US company Type One Energy has announced the publication of what it says is the world’s first comprehensive, self-consistent and robust physics basis, with conservative design margins, for a practical fusion pilot power plant.
This physics basis is presented in a series of seven peer-reviewed scientific papers in a special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics. They serve as the foundation for the Type One Energy’s first Infinity Two stellarator fusion power plant project, which the company is developing for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) utility in the USA.
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The Infinity Two fusion pilot power plant physics design basis realistically considers the complex relationship between competing requirements for plasma performance, power plant start-up, construction logistics, reliability and economics, utilising actual power plant operating experience. This Infinity Two baseline physics solution makes use of the inherently favourable operating characteristics of highly optimised stellarator fusion technology using modular superconducting magnets, as has been successfully proven on the W7-X science machine in Germany.
‘Why are we the first private fusion company with an agreement to develop a potential fusion power plant project for an energy utility? Because we have a design anchored in reality,’ said Christofer Mowry, CEO of Type One Energy. ‘The physics basis for Infinity Two is grounded in the knowledge of what is required for application to, and performance in, the demanding environment of reliable electrical generation for the power grid. We have an organisation that understands this isn’t about designing a science project.’
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Led by Chris Hegna, a theorist in modern stellarators, Type One Energy performed high-fidelity computational plasma physics analyses to improve Infinity Two’s functional and performance requirements, part of a global development programme that featured significant contributions from a broad coalition of scientists from national laboratories and universities around the world. The company made use of a spectrum of high-performance computing facilities, including access to the highest-performance US Department of Energy supercomputers, such as the exascale Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to perform its simulations.
‘We committed to this ambitious fusion commercialisation milestone two years ago and today we delivered,’ said John Canik, chief science and engineering officer for Type One Energy. ‘The team was able to efficiently develop deep plasma physics insights to inform the design of our Infinity Two stellarator, by taking advantage of our access to high performance computing resources. This enabled the Type One Energy team to demonstrate a realistic, integrated stellarator design that moves far beyond conventional thinking and concepts derived from more limited modelling capabilities.’
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The design for Infinity Two is based around a deuterium-tritium-fuelled, burning plasma stellarator with 800MW of fusion power and delivers a nominal 350MWe to the power grid. It’s characterised by fusion plasma with resilient and stable behaviour across a broad range of operating conditions, very low heat loss due to turbulent transport, as well as tolerable direct energy losses to the stellarator first wall. The Infinity Two stellarator has sufficient room for both adequately sized island divertors to exhaust helium ash and a blanket that provides appropriate shielding and tritium breeding. Type One Energy has high confidence that this essential physics solution provides a good baseline stellarator configuration for the Infinity Two plant.
According to Type One Energy, the stellarator configuration has enabled it to develop a maintenance solution that supports good power plant capacity factors and associated levellised cost of electricity. It also supports favourable regulatory requirements for component manufacturing and power plant construction methods essential to achieving a reasonable over-night cost for Infinity Two.