A Seattle-based company has unveiled its new nuclear fusion prototype with the goal of delivering commercially viable fusion energy as soon as possible.
Zap Energy revealed its Century device, which it says is the world's first demonstration system of its kind to produce 100 kilowatts of power, according to Interesting Engineering.
As the outlet reports, Century is unique because it doesn't use magnets, cryogenics, or lasers to achieve fusion, which are the most common means of achieving it. Instead, it uses what's known as a sheared-flow-stabilized Z pinch. This is essentially a phenomenon where electromagnetic fields are so strong that they compress matter together, per IE.
As Zap Energy reports, Z-pinch fusion has been around since the 1950s, but it was deemed ineffective because the plasma created — the piece that is essential to generating energy from the reaction — fizzles out incredibly quickly. The company claims that its sheared-flow stabilization can extend the lifespan of the plasma produced almost indefinitely, allowing it to continue to generate energy for as long as needed.
"We're developing all of the key enabling technologies that we're going to need to deliver commercial fusion," Zap Energy co-founder and CEO Benj Conway said, per TechCrunch. "We think that doing all of this in parallel — everything all-together, all-at-once type thing — is the fastest way to actually deliver a commercial product."
Century is designed to simulate power plant operation by firing high-voltage pulses of power every 10 seconds for more than two hours. This will allow Zap to test power supplies, plasma-facing circulating liquid metal walls, and its technology to try to mitigate electrode damage in the reactor.
Zap's VP of systems engineering Matthew C. Thompson compared the reactor's process to an internal combustion engine, per Interesting Engineering.
"Zap's fusion approach is pulsed, so ultimately, it will run like an internal combustion engine with cylinders firing all day long to produce steady energy output," Thompson said, "As you do that you also generate large neutron flux and heat loads in the system over time, which is exactly the energy output that you want, but requires unique engineering solutions. Century will test a lot of our assumptions and define the best path toward our first plant."
Fusion has been the focus of a number of projects around the globe in recent years. Scientists have potentially found a solution to prevent catastrophic failures in fusion reactors. They've also discovered that a lithium vapor cave could be a key to heat dissipation from reactions and have unveiled a cold fusion reactor, though skeptics remain regarding the latter's viability.
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If any of these technologies result in scalable solutions, they would be able to provide vast amounts of clean, low-cost power without generating toxic pollution associated with millions of premature deaths every year and the overheating of the planet.
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