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Zap Energy is a fusion startup that hopes to launch a pilot fusion plant in the next few years.
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Its technology uses a Z-pinch device to create plasma that generates a fusion reaction.
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It’s just one of many companies hoping to make progress with fusion energy.
Behind the glass doors of an impregnable office building in Everett, Washington, is a machine designed to harness the power of the sun. And maybe one day it will be.
Zap Energy hopes to use its Z-pinch device to generate valuable electricity with nuclear fusion.
Fusion is what powers the sun, and if it can work here on Earth, it can produce almost 4 million times the energy of fossil fuels like coal or oil.
As the climate crisis worsens, some see fusion as the ticket to abundant, fossil fuel-free energy. However, critics say the technology is too far behind to make a meaningful impact on the problem in the coming years.
That said, Zap Energy hopes to have a pilot plant up and running in the next few years, although it doesn’t have a firm date for the goal.
“Zap Energy is still doing some basic T’s and F’s,” 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.”
The fusion race
The company is just one of a handful of fusion startups in the Pacific Northwest.
Located not far from Zap, for example, is another startup, Helion Energy, which has raised over $600 million. It recently signed an agreement to supply fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.
Both the US government and private backers are investing heavily in the future that fusion might offer.
More than $6 billion from private funders is poured on fusion research in recent years, including from Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Gates’ investment firm helped with Zap’s $160 million Series C funding round in 2022.
No matter which startup you’re talking about, they’re all racing to achieve the same thing: create a fusion reactor that can generate more energy than it takes to power it.
It sounds simple enough but scientists have only achieved such a feat twice after more than 70 years of effort.
Every fusion startup has a vision of how best to generate net fusion energy. Zap Energy’s version improves upon a decades-old approach.
The Z-pinch reactor
Zap calls its Z-pinch device FuZE, short 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 for confining a plasma to try to reach fusion conditions,” Levitt said. “It’s also the first configuration any grad student learns because it’s the simplest.”
To operate, gas blows into the machine. A large burst of electricity converts the gas into plasma. Then, an electrode creates a magnetic force containing the plasma.
Plasma is a state of matter found in stars, and it is within that plasma that the conditions for nuclear fusion occur – where atomic nuclei fuse and release enormous amounts of energy.
To achieve this feat, the plasma must remain hot and dense long enough to fuse those nuclei. The main question is that instability form quickly in the plasma can put a damper on the fusion conditions.
To avoid these instabilities, many researchers turned away from Z-pinch devices in the 20th century and towards other types of reactors such as tokamaks. But in the 1990s, Uri Shumlak, chief scientist and founder of Zap Energy, started looking at Z-pinch again.
Then a graduate student at the University of Washington, Shumlak, thought that the plasma flowing in layers at different speeds could help smooth out the instabilities, allowing the plasma to remain in the right conditions for fusion to occur long enough to generate clean energy..
“That’s the stabilization mechanism here, called shear flow stabilization,” Levitt said. “That really is Zap Energy’s secret sauce.”
How close is Zap Energy to fusion power?
Ten years after the early experiments, Zap Energy thinks it is single-digit years away from using fusion to generate electricity. But there are still many obstacles in the way.
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 a chain link fence. They provide the energy to generate the plasma. Any more could generate a pulse of plasma energy that lasts for about 100 microseconds and could “become unstable,” Levitt said.
The company has yet to generate fusion reactions with its device, let alone produce clean energy from those reactions with powerhouses.
“So we think we know how it will work, but, of course, you have to prove it experimentally,” said Levitt.
The fusion cost
To generate electricity, Zap Energy plans to use tritium, which is great for fusion but turns out to be very expensive at around $30,000 per gram in 2022, according to Science.
Zap Energy has not started working with tritium, yet. And while it can’t control the cost of tritium, it can help keep costs down elsewhere.
For example, a self-generated magnetic field is its means of confining and controlling the plasma long enough for fusion. It uses a magnetic bottle in which the reactor generates its own magnetic field.
“You don’t really impose any kind of electromagnetic bottle around the plasma,” said Levitt. “He does that himself.”
That means the device doesn’t rely on expensive superconductor magnets — like Japan’s new reactor that cost $600 million to build — to keep the plasma there.
Breaking even
The first milestone for any fusion starter is to reach a scientific equilibrium, where you get as much energy from the fusion as you use to power the plasma.
After that, the ultimate goal is going beyond break-even, generating 10 to 20 times the amount of net energy. “You need to get another factor of 10 in the gain there, and then you need to do it over and over again,” Levitt said.
That will require other engineering work that Zap said he is working on simultaneously, like creating capacitors that will create the Z-pinch repeatedly very quickly.
“We have not and will not break even this year,” said a Zap Energy spokesperson.
Currently, Zap is working on creating its own power system that will charge, store and discharge the necessary energy.
Finally, these devices could surround the Z-pinch device in six to eight crates the size of shipping containers.
Zap Energy is also exploring the possibility of taking over part of Washington State’s only remaining coal-fired power plant, which will cease operations in the year 2025.
The power plant will offer space and Zap grid connections that could help it one day generate 200 megawatts of electricity per hour – enough to power around 164,000 homes if it operated continuously. — said a company spokesperson.
Because of the cost of setting up a plant for the first time, Ryan Umstattd, the company’s vice president of products and partnerships, said Zap’s first customers are likely to be early adopters. “It could be a good fit for things like data centers, which are popping up all over the place and have significant electricity demands,” he said.
Regulation of fusion power plants
Because there are no fusion energy plants in operation, the challenges and risks may not yet be fully understood, according to a 2020 study by researchers at Imperial College London.
That said, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers fusion to be safer than fission because it doesn’t carry the same risk of meltdown.
Indeed, earlier this year, the NRC vote to regulate nuclear fusion in the same way as particle accelerators rather than similar fission power plants.
This could make life easier for fusion companies like Zap because regulations for particle accelerators are “much simpler, cheaper, and more efficient than the more complicated rules imposed on fission reactors,” he said. Jeff Merrifield, former NRC commissioner. CNBC.
Simple does not mean simple, however.
Even as the US government pushes for a commercial fusion plant in the next 10 years, it could accept twenty years Get a large chunk of the grid operating on fusion. And that’s if all the technological and environmental issues are resolved.
Read the original article on Business Insider
