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Zap Energy is a fusion startup that hopes to build a pilot fusion plant within the next few years.
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His technology uses a Z-pinch device to create a plasma that creates a fusion reaction.
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It’s just one of many companies hoping to make a breakthrough in fusion energy.
Behind the glass doors of a modest office building in Everett, Washington, sits a machine designed to harness the power of the sun. And maybe one day it will happen.
Zap Energy hopes to use the Z-pinch device to generate copious amounts of electricity through nuclear fusion.
Fusion is what powers the sun, and if it could work here on Earth, it could produce almost 4 million times more energy than fossil fuels like coal or oil.
As the climate crisis worsens, some see fusion as the ticket to abundant, fossil fuel-free energy. But critics say the technology is too far behind to have a meaningful impact on the problem in the next few decades.
However, Zap Energy hopes to have a pilot plant operational within the next few years, but there is no firm date for this goal.
“Zap Energy is still doing some basic R&D,” Ben Levitt, the company’s vice president of research and development, told Business Insider during a recent visit to the company’s offices. “We’re kind of building the plane as we fly.”
fusion race
The company is just one of a handful of fusion startups in the Pacific Northwest.
For example, Helion Energy, another startup not far from Zap, has raised over $600 million in funding. It recently signed a deal to provide fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.
Both the US government and private sector supporters are heavily invested in the future that fusion can deliver.
Over $6 billion from private funders poured There has been interest in fusion research in recent years, including through the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Initiatives. Gates’ investment company contributed to Zap’s $160 million Series C financing round in 2022.
No matter which startup you’re talking about, they’re all racing to achieve the same thing: Creating a fusion reactor that can produce more energy than it takes to power it.
Although it seems quite simple, scientists have only been able to achieve such success twice after more than 70 years of attempts.
Every fusion startup has a vision for how net fusion energy can best be produced. Zap Energy’s version improves on a decades-old approach.
Z-pinch reactor
Zap calls its Z-pinch device FuZE, which stands for Fusion Z-Pinch Experiment. It is a long tube and has a simpler design than some of its competitors’ devices, such as Helion’s magneto-inertial fusion technology..
“Z-pinch was the first concept studied to confine a plasma to achieve fusion conditions,” Levitt said. “It is also the first configuration any graduate student learns because it is the simplest.”
Gas is blown into the machine to work. A massive electrical explosion turns the gas into plasma. An electrode then creates a magnetic force containing the plasma..
Plasma is a state of matter found in stars, and it is within this plasma that the conditions for nuclear fusion occur; Here, atomic nuclei combine and release large amounts of energy.
To achieve this feat, the plasma must remain hot and dense long enough for these nuclei to fuse. The point is instabilities It forms rapidly in plasma, preventing fusion conditions.
To avoid these instabilities, many researchers abandoned Z-pinch devices in the 20th century and turned to other types of reactors such as tokamaks. But in the 1990s, Uri Shumlak, chief scientist and founder of Zap Energy, began looking at Z-pinch again.
Shumlak, then a graduate student at the University of Washington, thought that making the plasma flow in layers at different speeds could help smooth out the instabilities and allow the plasma to remain in the right conditions for fusion to occur long enough to produce net energy..
“This is the stabilization mechanism called sheared flow stabilization,” Levitt said. “This is truly Zap Energy’s secret sauce.”
How close is Zap Energy to fusion power?
Decades after the first experiments, Zap Energy thinks using fusion to generate electricity is single-digit years away. However, there are still many obstacles ahead.
Currently, Levitt said Zap Energy can run its machine about 100 times a day, allowing researchers to tinker with different configurations of the Z-pinch device.
Next to the Z-pinch machine in Zap’s warehouse are large power banks surrounded by chain-link fencing. They provide the energy needed to produce plasma. A pulse of energy could create a plasma lasting about 100 microseconds because it could “become unstable” for longer periods of time, Levitt said.
The company has not yet succeeded in producing fusion reactions with its device, let alone producing net energy from these reactions to power plants.
“So we think we know how this will work, but of course you have to prove it experimentally,” Levitt said.
Fusion cost
Zap Energy plans to use tritium, which is great for fusion but extremely expensive, costing about $30,000 per gram by 2022, according to Science, to generate electricity.
Zap Energy has not started working with tritium yet. While it can’t control the cost of tritium, it can help keep costs down elsewhere.
For example, a method to trap and control plasma long enough for fusion is to use a self-generated magnetic field. It uses a magnetically generated bottle in which the reactor produces its own magnetic field.
“You’re not really imposing any electromagnetic bottle around the plasma,” Levitt said. “He’s doing it himself.”
This means the device does not rely on expensive superconducting magnets to hold plasma, like Japan’s new reactor, which cost $600 million to build.
Going beyond break-even
The first milestone for any fusion initiative will be to reach the scientific break-even point, where you get as much energy from fusion as you use to power the plasma.
The ultimate goal then is to produce 10 to 20 times more net energy, going beyond the break-even point. “You have to get to another factor of 10 in earnings here, and then you have to do it over and over again,” Levitt said.
This will require other engineering efforts that Zap said he is working on simultaneously, such as creating capacitors that will create the Z-particle over and over again very quickly.
“We have not and will not reach breakeven this year,” a spokesman for Zap Energy said.
Currently, Zap is trying to create its own power system that will charge, store and discharge the required energy.
Eventually, these devices can enclose the Z-pinch device in six to eight cases the size of shipping containers.
Zap Energy is also exploring the possibility of taking over part of Washington State’s only remaining coal plant. stop operations In 2025.
The plant will offer Zap field and grid connections that could help it one day generate 200 megawatts of electricity per hour; This is enough to power approximately 164,000 homes when operated continuously. — The company’s spokesperson said:
Zap’s first customers will likely be early adopters because of the cost of building an initial facility, said Ryan Umstattd, the company’s vice president of products and partnerships. “It could be a good choice for things like data centers, which are popping up everywhere and have significant electricity demand,” he said.
Regulation of fusion power plants
Since there are no fusion power plants in operation, the challenges and risks may not yet be fully understood, according to a 2020 study by researchers. Imperial College London.
However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers fusion to be safer than fission because it does not have the same risk of meltdown.
In fact, earlier this year NRC voted regulating nuclear fusion more like particle accelerators rather than fission power plants.
Former NRC commissioner Jeff Merrifield said this could make life easier for fusion companies like Zap because regulations for particle accelerators are “much simpler, less costly and more efficient than the more complex rules that apply to fission reactors.” CNBC.
Simpler does not mean simpler.
Even if the US government pushes for a commercial fusion facility within the next 10 years, it could be possible. to take decades to get It’s a pretty big chunk of the fusion-powered grid. And if all technological and environmental problems are solved.
Read the original article on Business Insider