Mark Megahan
When nuclear physicists hear people talking about an energy crisis, they hang their heads in shame. They all know that one of their ranks should have solved the fusion problem by now. Miniature stars in a magnetic bottle could power entire cities with not a trace of pollution. The only problem is keeping them from blowing up.
Breakthrough fusion design
When you want to solve a design dilemma, all the experts have the same advice. “Ask a 12-year-old.” New Jersey Physicist Michael Zarnstorff’s son may have the key to solving the fusion problem… refrigerator magnets.
Maybe not the run of the mill ones in your kitchen but “neodymium–boron permanent magnets.” They “behave like refrigerator magnets, only stronger.” The ones made these days are “powerful enough to potentially help control the plasma in stellarators.” What the heck is a stellarator? You ask.
Fusion reactors have been on the design drawing board since the 1950’s but “scientists haven’t been able to create designs that can produce energy in a sustainable manner.”
They have a hard time getting funding for projects which could blow off enough of the planet to make it wobble if something goes wrong. While Zarnstorff was helping his son with a school science project he had one of those “aha!” moment breakthroughs.
His day gig is chief scientist at the Max Planck Princeton Research Center for Plasma Physics in New Jersey.
His team has been playing with a complicated toy called a “stellarator” type nuclear fusion reactor, which shows a lot of promise. By smashing hydrogen atoms together to make helium they can unleash “vast amounts of energy.”
The pilot light
Just like the pilot light in your oven, fusion reactors need a “kick start.” In this case a pilot light that can heat “hydrogen plasma to over 100,000,000°C.”
Once the hydrogen “melts” and the hydrogen nuclei fuse, we can harvest nearly unlimited energy. Plasma at stellar temperatures isn’t real easy to work with.
The stuff is so touchy even looking at it is dangerous but stellarators “use external magnets to control and evenly distribute the hot plasma by ‘twisting’ its flow in specific ways.” Up until now, the fusion generating gizmos were all “outfitted with a complex series of electromagnetic coils that create an optimal magnetic field within the device.”
Really expensive and virtually hand wound coils. “The twisted coils are the most expensive and complicated part of the stellarator and have to be manufactured to very great precision in a very complicated form.” Unless you use fridge magnets.
Zarnstorff couldn’t wait to get his fusion team to work modifying the monster in their lab. “His team’s conceptual design combines simpler, ring-shaped superconducting coils with pancake-shaped magnets attached outside the plasma’s vacuum vessel.”
As Nature explains, like “refrigerator magnets—which stick on only one side—these would produce their magnetic field mainly inside the vessel.” They still have some bugs to work out, like “limitations in field strength, nontunability, and the possibility of demagnetization.” The equipment still might not be safe enough to test here on Earth but there’s an asteroid mining project it could safely power which would cover the cost of research and development with enough left over to buy a planet.
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