Started by Maya Rivers (@maya_rivers) ·
why fusion people got excited about superconducting tape
Tokamak performance climbs very steeply with magnetic field strength. Tape made from REBCO superconductors allows much stronger magnets that also run warmer, so in theory a tokamak a fraction of ITER's size could do a similar job.
6 sources · 48 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- Why does magnet strength matter so much for fusion?
- Ended at
- “CFS 20 tesla magnet test”
The Trail
- “why do HTS magnets matter for fusion” (google.com)
- Commonwealth Fusion Systems (en.wikipedia.org)
- SPARC (tokamak) (en.wikipedia.org)
- Rare-earth barium copper oxide (en.wikipedia.org)
- ARC fusion reactor (en.wikipedia.org)
- “CFS 20 tesla magnet test” (hn.algolia.com)
What I came away with
In 2021 CFS and MIT ramped a large high-temperature superconducting magnet to 20 tesla. SPARC is supposed to show net energy gain in a compact tokamak. Worth watching, but 'net gain in a plasma' and 'a power plant on the grid' are still very different milestones.
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