Opinion: With Ukraine in peril, writer laments indifference

After spending 30 years of working with media outlets across Europe, the Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych is frustrated by the lack of understanding for his country and culture.


Andrukhovych writes that Russian troops could soon arrive in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv

If you're Ukrainian, now is not the time to be getting COVID-19. Putin could attack while you're in bed with fever, preventing you from reaching for your rifle when the occupiers march past singing "Katyusha" and other wartime classics.

It would be particularly unpleasant for me because I keep getting requests from all over Europe. Every day, there are more: commissions for a Spanish magazine, an Italian newspaper, a Romanian agency, a French outfit, a Norwegian radio station ...

Yuri Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian writer, poet, essayist and translator whose works have been translated and published in many countries

Nobody showed any interest in Ukraine for eight years. It was if the country did not exist. And now, all of a sudden, everyone is getting in touch at the same time: "Answer this series of questions." "Contact us per telephone!" "Write an essay about the historical roots of the current conflict!" "Contradict Putin!" "Convince the Germans!" "Draw the attention of the Austrians!" "Remind the Croats!" "Explain to the Montenegrins!"

Whoa! What's the deadline? "Today, of course! Tomorrow at the latest!"

If I write in English, it will take longer. "No problem! Write in your mother tongue! We can also translate from Russian."

Unified German indifference

It is frustrating — just as it was eight years ago, when protesters were shot on Maidan square in Kyiv. People would phone me and say: "Write an opinion piece about the nationalists! Nationalist gangs have taken over Maidan. Tell us more about that!"

You could be shaking all over, and, at the same time, people wanted you to deliver a coolheaded analysis presenting "both sides" as accurately as possible, explaining what exactly is going on. So you'd compose something in English, which meant looking up words in dictionaries, figuring out expressions and formulating answers to almost everybody who had been in touch.

You would send it off and that was that: Everybody disappeared — nobody would responded, not even confirmation of receipt. There were no words of thanks, no words of support, neither for me personally, nor for my country. Till next time, then.

Everything is calmer eight years later. Nobody is being shot in the streets (yet). I know where my loved ones are. But, when a Spanish magazine asks me what Ukrainian writers are doing to work things out with the Russian people, it hits a nerve.

Some fear that President Vladimir Putin wants to build a new Russian empire

When I read that the vast majority of Germans oppose supplying Ukraine with arms, it's frustrating. According to a January 27 survey, most supporters of the Left party (71%), the nationalist Alternative for Germany (67%), the center-left Social Democrats (61%), the center-right Christian Democrats (56%), the Greens (55%) and the neoliberal Free Democrats (54%) share this view.

The Germans are finally unified — in their opinion that unarmed Ukrainians can be killed if they do not accept annexation by "Putin's nation." After all, ceasing to resist would be easier and more comfortable.

'People have gotten dumber'

Allow me to quote from a letter by an editor of one of Germany's best newspapers. "I think that most Germans do not yet realize that Putin wants to build a new Russian empire," the editor wrote. "If you could hear what people are saying here, even in educated circles: 'He is just interested in his legitimate sphere of influence,' 'Ukraine has always belonged to Russia,' 'he just wants respect,' and so on. People have not learned from 2014 — they've gotten dumber."

For me, this is a very sad, even tragic, assessment of the past 30 years. I never turned down the German media and was glad to be in contact. At the request of editors, I would put my novels and poems on hold to write other texts or to give interviews to influential national newspapers, as well as local ones, simply to everybody. I also did live and recorded radio and TV, which had audiences of millions. I thought I was being understood. At least, I thought I was beginning to be understood.

But now? Three decades later, three decades of effort, of hundreds of what I thought were good conversations, it is as if I am back at the beginning: in Munich in 1992, when people would ask me whether Ukrainian was a language — and not just a dialect of Russian. I am certain that I will be asked this question more than once in 2022. Nothing has changed in the German consciousness when it comes to the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian culture and Ukraine itself.

How could it have? For Germans, the top priority is the respect of spheres of influence — particularly Putin's sphere of influence. It is sacred and should not be violated.

This article was translated from German.

Ukraine and Canada agree closer nuclear cooperation

04 February 2022

The Organization of Canadian Nuclear Industries (OCNI)  and Energoatom have agreed a cooperation deal covering nuclear energy and related technologies.

Ukraine's nuclear plans include a first AP1000 project at Khmelnitsky nuclear power plant (Image: Energoatom)

A Memorandum of Understanding was signed by OCNI president Ron Oberth and Energoatom’s acting president, Petro Kotin, at a virtual signing ceremony in Canada and Ukraine.

Areas it covers include supporting cooperation opportunities associated with deployment of Canadian large-scale and small modular reactor technologies in Ukraine, nuclear decommissioning, medical isotopes and hydrogen production with nuclear electricity.

It also aims to encourage cooperation between academics and researchers in the two countries.

In a statement issued after the signing Oberth said: "OCNI looks forward to working closely with colleagues in Ukraine on projects that support global initiatives to achieve net zero by 2050 and improve the health of people around the world."

Kotin said: "Energoatom is pleased to establish partnership relations with OCNI, which opens new opportunities for our engagement with Canadian companies on the most promising areas in the nuclear energy field associated with ensuring reliable nuclear generation, nuclear research and development, innovation and care for the environment and people."

OCNI is an association of 240 Canadian suppliers to the nuclear industry. The Ukraine state enterprise Energoatom operates four nuclear power plants with 15 power units.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

Partnership could lead to first fusion power plant in Ontario

Magnetized target fusion technology is seen in this undated handout photo.

 (Source: General Fusion)

Scott Miller
CTV News London Videographer
Published Feb. 3, 2022 

The joke in the scientific world is that fusion energy is 20 years away, and always will be. Well, Jay Brister from General Fusion says otherwise.

“I like to tell people fusion is getting much more tangible than it ever has,” says Brister, the chief business development officer with the B.C.-based fusion development company.

General Fusion has joined forces with the Port Elgin, Ont.-based Nuclear Innovation Institute and Ontario’s largest nuclear plant, Bruce Power, to work towards advancing fusion-based electricity and possibly building a fusion power plant in Ontario.

“If there was an area in Ontario that would be a potential candidate for it, the Bruce Power site would be at the top of that list,” says Bruce Power’s Chief Development Officer James Scongack.

Bruce Power’s CANDU reactors harness the powers of 'fission,' splitting one atom into two, to power their nuclear fleet.

'Fusion,' which unleashes the power of combining two atoms into one, has not yet been harnessed commercially to produce electricity, -- until now, says General Fusion.

The company is about to build a fusion demonstration plant in the United Kingdom, with operations to begin in three years' time.

“That will bring us to the point that we’re ready to put a shovel in the ground by the end of this decade on the first fusion power plant, with operations anticipated in the early 2030s,” says Brister.

And if all goes according to plan, that first fusion plant could be built at or near the Bruce Power site.

“A lot of the attributes that we have for a nuclear site would make sense for a fusion site. It’s a secure site, there are utilities, support services, technical staff, not to mention the 60+ clean energy companies that are in the tri-county (Bruce, Grey, Huron) region,” says Scongack.

Hold your horses, says University of British Columbia professor and nuclear power researcher, Dr. M.V. Ramana.

He doesn’t believe fusion energy will be commercially feasible for many, many decades, if ever.

“As of today, no experiment in the the world has actually produced more energy than has been put in, so we are far from even the point where we can contemplate fusion being a source of energy,” he says.

That isn’t dulling the excitement at General Fusion or Bruce Power, who believe fusion energy could be part of the answer to our future carbon-free energy needs.

“To tackle net zero we need massive volumes of clean power, so that allows us to say, 'Let’s put every tool in the tool box on the table to tackle this problem,'” says Scongack.

Bruce Power is looking for its next act — and thinks fusion power might be it

ANALYSIS: The company that operates the world’s largest nuclear plant apparently won’t have enough on its plate in the 2030s, so it’s signed a deal with a Canadian fusion-power startup

By John Michael McGrath - Published on Feb 04, 2022

Bruce Power has signed an agreement with General Fusion to explore a possible commercial fusion power plant in Ontario. (Chuck Szmurlo/Wikimedia/CC BY 2.5)

Jay Brister has heard the joke before a million times: fusion power is 20 years away and has been for the last 50 years. It’s an occupational hazard for him, as the chief business development officer for General Fusion, a Burnaby, British Columbia-based company that’s been developing a novel approach to fusion power for 20 years. He’s able to laugh about it, although, these days, he’s trying to convince people that fusion isn’t some far-off prospect for the future — it’s now.

“We’ve been doing fusion research for over 70 years. And, from a science perspective, we know more today than we’ve ever known about plasma physics,” he says. “Add to that advanced manufacturing technologies that we didn’t have even a few years ago … we’re at a point now where it’s about to become a lot more tangible.”

Earlier this week, General Fusion signed an agreement with Bruce Power — the operators of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station on the shores of Lake Huron — to explore a possible commercial fusion power plant in Ontario. In this context, “now” doesn’t mean soon: if everything pans out, General Fusion and Bruce Power are eyeing a possible fusion plant sometime in the 2030s.

Bruce Power’s chief development officer, James Scongack, says the company will have its hands full with the ongoing work to refurbish the existing Bruce nuclear plant and extend its operating lifespan into the 2060s. But the refurb work will be done after this decade, and then Bruce will be looking to build on its current assets — the power plant itself, but also the network of suppliers and personnel that have been established in the region — to explore new opportunities.

Some of that work has already started: the Bruce’s reactors are now producing medically important radioactive isotopes, for example, and the company is looking at new technologies to help Ontario get to net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions. Fusion is part of the long-term plan, too.

“The commonality with all of those things is that they are all highly technical fields — they require significant expertise — and that’s something we have here for 50 or 60 years,” says Scongack. “We’ve been working with General Fusion for some time; they’re doing great work, and they’re a great Canadian success story.”

It’s not just Bruce Power that’s betting on the potential for fusion power in the near future: a number of companies have landed huge investments from private capital on the promise of finally cracking a problem that scientists have been working on for over half a century.

Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised $1.8 billion from investors like Bill Gates late last year;Helion Energy has announced up to $2.2 billion in investments (dependent on achieving certain milestones). For its part, General Fusion announced a successful $130 million funding round in November 2021.

Fusion’s proponents use superlatives like “unlimited clean energy” to describe its potential, and the scientific basis is clear enough: we know that nuclear fusion — combining light elements such as hydrogen at extremely high temperatures, instead of splitting heavy elements in conventional nuclear reactors — powers everything from the sun (benignly) to nuclear weapons (less so). Researchers have spent decades trying to generate a fusion reaction that is controlled, can be maintained, and generates more power than it takes to do both. So far, nobody has demonstrated that can be done on a commercial scale.

Critics have also argued that, even if fusion does turn out to be technically possible — which is still a big “if” — it may end up being so difficult and expensive that it will never produce power more cheaply than more conventional methods. Daniel Jassby, a former plasma physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, wrote in 2017 that, in his retirement, he’d come to take a more jaundiced view of the potential for fusion power. In particular, while fusion proponents say their reactors don’t produce nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel rods (as conventional nuclear reactors do), the power plants themselves will be subjected to intense radiation for their operating lives and could effectively be radioactive waste that would need to be decommissioned carefully and expensively at the end of their lives.

Those might be difficult or even impossible problems to solve. (Brister says that General Fusion’s design for a reactor will minimize the creation of radioactive-waste problems.) Alternatively, it’s possible that one of the competing designs for a fusion power plant could succeed but that General Fusion’s might not. General Fusion is confident enough in its approach that it’s leased space at the Vancouver International Airport to build a 70 per cent-scale version of what it believes will be a commercial-size plant. That should begin construction later this year and be in operation by 2025.

But then there are the problems technology can’t answer, which come from Ontario’s murky politics around electricity planning. Both the current government and its predecessor have, for example, ended up being rebuked by courts or tribunals for cancelling wind-power projects that have happened to conflict with political imperatives of the government of the day. So is General Fusion worried about spending time, energy, and money working in a province where energy planning can be so unpredictable?

“That landscape is a variable, I would say, that’s not unique to Ontario,” says Brister, charitably. He describes navigating political waters as just as much a part of getting a new project built as securing financing or proving the science and engineering.

Bruce County has hosted the current generating station for half a century, first as an Ontario Hydro station and since 2001 as Bruce Power — and, Brister says, with more than 20 years of experience navigating the political and regulatory space, the company can help General Fusion navigate the sometimes treacherous political and regulatory shoals here.

Scongack sees that as just another one of the assets that Bruce Power can bring to the table. “We’ve got the supply chain, we’ve got the workforce, and we’ve got the site. We believe if we’re going to tackle net-zero, we need to be open to all technologies.”

Initiatives aim to speed fusion deployment

03 February 2022

Two newly announced North American initiatives aim to accelerate the deployment of fusion technologies for power generation. In Canada, Bruce Power, General Fusion, and the Nuclear Innovation Institute (NII) will work together to evaluate potential deployment of a fusion power plant in Ontario. Meanwhile, scientists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are teaming up with Renaissance Fusion America as part of a US programme to speed the development of fusion energy.

(Image: Bruce Power/General Fusion/NII)

Bruce Power, General Fusion and the NII yesterday announced that they have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on accelerating the delivery of clean fusion power in Canada. The partners said they will build on existing clean energy technologies, skills, and expertise in the so-called Clean Energy Frontier region of Ontario to develop a "go-forward strategy", and will also lead stakeholder and public outreach activities to raise awareness of the "transformative potential" of fusion energy for powering Canadian homes, businesses, and industry.

Vancouver-based General Fusion is a private company which aims to build a commercial fusion power plant based on Magnetised Target Fusion (MTF) technology, which involves injecting hydrogen plasma into a liquid metal sphere, where it is compressed and heated so that fusion occurs. A Fusion Demonstration Plant at the Culham Campus near Oxford in the UK is scheduled to be operational in 2025, and the company says it aims to bring clean fusion energy to the world's energy systems by the early 2030s.

General Fusion CEO Christofer Mowry described the MOU as a "landmark", providing a framework under which Canada's energy leaders can benefit from each other's technology innovations and expertise to lead the way in adopting fusion power in Ontario and across Canada. "We look forward to advancing this partnership to help meet Canada's climate targets and the increasing electricity needs of Canadians," he said.

Fostering innovation in new energy technologies including fusion is one of the five pillars in Bruce Power's NZ-2050 strategy to contribute to a net-zero Canada while growing the economy and supporting innovation. The MOU represents one way the company is looking to advance new clean energy technologies, the company said.
 
"In order to achieve a net-zero future here in Ontario, and Canada, we need to continue expanding the clean electricity production of our existing facilities and will need innovation as part of the future," said Mike Rencheck, President and CEO, Bruce Power. "Our partnership will explore these innovations and leverage the established capability in this region as a home to new technologies that will contribute to a carbon-free future."

PPPL collaboration

Grenoble, France-based Renaissance Fusion aims to put fusion energy from stellarator-based devices on the grid in the next 13 years. A newly announced public-private partnership between the company's US affiliate, Renaissance Fusion America, and three scientists at PPPL aims to further speed the development of the technology by generating an open-source dataset of stellarator configurations that scientists around the world can use to train their own models and advance artificial intelligence research in stellarators.

Stellarators, like tokamaks, are devices for the magnetic confinement of fusion plasmas. Unlike tokamaks, they have no toroidal plasma current, meaning that they offer increased plasma stability compared with tokamaks. Because the burning plasma can be more easily controlled and monitored, stellarators have an intrinsic potential for steady-state, continuous operation. This makes stellarators potentially easier to operate than tokamaks, but their greater complexity makes them more difficult and expensive to design and build.  

Developing machine-learning software to speed up predictions of the loss of alpha particles from fusion reactions should enable designers to quickly enhance the shape, or geometry, of stellarator magnetic fields to improve alpha particle confinement, PPPL said.

The year-long collaboration is sponsored by the US Department of Energy's Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) programme, launched in 2015 to accelerate fusion energy development in the private sector by reducing impediments to collaboration involving the expertise and unique resources available at DOE laboratories and universities.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

European industrial giants join nuclear fusion race

February 3, 2022
in Tech


European industrial giants have joined the race to create cleaner energy through nuclear fusion, a nascent industry pioneered primarily in the US.

Munich-based Marvel Fusion has signed partnerships with Dax-listed Siemens Energy, France’s Thales and the privately owned German mechanical engineering group Trumpf, while also raising €35mn in a funding round led by tech investor Earlybird.

Interest in nuclear fusion technology, a promising process that does not produce long-lasting radioactive waste and carries no risk of reactor meltdowns, has been hotting up in recent months.

Last year, the sector attracted more than €2.3bn in venture capital funding, predominantly for companies based in the US.

Unlike current nuclear power generation, which is based on fission, fusion could provide a virtually limitless energy supply with a very low environmental footprint. In theory, a fusion plant the size of a football field could even power a city as large as London.

But although the technology has been around since Soviet scientists tried using it in the 1950s, to date none of the few dozen nuclear fusion companies worldwide have been able to achieve it while producing more electricity than the complex process consumes.

Marvel Fusion claims its method, which uses lasers to trigger atomic reactions rather than magnets and extreme heat, will make the process commercially viable in a few years’ time.

“It’s a theoretical model, which is essentially a very large computer simulation, and then step by step it is being validated in an experimental campaign that started last year,” Marvel Fusion chief executive Moritz von der Linden told the Financial Times, adding that the validation should be completed in two to three years. “If it works, it is the Holy Grail.”

The company, which was founded in 2019, said its technology was based on the breakthrough by 2018 Nobel Prize winners Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou, who “succeeded in creating ultrashort high-intensity laser pulses without destroying the amplifying material”.

Most other nuclear fusion start-ups use a process called magnetic confinement and some have attracted large sums from investors.

In December, American start-up Commonwealth Fusion Systems secured nearly $2bn from backers, including Tiger Global Management and Bill Gates, a few weeks after competitor Helion raised $500mn from Peter Thiel’s investment vehicle and Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman, among others.

Marvel Fusion’s partners are among those hoping that Europe’s existing laser technology expertise could help companies on the continent catch up.

Europe “can probably have a breakthrough by doing this with lasers”, said Thales’ director of laser activities, Franck Leibreich. But he added: “Right now we are more in the feasibility stage. We need to demonstrate that the fusion is possible physically, not just on paper.”

Energy independence in Europe has also risen to the top of the political agenda in recent weeks, with fears mounting that gas supplies from Russia could be cut off or reduced in the event of conflict in Ukraine.

Germany, which is due to close down its last three nuclear plants in the next year, needs clean technologies to make up for the lost capacity.

Peter Leibinger, chief technology officer at Marvel Fusion’s new partner Trumpf, said the family-run company was “pleased to jointly develop this important technology” because “fusion is an essential component of the energy sovereignty of Europe and Germany”.

But von der Linden said Marvel Fusion, which is launching another funding round this year, would “need significantly more money” for laser developments and warned that a prototype power plant — that would cost billions of euros — would have to be backed by public investment too.

“Europe has to step up its game,” he added.

Source: Financial Times

Kyoto Fusioneering secures $11.7M to build out its fusion reactor technologies

Mike Butcher@mikebutcher •February 3, 2022

Image Credits: Kyoto Fusioneering

With startups getting into nuclear technology, it’s no surprise to see more fundraising happening. Now, Kyoto Fusioneering, a fusion energy startup based out of Japan but increasingly expanding abroad, has raised 1.33 billion yen ($11.7 million) in its latest round of funding. The company has now raised 1.67 billion yen ($14.7 million) to date.

In 2020 the U.K. government-backed STEP, a prototype reactor, aiming to have it operating by 2040, and Kyoto Fusioneering has been awarded several contracts to support its development. This is going to be key to KF’s future.

The Series B funding round was supported by existing investors, including Coral Capital Co. Also participating was Daiwa Corporate Investment, DBJ Capital, JAFCO Group, JGC MIRAI Innovation Fund and JIC Venture Growth Investments.

KF has also secured an 800 million yen ($7 million) debt financing from Bank of Kyoto, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and MUFG Bank.

The funds will be used to accelerate its research and expand the business, developing its plant engineering technologies for plasma heating (gyrotrons) and heat extraction (blankets). These technologies are needed in the development of fusion reactor projects.

At the moment a group of nations are supporting the international ITER project (the European Union, Japan, the United States, Russia, Korea, India, the UK and China), a technology test reactor which will be first operated later this decade.

Others, such as the U.S. and China, are pursuing their own domestic programs. The Japanese government also has a number of initiative sin the fusion space.

James Riney, founding partner and CEO of Coral Capital, said: “Climate change is an existential threat to humanity, and a fusion energy future, if achieved, could be the silver bullet that literally saves the world.. While many startups talk about how they want to change the world, this company is actually doing it.”

Nuclear fusion promises a lot, but to date has not delivered a great deal. But if someone gets it right, it has the potential to solve much of the world’s energy and environmental problems, given it would mean a virtual unlimited fuel resource, and clean energy with no carbon emissions.

U.S. Project Reaches Major Milestone toward Practical Fusion Power

In a world first, the National Ignition Facility has generated a “burning plasma,” a fusion reaction on the cusp of being self-sustaining

By Philip Ball on February 2, 2022

A metallic case called a hohlraum holds the fuel capsule for NIF experiments. Target handling systems precisely position the target and freeze it to cryogenic temperatures (18 kelvins, or -427 degrees Fahrenheit) so that a fusion reaction is more easily achieved. 

Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Nuclear fusion could potentially provide abundant, safe energy without the significant production of greenhouse gas emissions or nuclear waste. But it has remained frustratingly elusive as a practical technology for decades. An important milestone toward that goal has now been passed: a fusion reaction that derives most of its heat from its nuclear reactions themselves rather than the energy pumped into the fuel from outside.

A team at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California has reported this so-called burning plasma condition using an approach called inertial-confinement fusion, where the ferociously high temperatures and pressures needed to initiate fusion in a fuel of hydrogen isotopes are produced by intense pulses of laser light. The researchers’ findings appear in Nature, with companion papers published in Nature Physics and on the preprint repository arXiv.org. “The data clearly show that they have reached that condition,” says fusion physicist George Tynan of the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the work.

“The NIF results are a really big deal,” says fusion physicist Peter Norreys of the University of Oxford, who was not part of the studies. “They show that the pursuit of an inertial fusion reactor is a realistic possibility for the future and not built upon difficult and insurmountable physics.” Plasma physicist Kate Lancaster of the University of York in England, who was also not involved in the research, agrees. “This is an incredible achievement, which is a culmination of a decade of careful, incremental research,” she says.

Nuclear fusion, the process that fuels stars and that is triggered explosively in hydrogen bombs, requires extreme heat and pressure to give atoms enough energy to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between their positively charged nuclei so that they can fuse and release energy. The usual fuel for producing controlled fusion in reactors consists of a mix of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, which may unite to make helium. The energy this releases can be harnessed for electricity generation—for example, by using the heat to drive conventional power turbines. Unlike nuclear fission—the process used in all nuclear power plants today—fusion does not use or generate large quantities of long-lived radioactive materials. And in contrast to fission, fusion does not involve a chain reaction, which makes it inherently safer: any changes to the working conditions of a fusion reactor will cause it to automatically shut down in an instant.

Fission’s advantage is that it typically occurs in reactors at temperatures of a little more than 1,000 kelvins, whereas deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion starts at temperatures of around 100 million kelvins—hotter than the heart of the sun. Handling such a seething plasma is, to put it mildly, immensely challenging. One approach is to confine it with magnetic fields into a doughnut shape inside a chamber called a tokamak. This is the method of choice for many fusion projects, including the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). for which a global collaboration is building a massive experimental reactor in France that is slated to achieve sustained fusion no earlier than 2035.

Inertial fusion does not try to trap the plasma but instead relies on inertia alone to hold it together for a brief instant after fusion is triggered by an ultrafast compression of the fuel. That creates a very brief outburst of energy—a tiny thermonuclear explosion—before the burning fuel expands and dissipates its heat. “Fusion energy schemes based on inertial confinement involve repeating the pulsed process over and over again, much like the pistons in an internal combustion engine, firing several times per second to give nearly continuous power,” says Omar Hurricane of LLNL, chief scientist for the NIF’s Inertial Confinement Fusion program, who was a team leader for the latest experiments.

Although inertial-confinement fusion does not have to solve the problem of maintaining a hot, wobbly plasma inside a tokamak, it does require tremendous inputs of energy to trigger the fusion process. The NIF team used 192 high-power lasers, all focused into a chamber called a hohlraum that is about the size and shape of a pencil’s eraser and contains the fuel capsule of deuterium and tritium. The laser energy heats and vaporizes the capsule’s outer layer, blowing it away and creating a recoil that compresses and heats the fuel in the center. In the NIF method, the laser beams do not directly spark detonation but instead strike the hohlraum’s inner surface, unleashing a furious bath of capsule-compressing x-rays within the tiny chamber.

Researchers demonstrated the feasibility of starting fusion this way back in the 1970s. But getting to the burning-plasma point has been a slow process, full of technical hurdles and setbacks. “For many decades, researchers have been able to get reactions to occur by using a lot of external heating to get the plasma hot,” says Alex Zylstra of LLNL, a member of the NIF team. “In a burning plasma, which we have now created for the first time, the fusion reactions themselves provide most of the heating.” Those conditions last only for about 100 trillionths of a second before the plasma’s energy is dissipated.

“There was no one secret that allowed them to make this breakthrough but a whole bunch of smaller advances,” Tynan says. To have any hope of getting the fusion process to sustain itself, the energy it produces should be deposited mostly in adjacent fuel layers rather than leaking from the capsule to heat the surroundings. This means that the capsule has to be sufficiently large and dense to keep the energy inside while still collapsing symmetrically—which is one of the issues the NIF team has cracked. The researchers have also tweaked the hohlraum’s design to ensure its interior uniformly fills with x-rays, ultimately creating a smoother, stronger and more efficient implosion of the fuel capsule. “We had to learn how to better control the symmetry while making the implosion bigger,” Hurricane says. Such improvements have required decades of effort. “It’s been a very long trial-and-error process, guided by computations,” Tynan says.

Of the experimental runs that the NIF researchers have reported, four conducted in 2020 and early 2021 exceeded the threshold fusion output for a burning plasma. The most recent of these were in February 2021, so “it clearly took some time for them to convince colleagues of the validity of their results,” says Vladimir Tikhonchuk, a plasma physicist at the University of Bordeaux in France, who was not involved with the work. But they have evidently done so. “I truly believe publication of these papers is an important scientific event,” Tikhonchuk adds.

Making fusion viable requires more than merely burning plasma, however. For one thing, although the plasma is self-heating, it might still radiate more heat than it generates, including the energy lost when the implosion blows itself apart after reaching peak compression. “Even if you have burning, the reaction fizzles out if the radiative losses are too high,” Tynan says. But the NIF team notes that, in one of its runs, the heating exceeded such losses.

That brings the scientists closer to the next big goal: ignition, where the net energy release from the fusion reaction exceeds the energy injected to produce it. On average, they can produce about 0.17 megajoule of fusion energy for an input laser energy of 1.9 megajoules. In other words, these NIF shots channel the energetic equivalent of a half-kilogram of exploding TNT into the tiny hohlraum only to get about 10 times less energy out. But that is still close enough to the break-even point to get fusion researchers fired up. “They are right on the threshold of achieving a propagating ignition burn,” Tynan says.

Lancaster is optimistic about that. “We are now in a regime where modest improvements can create massive gains in output energy,” she says. “We have definitely moved from an ‘if’ to a ‘when’ for ignition.”

Even achieving ignition would be just the end of the beginning for fusion. For one thing, net energy gain must not only be demonstrated but also improved to compensate for inefficiencies in converting the heat into electricity. Better methods must also be developed for on-site production and handling of tritium to use as fuel. And in the specific case of inertial-confinement fusion, the exquisitely designed fuel capsules must somehow be made in abundance—and on the cheap. “Right now they cost $1 million and are custom pieces of kit made in the lab,” Tynan says. But for any inertial fusion power plant to turn a profit, “you have to be able to make hundreds of thousands of them a day at 10 cents a piece.” And these spectacular results for burning plasma in inertial confinement “do not really translate to tokamaks” at all, Hurricane warns.

“People working in this domain understand very well that there is a large gap between the [eventual] demonstration of ignition and a commercial fusion reactor,” Tikhonchuk says. That gap certainly will not be closed at NIF, which is geared toward exploring the basic physics of fusion, especially in the context of nuclear stockpile management and national security. “We do not yet have lasers of a needed energy and power operating with a repetition rate of a few shots per second,” Tikhonchuk adds—although Lancaster says that these “are well on the way, with big programs in the U.K., the U.S., France and Germany, for example.”

“Now that NIF has demonstrated that [burning plasma conditions] can be done in a controlled laboratory setting,” Norreys says, solutions to the remaining challenges “need to be studied in the coming years with renewed vigor.”

“The challenge is [pivoting] from ‘Is the physics even possible?’ to ‘Can we engineer a viable system that has sufficient lifetime and that is safe enough and do all those things at an affordable price?’” Tynan says. “That’s still the big open question in front of the research community.”

Hot stuff: US Lab hits milestone on long road to fusion power

Seth Borenstein
The Associated PressStaff
 Wednesday, January 26, 2022 


This image provided by the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shows the NIF Target Bay in Livermore, Calif. The system uses 192 laser beams converging at the center of this giant sphere to make a tiny hydrogen fuel pellet implode. (Damien Jemison / Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory via AP)

With 192 lasers and temperatures more than three times hotter than the center of the sun, scientists hit -- at least for a fraction of a second -- a key milestone on the long road toward nearly pollution-free fusion energy.

Researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California were able to spark a fusion reaction that briefly sustained itself -- a major feat because fusion requires such high temperatures and pressures that it easily fizzles out.

The ultimate goal, still years away, is to generate power the way the sun generates heat, by smooshing hydrogen atoms so close to each other that they combine into helium, which releases torrents of energy.

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A team of more than 100 scientists published the results of four experiments that achieved what is known as a burning plasma in Wednesday's journal Nature. With those results, along with preliminary results announced last August from follow-up experiments, scientists say they are on the threshold of an even bigger advance: ignition. That's when the fuel can continue to "burn" on its own and produce more energy than what's needed to spark the initial reaction.

"We're very close to that next step," said study lead author Alex Zylstra, an experimental physicist at Livermore.

Nuclear fusion presses together two types of hydrogen found in water molecules. When they fuse, "a small amount (milligrams) of fuel produces enormous amounts of energy and it's also very `clean' in that it produces no radioactive waste," said Carolyn Kuranz, a University of Michigan experimental plasma physicist who wasn't part of the research. "It's basically limitless, clean energy that can be deployed anywhere," she said.

Researchers around the world have been working on the technology for decades, trying different approaches. Thirty-five countries are collaborating on a project in Southern France called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor that uses enormous magnets to control the superheated plasma. That is expected to begin operating in 2026.

Earlier experiments in the United States and United Kingdom succeeded in fusing atoms, but achieved no self-heating, said Steven Cowley, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who wasn't part of this study.

But don't bank on fusion just yet.

"The result is scientifically very exciting for us," said study co-author Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for Lawrence Livermore's fusion program. "But we're a long way from useful energy."

Maybe decades, he said.

It's already taken several years inside a lab that is straight out of Star Trek -- one of the movies used the lab as background visuals for the Enterprise's engine room -- and many failed attempts to get to this point. One adjustment that helped: Researchers made the fuel capsule about 10 per cent bigger. Now it's up to the size of a BB.

That capsule fits in a tiny gold metal can that researchers aim 192 lasers at. They heat it to about 100 million degrees, creating about 50 per cent more pressure inside the capsule than what's inside the center of the sun. These experiments created burning plasmas that lasted just a trillionth of a second, but that was enough to be considered a success, Zylstra said.

Overall, the four experiments in the Nature study -- conducted in November 2020 and February 2021 -- produced as much as 0.17 megajoules of energy. That's far more than previous attempts, but still less than one-tenth of the power used to start the process, Zylstra said. A megajoule is about enough energy to heat a gallon of water 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius).

Preliminary results from experiments done later in 2021, which are still being reviewed by other scientists, pushed energy output to 1.3 megajoules and lasted 100 trillionths of second, according to a government press release. But even that is shy of the 1.9 megajoules needed to break even.

"The major problem with fusion is that it is hard," said Princeton's Cowley. "Otherwise, it might be the perfect way to make energy -- sustainable, plentiful, safe and minimal environmental impact."

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

RELATED IMAGES

This illustration provided by the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory depicts a target pellet inside a hohlraum capsule with laser beams entering through openings on either end. The beams compress and heat the target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur.

 (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory via AP)

New catalysts steer hydrogen fuel cells into mainstream

By Joshua A. Krisch 

February 3, 2022

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Cornell chemists have discovered a class of nonprecious metal derivatives that can catalyze fuel cell reactions about as well as platinum, at a fraction of the cost.

This finding brings closer a future where hydrogen fuel cells efficiently power cars, generators and even spacecraft with minimal greenhouse gas emissions.

“These less expensive metals will enable wider deployment of hydrogen fuel cells,” said Héctor D. Abruña, the Émile M. Chamot Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “They will push us away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources.”

Abruña, with co-authors Francis DiSalvo, the John A. Newman emeritus professor of chemistry; doctoral student Rui Zeng; Yao Yang, Ph.D. ’21; Xinran Feng, Ph.D. ’21, and Huiqi Li, a visiting graduate student from Xiamen University; and Lauryn M. Gibb ‘22,  published the findings Feb. 2 in “Nonprecious Transition Metal Nitrides as Efficient Oxygen Reduction Electrocatalysts for Alkaline Fuel Cells,” in the journal Science Advances.

As long as combustion engines rule the streets and fill the skies with smog, it is hard to imagine a sustainable future for transportation. Hydrogen fuel cells, which convert hydrogen directly into electricity with only water and a small amount of heat as byproducts, are promising renewable alternatives.

A critical part of the fuel cell is the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), an infamously sluggish process – Abruña often calls it “God’s collective punishment to electrochemistry” – that is traditionally sped up by platinum and other precious metals. A model catalyst, platinum conducts electricity, catalyzes the most temperamental reactions with aplomb, and is hardy enough to survive the harsh, acidic environment of a fuel cell. But it can be prohibitively expensive.

Lately, however, more forgiving alkaline fuel cells have gained prominence, raising the possibility that less expensive metals, once ruled out for their vulnerability to acidic environments, might replace platinum in these gentler, next-generation fuel cells. Abruña and his team set out to engineer an inexpensive material, fit for an alkaline fuel cell, that would conduct electricity and catalyze the ORR reaction just as efficiently as platinum.

Transition metal nitrides (TMNs) were an obvious choice, and DiSalvo is a world expert on these materials, Abruña said. A class of compounds derived from cobalt, manganese, iron and other transition metals, TMNs conduct electricity and, when exposed to air, tend to form a thin oxygen-based outer shell that provides a perfect surface for catalyzing chemical reactions. After synthesizing a family of TMNs with conductive nitride cores and reactive oxide shells, the team tested each candidate catalyst in a model hydrogen fuel cell.

Manganese- and iron-based candidates made strong showings. But the cobalt nitride catalyst was “the clear winner,” Abruña said, with near identical efficiency to platinum while costing 475 times less as of Feb. 2.

Those savings may help finally brings hydrogen fuel cells out of the laboratory and into the mainstream. If affordable, fuel cells could replace combustion engines and car batteries with a sustainable alternative that, fed a steady diet of hydrogen, never needs to recharge and wastes as little as 10% of the energy that goes into making it run. By comparison, a typical car engine wastes about 75% of its energy.

“Hydrogen fuel cells are enormously powerful, enabling you to run at an efficiency that simply does not exist for more traditional engines,” Abruña said. “People recognize that fuel cells are the way to go. The trick is designing stable and affordable catalysts that make it all possible.”

Funding for this research was provided in part by the Center for Alkaline Based Energy Solutions, an Energy Frontier Research Center supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Joshua A. Krisch is a freelance writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.

The hydrogen economy: Data centers of the future

Is the solid oxide platform the world’s answer to accelerating hydrogen adoption? We sat down with Bloom Energy to find out more

February 04, 2022 

By

 

Claire

Fletcher

What the world needs now (apart from love, sweet love) is a viable, long-term energy solution. With fossil fuels a finite resource, most renewables highly intermittent, and batteries ineffective for extended periods of time, many believe the answer lies within the universe’s most abundant element: hydrogen. Green hydrogen, to be precise.

Amongst electrolyzer technology, solid oxide is widely recognized for its potential to generate green hydrogen at the lowest cost, particularly when pitted against PEM (proton exchange membrane) and alkaline electrolyzers.

This is largely due to the superior efficiency and scalability of solid oxide electrolyzers, as well as their rapidly declining costs, according to Jack Brouwer, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine.

Amongst electrolyzer technology, solid oxide is widely recognized for its potential to generate green hydrogen at the lowest costBloom Energy

With 66 countries across the globe currently committed to net-zero targets in the coming decades, it’s clear we need a clean, flexible answer to energy. The EU has already committed to build 40 GW of electrolyzers this decade, an investment of roughly €24B and is considering importing another 40 GW from countries like Morocco which benefit from lower hydrogen production costs.

Governments are increasingly recognizing the need for hydrogen too, to complement renewable power and plug the gaps left by their intermittency. In terms of renewable power serving as the electricity input used to produce green hydrogen, some of the largest electrolysis deployments have been linked to dedicated renewable projects.

On the other side of the world, a new Green Deal in Korea has seen the country commit to 200,000 hydrogen powered vehicles, as well as 450 refuelling stations by 2030. Elsewhere, programs such as California’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard have spurred early momentum in the US, with the Biden administration vying to make hydrogen a key element in its fight against climate change, as well as playing a key role in decarbonization.

And as hydrogen’s market momentum continues to build – with a 20-fold increase in announced projects over the last 18 months globally – could green hydrogen finally be the holy grail we’ve been waiting for?

The solid oxide advantage

Combining the advantages of scalability and flexibility, with higher production efficiencies thanks to a supply chain that relies on readily available materials, Bloom Energy has established itself as a global leader in solid oxide technology with its power generation unit, the Bloom Energy Server, deployed at data centers, hospitals, retail locations, and even reaching utility scale.

Rapid improvements across the hydrogen economy are beginning to facilitate real solutions at scaleBloom Energy

Leveraging 15-years of experience and a scaled-up solid oxide platform, married with strong hydrogen intellectual property (including 19 patents) Bloom is positioned to create uniquely differentiated hydrogen and power generation solutions.

Bloom’s hydrogen journey started more than 20 years ago, when founders selected solid oxide technology for NASA’s first planned mission to Mars. This flight-ready hardware was intended to produce oxygen and hydrogen from solar power.

This solid oxide technology would later form the basis of Bloom’s core Energy Server platform, with demonstrations in 2005 producing both hydrogen and power. At the time, there wasn’t a sufficient market for hydrogen, so Bloom systems initially recycled the produced hydrogen back into the system to boost efficiency and reduce emissions, a mode Bloom’s fleets still operate in today.

That said, the rapid improvements across the hydrogen economy are beginning to facilitate real solutions at scale. Solid oxide offers many competitive advantages across a range of hydrogen production scenarios, for example, utilizing excess renewables or integrating with large sources of steam from industrial processes and nuclear reactors.

This kind of flexibility has the potential to open doors to several global end-use markets that might have previously been off-limits, including steel and chemical manufacturing, long-haul transportation and wholesale power, to name but a few.

Digging deeper

Hydrogen isn’t a readily available substance on Earth, it requires a primary input energy source to be produced. The traditional way of doing this uses fossil fuels.

Green hydrogen, however, can be produced via electrolysis, which uses zero-carbon electricity to split water at the molecular level into hydrogen and oxygen, through a device called an electrolyzer.

Unlike PEM and alkaline electrolyzers that predominantly rely on electricity and water to make hydrogen, Bloom Electrolyzers can substitute a good proportion of electricity with steamBloom Energy

Since the cost of electricity can account for up to 80 percent of the total cost of hydrogen production, maximizing efficiency is the key to unlocking affordable green hydrogen.

Turning up the heat

The electrical energy required to produce hydrogen changes with the temperature of the input water. Solid oxide technology is capable of utilizing steam as an input, which creates a critical advantage when it comes to cost-effective hydrogen production.

Bloom has years of experience building and optimizing commercial high temperature solid oxide systems that are thermally packaged to minimize heat loss.

The Bloom Electrolyzer operates at high temperatures of between 700 and 850°C, using solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOEC) as the catalyst for a reaction. The heat serves as a secondary source of energy to help this happen, significantly reducing the electrical energy requirement and associated costs.

Unlike PEM and alkaline electrolyzers that predominantly rely on electricity and water to make hydrogen, Bloom Electrolyzers can substitute a good proportion of electricity with steam.

Hydrogen goes global

With several governments having already announced explicit hydrogen investment targets, subsidy schemes and regulatory frameworks, it’s clear that there is a seat at the table for green hydrogen.

38:07

DCD>Talks Hydrogen Fuel Cells with Jamie Funk from Bloom and Pete Sacco from PTS

Jamie Funk, Head of Sales for Verticals at Bloom Energy and Pete Sacco, Founder and President, PTS talk to Dan Loosemore of DCD

26 May 2021

Companies like Bloom are working hard to make hydrogen a viable and affordable asset for all, with the view to make this technology cost-competitive in the future. After all, access to abundant, clean, reliable power should be a necessity available to all, not just those with the deepest pockets.

For data centers, hydrogen can be utilized as a zero-carbon fuel for reliable onsite power production. Using fuel cells paired with hydrogen puts data centers in control over their decarbonization targets, while simultaneously improving their overall power reliability and ensuring predictable costs.

When thinking about the data center of the future, we think about unparalleled levels of reliability, a zero-carbon footprint, and predictable and low costs. Hydrogen is making a case that it can deliver on all three of these necessities.

New research could be the first step to hydrogen power, day and night

A new molecule could be the key to getting hydrogen whenever it's needed.

DOUG JOHNSON - 2/4/2022,

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Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

There’s a disconnect between when people want to use electricity and when solar tends to produce it. Most often, people use power during the evening or the early morning, when the Sun isn’t yet up.

“There is a mismatch between solar irradiation arriving on Earth and the time when you actually need the energy,” Carsten Streb, a researcher at Elm University, told Ars. “Typically, the energy demand—at least in Germany—is highest in the morning and the evening. Everyone switches on their appliances. But obviously, irradiation is strongest at mid-day.”

One option to handle this mismatch is to use solar power to produce hydrogen, which can then be used at a later time. But keeping the hydrogen around for later use can be a challenge. As Streb told Ars, “One of the big problems we’re seeing with hydrogen is the storage.”

In theory, you could de-link the production of hydrogen with the light from the Sun using solar panels to charge a battery that powers an electrolyzer when the hydrogen is needed, but that has its own issues. “With every energy conversion step, you have losses. That process, while feasible, is not efficient,” he said.

Soak up the Sun

However, Streb and a multidisciplinary team of researchers have produced a novel molecule that could be used to allow hydrogen to be made from solar energy on demand—even when it's dark. They developed a photosensitizer–polyoxometalate dyad that absorbs light and stores charge and then can use that charge to produce hydrogen when triggered to do so.

In short, you shine a light on the solution containing the molecule and wait for it to charge—Streb noted that the solution goes from clear to a dark, inky blue in the presence of light. When you want to trigger the hydrogen release, you just add an acid, like the sulphuric acid Streb and his team used.

The hydrogen that's released can then be used for power. Streb said that previous work in this area has produced compounds that can hold electrons for short periods of time, sometimes just fractions of a second. The one he and his team made, however, can store them for hours or even days—the half-life is around 40 hours.

In theory, this molecule could be used almost like a liquid fuel to produce hydrogen at any time of day for a hydrogen-powered vehicle, he said. He did note, however, that the research does not cover how to recycle the molecule. The molecule can be charged and discharged multiple times, but there is some level of degradation that occurs with it. Streb noted that this is a problem that other, similar research is experiencing as well.

“In all fairness, it’s not unexpected. These are light-sensitive compounds that we are using. Typically, when you shine a lot of light on them, they tend to break apart,” he said. “This is something we are working on right now.”

It's still too early to say how useful this molecule could be, however. Beyond questions about recyclability, ruthenium—an element used in the molecule—is quite expensive. All the same, the research is an interesting way around some of the technical problems that hydrogen fuel faces.

Nature Chemistry, 2022. DOI: 1038/s41557-021-00850-8 (About DOIs)

Opinion: We need to tread lightly with hydrogen in Quebec

Émile Boisseau Bouvier and Charles Bonhomme
Published Thursday, February 3, 2022 


Everyone seems to be talking about hydrogen these days, touting its potential economic and climate benefits and framing it as key to the energy transition. But we must temper this overwhelming enthusiasm because hydrogen is not a miracle solution, far from it.

“Get ready, you’ll hear a lot about it,” stated Quebec Premier François Legault, when he was at the COP26 climate change conference last fall. Dominique Anglade and the Quebec Liberal Party have made it a cornerstone of their election and environmental platform, calling hydrogen a “social project” on par with James Bay. Sophie Brochu, CEO of Hydro-Quebec, also emphasized its "extraordinary" potential and didn’t hesitate to describe it as our "new dams".

We’re worried to see how our political leaders are giving hydrogen such a prominent place. Because the increased global interest, which has clearly swept up our own elected officials, is far from innocuous.

This sudden hype about how hydrogen will be the energy of the future is first and foremost a play by the fossil fuel industry to keep selling its products (gas, oil, coal) and to slow down the transition to renewable energy all over the world. Because, about 95 per cent of the time, these highly damaging fuels are being used to produce our “saviour” hydrogen.

A Trojan horse from those who have led us to the edge of the climate abyss.

We must be aware.

A PARTICULAR CASE IN QUEBEC

That being said, the story is a bit more complex in Quebec, where hydrogen is produced from our precious renewable hydroelectricity. Admittedly, the production of this green hydrogen (hydrogen made by renewable energy) is a solution that could help us decarbonize some sectors that are difficult to electrify directly, such as some industrial processes or aviation and marine transportation.

We must ensure that hydrogen is used in a very smart and targeted way because hydrogen production requires A LOT of electricity!

At a time when many are rightfully pointing out that the province must reduce its consumption of hydroelectricity in order to conserve this strategic resource for other key projects—such as the electrification of transportation or exporting it to other nations—using up huge quantities of hydroelectricity to produce green hydrogen for sectors other than those that are difficult to electrify would not be wise.

As such, we hope Quebec’s new hydrogen strategy that our Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Jonatan Julien, will be presenting this spring will be realistic, based on numbers, and will consider the limits of our hydroelectricity production capacity.

Our organizations, Équiterre and the David Suzuki Foundation, submitted a brief during the consultations on this strategy, to inform the government of the potential pitfalls that it should avoid in developing the hydrogen industry in Quebec.

Hopefully, as common sense and science would dictate, we will tread lightly.

Émile Boisseau Bouvier is the Climate Policy Analyst at Équiterre and Charles Bonhomme is the Communications and Public Affairs Specialist at David Suzuki Foundation