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First plasma achieved by OpenStar; 'this is New Zealand's bid to win the fusion race'

Technology / news
First plasma achieved by OpenStar; 'this is New Zealand's bid to win the fusion race'
Source: OpenStar
Source: OpenStar

The researchers at OpenStar Technologies in Te Whanganui-a-Tara say they have achieved a crucial milestone when it comes to creating fusion energy, by making plasma suspended within a magnetic field in a vacuum chamber.

Fusing atoms at extremely high temperatures as happens in the Sun and stars holds the promise of providing nearly endless green energy. While mankind has been able to successfully split atoms (fission) since the 1940s in experimental and eventually, commercial reactors, fusion equivalents have been elusive and remain at the experimental stage.

This despite regular breakthrough announcements that claim to take us yet another step closer towards energy production through fusion.

At the heart of the matter is heating the plasma (ionised gas) to the temperature required for fusion to take place on Earth, which can be 50 million degrees Celsius for some approaches.

Not only does this use a large amount of energy but as OpenStar said: "creating and confining plasma is the key engineering feat to enable fusion, as no physical material can withstand contact with temperatures that high; it must be suspended within magnetic fields in a vacuum chamber."

This is much more difficult than it sounds but it is what the Māori-led OpenStar appears to have done successfully, using a prototype of its Levitated Dipole Reactor. 

Source: Openstar

In the words of OpenStar's director of plasma science, Dr Darren Garnier:

“We made a plasma today, so for me it is like Christmas. We’re a fusion company now, not just a magnet company, or someone drawing schematics with only hopes and dreams.” 

Garnier's Alma Mater is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, which is where the Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX) operated between 2004 and 2011 in Collaboration with Columbia University. 

OpenStar described its process as an elegant solution inspired by nature that uses superconductors housed within the [vacuum] chamber, and the magnetic field lines emanate outwards in a dipole shape. This confines the plasma around the magnet, in a similar fashion to the Earth's magnetosphere.

Crucial to creating the magnetic containment fields are High Temperature Superconductors. OpenStar said they permit electromagnets that produce very strong containing fields, yet with effectively no power consumption. Wellington's Robinson Research Institute produces innovative work around superconducting magnets, and they're used in other nuclear fusion efforts around the world.

Levitated Dipole. Source: OpenStar

Although MIT and Columbia University thought the Levitated Dipole reactor was promising, official United States funding was diverted from their experiment in 2011, towards toroidal chambers with magnetic coils or tokamak systems to confine the plasma, which is a different approach, used by for example ITER in France. We'll see where OpenStar goes with its technology, if it gets us towards sustained fusion but company founder Dr Ratu Mataira said "this is New Zealand's bid to win the fusion race".

 

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34 Comments

Thanks for this. I checked the date to make sure it wasn't April. I didn't know we had research going on in this space in NZ.

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Indeed. How exactly is nuclear power research allowed in New Zealand?

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I would imagine the research is fine because it is fusion not fission.

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No, that wouldn't matter, there is no ban on nuclear power (whether fission or fusion) in NZ, there is a ban on nuclear weapons, and a ban on nuclear powered ships entering NZ waters.

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Which will be gone under Trump unless we want some hefty tariffs on our primary products entering the USA

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New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987. Just seen. So why no fission research? Apart form the cost and public perception. We have no fission research, it would seem we are reliant on Australia to provide medical isotopes.

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We used to have research reactors in NZ, I worked in a lab where it was built for this purpose - reactor removed way back (Cant Uni Electrical Eng Dept)

 

Go for it, there are patents to be had here.....

 

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Can someone answer a naive question then. If this experimenting eventuates in a cheap, clean, efficient source of energy could that in turn power the viable production of the so called green energy hydrogen to power ice vehicles instead of petroleum etc? 

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@Foxglove - yes to potential for 'green' hydrogen production from excess nuclear power. No, this could not be combusted in ICE vehicles, but would be used in fuel cell powered vehicles.

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The EROEI of hydrogen is negative. 

You are better using the electricity (the interface energy-form) directly. 

But: Simon MICHAUX | Senior Scientist | Geological Survey of Finland, Espoo | GTK | MIM | Research profile

 

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If want to go down that path you can make nuclear diesel.

"US Navy Research Lab demonstrated removing CO2 from seawater and making jet fuel, using electricity potentially generated from nuclear power plants on an aircraft carrier. The Navy lab estimated synfuel costs would be $5 per gallon. Bosch estimated CO2-sourced synfuel costs at $4 to $6 per gallon, and lifetime costs of a synfueled hybrid auto cheaper than a long-range EV.

Advancing the game further, new nuclear technology can provide high temperature heat via 550°C steam or 750°C helium. Wind or solar energy sources can not. Dow is the first US company to embrace this nuclear heat potential, initially to reduce their own CO2 emissions. US petrochemical companies and engineers have the expertise to use the high-temperature heat and reliable electric power to build synfuel refineries. Advanced nuclear source energy costs can be 3.5 cents/kWh for electricity or 2 cents/kWh for high-temperature heat. This raw, source energy input cost to manufacture nuclear diesel is less than $1 per gallon. Even after adding new refinery capital costs and operations costs I expect new refineries could produce nuclear diesel at current wholesale prices near $3 per gallon."

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There is no prohibition on Nuclear power in NZ, only on nuclear ships entering our waters.

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...what race were the others involved? God this gets tiresome.

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Great effort openstar, as I understand this levetating dipole reactor is a new approach first tried then discarded by MIT, but since the advances in superconductors has become viable...Good luck lads..

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No it isn't; it's illogical. 

'as no physical material can withstand contact with temperatures that high; it must be suspended within magnetic fields in a vacuum chamber."

So both the magnetic fields and the vacuum need to never fail. 

Never. 

Name me one human construct that has never failed?  And we're going to extract the energy, controllably, how? 

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Why does it have to never fail? A Nuclear power station is going to have multiple reactors, some taken offline for maintenance from time to time. If one units fails it might cause a big drop in power output, but it's not going to blow up. If the plasma is released from its containment field it'll just dissipate and shut itself down, that's the beauty of fusion.

As for extracting the energy, you just need something able to get close enough to that heat source to transfer it elsewhere, eg. steam turbines like a fission plant. I believe molten salt blankets is the current favoured method.

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At that temp? 

 

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“Maori-led” is both an irrelevance/non-sequitur in the context of linking this achievement to ethnicity of the Founder, an insult to the identities of all the other team members, and a general embarrassment in its implication that the Maori ancestry of someone needs to be specifically acknowledged when something good is achieved.

Well done to the team though, would be amazing if they pulled it off.

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The company describes itself as: "OpenStar Technologies is a highly ambitious, forty seven-strong Māori-led start-up, founded and based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa."

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I've noticed a trend amongst other media outlets of using the Māori names of entities when $hit is going wrong and using their English titles at other times. It's nice to see positive associations made too - in this case where the leadership and their team are world-leading in their tech niche.

OpenStar crew - you're bloody awesome

Juha - keep bringing positivity

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In this case I think it's worth highlighting and showcasing that it doesn't matter what ethnicity you come from, you can achieve great things. The CEO has a PhD in applied superconductivity and clearly knows his stuff. Good on him.

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Don’t we all know that anyway? Well everyone apart from racists.

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We humans are creatures of story much more than fact-collecting machines. Sometimes we need to be reminded where the facts don't align with our preconcieved worldview

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Touche

Facts tend to transcend worldviews. Overshoot is a fact, draw-down is another, depletion is a third. 

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Indeed, it's really not that different to saying "a team of New Zealanders", which could also be considered an irrelevant detail depending on your perspective. People like to categorise themselves and others for some reason. This could be happening in China and still be just as advantageous to the world.

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Maybe openly celebrating the success of people with Maori heritage will help inspire other young Maori, by cutting through this seemingly ingrained idea that the universe is out to disadvantage them.  

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They were closer to maintainable ways of life, before Europeans got here. 

But this is absolute nonsense - if humans had infinite energy, look at our track record? We'd use it to stuff the place even faster. 

And I'd add; if we extrapolate the emanation of low-grade energy over the last 200 years, we boil the oceans in another 400. I kid you not. 

Galactic-Scale Energy | Do the Math

Anyone doubting, please search: World3    Note that BAU2 is the closest tracking, 50 years on. Plot the inflections, note the dates. Then ask yourself the relevancy of this research?

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Given that the sun provides the Eart with a continuous 173 petawatts of energy input (equivalent to more than 1 million very large nuclear power plants), nothing humans do in addition to this is more than a rounding error. In other words, no the seas aren't going to boil.

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It's a simple energy balance black-body radiation calculation. And it is not wrong - if we continue to grow energy usage at 2.3% per year then surface temperature on earth will hit 100 degrees around 2460. This is ignoring the increasing greenhouse effect.

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That's a myth. There were massive changes in land use patterns prior to European arrival, as Maori practiced slash and burn agriculture and deforestation to drive out prey animals (Moa etc).

The only constraint was human population attrition via warfare/disease etc. It's highly possible that the natural ecosystem would have suffered further deterioration, even without that advent of Europeans.

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Absolutely agree - not I said: closer - and when somewhat tired post battle, they replenished on the nearest source of protein...

Thinking it through, the Maori connection is probably how they got this past the previous Govt. The sun shines, and all that...

 

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Maybe openly celebrating the success of people with Māori heritage will help inspire other young Māori, by cutting through internalised limiting beliefs and improving others' perception and regard for Māori people's potential 

There, fixed the broad brush statement for you

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Where is Te Whanganui o tara? 

Frank understood the Maori name for Wellington is Poneke. Or Te Upoko o Te ika a Maui (the local university name). 

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Helps if you recall that Wellington wasn't a city/region when many of these "names" came about, so it can be called different things depending on the perspective and preferences of the namer. Definitive names for places is an introduced concept. Just like you could refer to the place where your local corner dairy is as "down the street", "by the main drag", "where the dairy is", "on the corner of main street and duvet drive". Poneke is just a transliteration of "Port Nicholson" from the colonial era, and is used where a definitive name is required because it's short and fits on signs. It doesn't really have any tradition behind it.

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