![]() ![]() In a commercial power plant, this would happen once every 30 seconds, giving the plant an effective output around 744 MW – a little under the 1 GW of the average US nuclear fission plant, but without any nuclear waste or potential of meltdown. ![]() According to Energy UK, that equates to about 6.2 megawatt-hours. These shockwaves intersect at planned moments to supercharge the pistol shrimp's cavitation effects, greatly multiplying the pressure around a small, precisely positioned fuel pellet in the middle.Īs the pellet splashes down into a pool of liquid lithium, a heat exchanger transfers the heat to water, generating steam that turns a turbine and produces electricity in the final commercial reactor design.Įach target, says First Light, would produce enough energy to power an average UK home for two years. It has created and refined a series of small targets, some in cubic form with sides of about 1 cm (0.4 inches) that are designed to create a series of interacting shockwaves and bubble cavities when they're hit with coin-shaped projectiles at super-high velocities. Amazing stuff, you can hear Richard Hammond talking about it and see these shockwaves in ultra-slow motion in this BBC Earth Lab video clip.įirst Light took this as a starting point and began designing ways to amplify this effect well beyond what the shrimp's claw can achieve, to a point where it can create fusion-friendly conditions. The bubble cavities interact with the shockwave, and collapse in an infinitesimally short period of time – but for the briefest of moments, the vapor in those bubbles is heated to tens of thousands of degrees, and even emits a bright flash of light. That's so fast that the water itself gets vaporized as it shears against the still water around it, creating tiny bubble cavities. These little fellas snap their claws together at incredible speed, creating a shockwave and squirting a jet of water forward at up to 60 mph (96 km/h). This technique, says First Light, is inspired by the pistol shrimp, and its famous underwater bubble-shooting weapon. ![]() Pressure levels high enough to cause small embedded deuterium fuel pellets to implode upon themselves at high enough speeds to overcome nuclear repulsion and start fusion reactions. Hypersonic speed, in fact, in the form of a projectile being fired from a railgun at a falling target, which is specifically designed to generate finely tuned, collapsing shockwaves that create momentary pressure levels nearly a billion times higher than atmospheric air pressure at sea level. Like the HB11 approach, First Light requires tremendous speed. Most of the big tokamak and stellarator-based fusion projects in progress now intend to create monstrously high temperatures, higher than in the core of the Sun, in magnetically confined plasma, hoping to get those atoms moving fast enough to overcome the powerful repulsion between two nuclei.īut there are other approaches, including that of Australia's HB11, which takes a more targeted approach by using ultra-powerful lasers to accelerate hydrogen atoms into boron fuel pellets at tremendous speed, yielding positively-charged helium atoms, which can be directly harvested for electrical power.įirst Light Fusion says it's got another approach altogether, that doesn't require expensive, powerful lasers or magnets to get the job done. Where current nuclear power plants release energy by splitting atoms in fission reactions, fusion reactors will release energy in the same way the Sun does – by smashing atoms together so hard and so fast that they fuse into heavier elements. The nuclear fusion space is heating up, if you'll pardon the pun, as the world orients itself toward a clean energy future. Oxford spinoff First Light Fusion says its novel "projectile" approach offers "the fastest, simplest and cheapest route to commercial fusion power." The company is now celebrating a significant breakthrough with its first confirmed fusion reaction.
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