
The proposed mine is expected to produce more than 159 million pounds of copper, 199 million pounds of zinc, 33 million pounds of lead, 30,600 ounces of gold and 3.3 million ounces of silver over a 12-year mine life.
UN Draws Criticism For Special Treatment Of China In Coal Phase Out
The UN has drawn criticism for what is seen as allowing China to continue using coal until 2040 while calling on other big economies to phase it out by 2030.
The criticism follows a Monday speech by UN Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary-General on Climate Action, Selwin Hart, who called on Australia to join other OECD economies in committing to phase-out coal use by 2030 as a means to achieving net-zero status by 2050 and contributing to the 1.5-degree Paris Agreement target.
“National governments responsible for 73% of global emissions have now committed to net-zero by mid-century, and we urge Australia to join them as a matter of urgency,” Hart said, adding “Collectively these commitments must cut carbon pollution by 45% this decade if we are to keep our 1.5C goal within reach. We have seen strong new commitments from many key economies, including the US, Japan and the European Union, who are increasingly looking to their trading partners to follow suit.”
Coal is a major export commodity for Australia and this year has been a bumper one for the most polluting fossil fuel as a shortage of supply and a boom in demand pushed coal prices to the highest in years. And unlike Australia, China is not being called upon to phase out coal by 2030.
“The U.N. has exposed their real agenda this week,” Australian Senator Matt Canavan told The Epoch Times this week following Hart’s speech. “This isn’t about changing the climate, it is about changing our society.”
It does not seem that the Australian government has taken Hart’s call for action to heart.
"Australia has an important role to play in meeting [coal] demand. Coal will continue to generate billions of dollars in royalties and taxes for state and federal governments, and directly employ over 50,000 Australians," the country’s Minister for Resources and Water, KeithPitt, said in a statement following Hart’s speech, The official added that Australia was going to keep mining and using coal beyond 2030.
Australia has a good reason to stick with coal: coal mining and power generation employ some 50,000 Australians and coal exports account for about 16 percent of the country’s total exports over the last five years.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy
New superconducting magnet breaks magnetic field strength records, paving the way for practical, commercial, carbon-free power.
Watch Video David Chandler | MIT News Office Publication Date:September 8, 2021 Caption:This large-bore, full-scale high-temperature superconducting magnet designed and built by Commonwealth Fusion Systems and MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) has demonstrated a record-breaking 20 tesla magnetic field. It is the strongest fusion magnet in the world. Credits:Credit: Gretchen Ertl, CFS/MIT-PSFC, 2021 Caption:Collaborative team working on the magnet inside the test stand housed at MIT. Research, construction and testing of this magnet has been the single largest activity for the SPARC team, which has grown to include 270 members. Credits:Credit: Gretchen Ertl, CFS/MIT-PSFC, 2021 Caption:Spool of high-temperature superconducting tape used in the new class of fusion magnet. The magnet built and tested by CFS and MIT contains 267 km (166 mi) of tape, which is the distance from Boston, MA to Albany, NY. Credits:Credit: Gretchen Ertl, CFS/MIT-PSFC, 2021 Caption:A team of engineers and scientists from CFS and MIT’s PSFC lower the superconducting magnet into the test stand in which the magnet was cooled and powered to produce a magnetic field of 20 tesla. Credits:Credit: Gretchen Ertl, CFS/MIT-PSFC, 2021 Caption:Director of the PSFC Dennis Whyte (L) and CEO of CFS Bob Mumgaard (R) in the test hall at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. The collaboration which began over three years ago with the formation of Commonwealth Fusion Systems now moves to the next phase, building SPARC, which will be the world’s device to create and confine a plasma that produces net fusion energy. Credits:Credit: Gretchen Ertl, CFS/MIT-PSFC, 2021
Caption:Rendering of SPARC, a compact, high-field, tokamak, currently under design by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Its mission is to create and confine a plasma that produces net fusion energy. Credits:Credit: T. Henderson, CFS/MIT-PSFC, 2020
It was a moment three years in the making, based on intensive research and design work: On Sept. 5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth. That successful demonstration helps resolve the greatest uncertainty in the quest to build the world’s first fusion power plant that can produce more power than it consumes, according to the project’s leaders at MIT and startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS).
That advance paves the way, they say, for the long-sought creation of practical, inexpensive, carbon-free power plants that could make a major contribution to limiting the effects of global climate change
“Fusion in a lot of ways is the ultimate clean energy source,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. “The amount of power that is available is really game-changing.” The fuel used to create fusion energy comes from water, and “the Earth is full of water — it’s a nearly unlimited resource. We just have to figure out how to utilize it.”
Developing the new magnet is seen as the greatest technological hurdle to making that happen; its successful operation now opens the door to demonstrating fusion in a lab on Earth, which has been pursued for decades with limited progress. With the magnet technology now successfully demonstrated, the MIT-CFS collaboration is on track to build the world’s first fusion device that can create and confine a plasma that produces more energy than it consumes. That demonstration device, called SPARC, is targeted for completion in 2025
“The challenges of making fusion happen are both technical and scientific,” says Dennis Whyte, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, which is working with CFS to develop SPARC. But once the technology is proven, he says, “it’s an inexhaustible, carbon-free source of energy that you can deploy anywhere and at any time. It’s really a fundamentally new energy source.”
Whyte, who is the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, says this week’s demonstration represents a major milestone, addressing the biggest questions remaining about the feasibility of the SPARC design. “It’s really a watershed moment, I believe, in fusion science and technology,” he says.
On Sept. 5, 2021, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth. That successful demonstration helps resolve the greatest uncertainty in the quest to build the world’s first fusion power plant that can produce more power than it consumes, according to the project’s leaders at MIT and startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
The sun in a bottle
Fusion is the process that powers the sun: the merger of two small atoms to make a larger one, releasing prodigious amounts of energy. But the process requires temperatures far beyond what any solid material could withstand. To capture the sun’s power source here on Earth, what’s needed is a way of capturing and containing something that hot — 100,000,000 degrees or more — by suspending it in a way that prevents it from coming into contact with anything solid.
That’s done through intense magnetic fields, which form a kind of invisible bottle to contain the hot swirling soup of protons and electrons, called a plasma. Because the particles have an electric charge, they are strongly controlled by the magnetic fields, and the most widely used configuration for containing them is a donut-shaped device called a tokamak. Most of these devices have produced their magnetic fields using conventional electromagnets made of copper, but the latest and largest version under construction in France, called ITER, uses what are known as low-temperature superconductors.
The major innovation in the MIT-CFS fusion design is the use of high-temperature superconductors, which enable a much stronger magnetic field in a smaller space. This design was made possible by a new kind of superconducting material that became commercially available a few years ago. The idea initially arose as a class project in a nuclear engineering class taught by Whyte. The idea seemed so promising that it continued to be developed over the next few iterations of that class, leading to the ARC power plant design concept in early 2015. SPARC, designed to be about half the size of ARC, is a testbed to prove the concept before construction of the full-size, power-producing plant.
Until now, the only way to achieve the colossally powerful magnetic fields needed to create a magnetic “bottle” capable of containing plasma heated up to hundreds of millions of degrees was to make them larger and larger. But the new high-temperature superconductor material, made in the form of a flat, ribbon-like tape, makes it possible to achieve a higher magnetic field in a smaller device, equaling the performance that would be achieved in an apparatus 40 times larger in volume using conventional low-temperature superconducting magnets. That leap in power versus size is the key element in ARC’s revolutionary design.
The use of the new high-temperature superconducting magnets makes it possible to apply decades of experimental knowledge gained from the operation of tokamak experiments, including MIT’s own Alcator series. The new approach, led by Zach Hartwig, the MIT principal investigator and the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, uses a well-known design but scales everything down to about half the linear size and still achieves the same operational conditions because of the higher magnetic field.
A series of scientific papers published last year outlined the physical basis and, by simulation, confirmed the viability of the new fusion device. The papers showed that, if the magnets worked as expected, the whole fusion system should indeed produce net power output, for the first time in decades of fusion research.
Martin Greenwald, deputy director and senior research scientist at the PSFC, says unlike some other designs for fusion experiments, “the niche that we were filling was to use conventional plasma physics, and conventional tokamak designs and engineering, but bring to it this new magnet technology. So, we weren’t requiring innovation in a half-dozen different areas. We would just innovate on the magnet, and then apply the knowledge base of what’s been learned over the last decades.”
That combination of scientifically established design principles and game-changing magnetic field strength is what makes it possible to achieve a plant that could be economically viable and developed on a fast track. “It’s a big moment,” says Bob Mumgaard, CEO of CFS. “We now have a platform that is both scientifically very well-advanced, because of the decades of research on these machines, and also commercially very interesting. What it does is allow us to build devices faster, smaller, and at less cost,” he says of the successful magnet demonstration.
Proof of the concept
Bringing that new magnet concept to reality required three years of intensive work on design, establishing supply chains, and working out manufacturing methods for magnets that may eventually need to be produced by the thousands.
“We built a first-of-a-kind, superconducting magnet. It required a lot of work to create unique manufacturing processes and equipment. As a result, we are now well-prepared to ramp-up for SPARC production,” says Joy Dunn, head of operations at CFS. “We started with a physics model and a CAD design, and worked through lots of development and prototypes to turn a design on paper into this actual physical magnet.” That entailed building manufacturing capabilities and testing facilities, including an iterative process with multiple suppliers of the superconducting tape, to help them reach the ability to produce material that met the needed specifications — and for which CFS is now overwhelmingly the world’s biggest user.
They worked with two possible magnet designs in parallel, both of which ended up meeting the design requirements, she says. “It really came down to which one would revolutionize the way that we make superconducting magnets, and which one was easier to build.” The design they adopted clearly stood out in that regard, she says.
In this test, the new magnet was gradually powered up in a series of steps until reaching the goal of a 20 tesla magnetic field — the highest field strength ever for a high-temperature superconducting fusion magnet. The magnet is composed of 16 plates stacked together, each one of which by itself would be the most powerful high-temperature superconducting magnet in the world.
“Three years ago we announced a plan,” says Mumgaard, “to build a 20-tesla magnet, which is what we will need for future fusion machines.” That goal has now been achieved, right on schedule, even with the pandemic, he says.
Citing the series of physics papers published last year, Brandon Sorbom, the chief science officer at CFS, says “basically the papers conclude that if we build the magnet, all of the physics will work in SPARC. So, this demonstration answers the question: Can they build the magnet? It’s a very exciting time! It’s a huge milestone.”
The next step will be building SPARC, a smaller-scale version of the planned ARC power plant. The successful operation of SPARC will demonstrate that a full-scale commercial fusion power plant is practical, clearing the way for rapid design and construction of that pioneering device can then proceed full speed.
Zuber says that “I now am genuinely optimistic that SPARC can achieve net positive energy, based on the demonstrated performance of the magnets. The next step is to scale up, to build an actual power plant. There are still many challenges ahead, not the least of which is developing a design that allows for reliable, sustained operation. And realizing that the goal here is commercialization, another major challenge will be economic. How do you design these power plants so it will be cost effective to build and deploy them?”
Someday in a hoped-for future, when there may be thousands of fusion plants powering clean electric grids around the world, Zuber says, “I think we’re going to look back and think about how we got there, and I think the demonstration of the magnet technology, for me, is the time when I believed that, wow, we can really do this.”
The successful creation of a power-producing fusion device would be a tremendous scientific achievement, Zuber notes. But that’s not the main point. “None of us are trying to win trophies at this point. We’re trying to keep the planet livable.”
Is The World Investing Enough In Nuclear Fusion Research?
The old cliched joke in newsrooms used to be: “Nuclear fusion is 30 years away...and always will be.” While that cheeky adage has continued to ring true even as scientists made small advancements and mini-breakthroughs in over the last 100 years, things are finally starting to catch traction in the highly experimental world of man-made nuclear fusion.
A recent record-breaking experiment at the United States National Ignition Facility (NIF), based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California got remarkably close to achieving net energy creation from their laser-based fusion experiment. The flash of light and energy which ensued lasted only a tiny fraction of a second, but which triggered a self-sustaining chain of nuclear fusion reactions -- the holy grail of nuclear fusion exploits. That reaction, which showed a 1,000% increase in energy release since 2011 experiments, came incredibly close to proving that net energy gain through fusion is possible in a lab setting.
“The pace of improvement in energy output has been rapid, suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kickstart the process,” Professor Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, was quoted last month by phys.org.
It’s nearly impossible to overstate the potential disruption that achieving net energy gain and, eventually, commercial nuclear fusion would have for the global energy landscape, the worldwide economy, and climate change. It would change everything. Unlike nuclear fission, which currently powers nuclear power plants around the world, nuclear fusion is a completely clean form of energy production, leaving no hazardous or radioactive waste behind. Its hydrogen-based fuel sources, deuterium and tritium, are plentiful and will be in abundance for thousands of years. And, unlike wind and solar, nuclear fusion requires relatively little land to operate.
While nuclear fission entails capturing the energy released by splitting unstable atoms, nuclear fusion is the process of combining two smaller atoms into one larger one, a process which releases several times more energy. This is the process that powers our own sun and stars and which created most of the atoms that you and I are made of. Nuclear fusion is the powerhouse of the universe.
But it’s long remained elusive for humans to recreate. While nuclear fusion experiments have a 100-year history, most of those have been thought experiments that were far outside of scientists’ reach. In recent decades, however, many governments have started to get serious about cracking the code for nuclear fusion in time to solve our myriad global energy crises and their devastating environmental externalities.
In the South of France, 35 nations have collaborated to make ITER, the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor, called a tokamak, which involves the use of enormous magnets to heat and control plasma to make a kind of artificial star. ITER has projected that it will achieve first plasma in 2025. China, too, has an enormous state-sponsored tokamak.
And now, for the first time, private companies are also entering the race in earnest. A recent Guardian report identifies this emerging privatization of the nuclear fusion sector to be the single-biggest change in the pursuit of fusion, and perhaps it will be the development that finally tips the scales toward making this once-impossible dream a reality. The Fusion Industry Association, another recent addition to the world of fusion, estimates that private fusion startups have already collectively received more than $2 billion in investments. “Some of the investors in these firms have deep pockets: Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, Legal & General, and Chevron have all financed enterprises pursuing this new nuclear power source,” reports the Guardian. “For now, publicly funded labs are producing results a long way ahead of the private firms – but this could change.”
So far, the focus in fusion experiments is still just to show that net energy gain is possible. Until recently, successful fusion experiments required many times more energy than they released. Breakeven energy still hasn’t been achieved, and commercial nuclear fusion will require about 30 times more energy output than energy inputs in order to be viable. Breakeven could easily be 30 years away, but this time that 30-year projection just might stick. And if the global community puts its money and energy behind nuclear fusion to help it advance even more rapidly than its currently impressive pace, commercial fusion may even become a reality in time to play an essential role in avoiding climate change. By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion has brought us a step closer to ‘infinite’ energy
If development follows this accelerated track, nuclear fusion could amount for about 1% of global energy demand by 2060.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has announced a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion, using powerful lasers to produce 1.3 megajoules of energy – about 3% of the energy contained in 1kg of crude oil.
Nuclear fusion has long been thought of as the energy of the future – an “infinite” source of power that does not rely on the need to burn carbon. But after decades of research, it has yet to deliver on its exciting promise.
How much closer does this new breakthrough bring us to the desired results? Here is a brief overview to put this new scientific advance into perspective.
What’s nuclear fusion?
There are two ways of using nuclear energy: fission, which is used in current nuclear power plants, and fusion.
In fission, heavy uranium atoms are broken into smaller atoms to release energy. Nuclear fusion is the opposite process: light atoms are transformed into heavier atoms to release energy, the same process that occurs within the plasma core of the Sun.
A fusion reactor amplifies power: the reaction triggered must produce more energy than is needed to heat up the fuel plasma for energy production to occur – this is known as ignition. No one has managed this yet. The current record was achieved in 1997 by the Joint European Torus in the United Kingdom, where 16 megawatts of power were generated by magnetic fusion, but it took 23 megawatts to trigger it.
There are two possible ways of achieving nuclear fusion: magnetic confinement, which uses powerful magnets to confine the plasma for very long periods of time, and inertial confinement, which uses very powerful and brief laser pulses to compress the fuel and start the fusion reaction.
Historically, magnetic fusion has been favoured because the technology needed for inertial fusion, particularly the lasers, was not available. Inertial fusion also requires much higher gains to compensate for the energy consumed by the lasers.
Inertial confinement
The two largest inertial projects are the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States and the Laser MégaJoule in France, whose applications are mainly military and funded by defence programmes. Both facilities simulate nuclear explosions for research purposes, though the National Ignition Facility also carries out research on energy.
The National Ignition Facility uses 192 laser beams that produce a total of 1.9 megajoules of energy for a period lasting a few nanoseconds to trigger the fusion reaction. Fuel is placed inside a metal capsule a few millimetres across, which, when heated by lasers, emits X-rays that heat up and compress the fuel.
It was this process that, on 8 August 2021, achieved the landmark energy production of 1.3 megajoules, the highest value ever recorded by the inertial approach: that is, the closest we have come to ignition.
The overall gain of 0.7 equals the record achieved by Joint European Torus in 1997 using magnetic confinement, but in this case, the fuel absorbed 0.25 megajoules of energy and generated 1.3 megajoules: fusion, therefore, generated a good part of the heat needed for the reaction, approaching the point of ignition.
Still, a reactor will have to achieve much higher gains (more than 100) to be economically attractive.
Magnetic confinement
The magnetic confinement approach promises better development prospects and is thus the preferred route for energy production so far. The vast majority of research focuses on tokamaks, fusion reactors invented in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, where the plasma is confined by a strong magnetic field.
ITER, a demonstration reactor under construction in the south of France involving 35 countries, uses the tokamak configuration. It will be the world’s largest fusion reactor, and aims to demonstrate a gain of 10 – the plasma will be heated by 50 megawatts of power and should generate 500 megawatts. The first plasma is now officially expected by the end of 2025, with a demonstration of fusion expected in the late 2030s.
The UK has recently launched the STEP project (Spherical Tokamak for Electricity Production), which aims to develop a reactor that connects to the energy grid in the 2040s. China is also pursuing an ambitious programme to produce tritium isotopes and electricity in the 2040s. Finally, Europe plans to open another tokamak demonstrator, DEMO, in the 2050s.
Another configuration called the stellarator, like Germany’s Wendelstein-7X, is showing very good results. Though stellarator performances are lower than what a tokamak can achieve, its intrinsic stability and promising recent results make it a serious alternative.
Future of fusion
Meanwhile, private nuclear fusion projects have been booming in recent years. Most of t
Two different nuclear fusion deployment scenarios, compared with wind, solar and nuclear fission. Photo credit: G De Temmerman, D Chuard, J -B. Rudelle for Zenon Research (Author provided)
While these initiatives use other innovative technologies to reach fusion and could thus very well deliver operational reactors fast, deploying a fleet of reactors throughout the world is bound to take time.
If development follows this accelerated track, nuclear fusion could amount for about 1% global energy demand by 2060.
So while this new breakthrough is exciting, it is worth keeping in mind that fusion will be an energy source for the second part of the century – at the earliest.
Greg De Temmerman is an Associate researcher and Managing Director of Zenon Research at Mines ParisTech-PSL.
