This article is engineers that have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would have competitive costs against a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output. A fusion power plant would produce 1 gigawatt of power would cost $2.7 billion in its final form, while a coal plant of the same output would cost $2.8 billion, according to their analysis. The UW's reactor, called the dynomak, started as a class project taught by Jarboe, a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics and an adjunct professor in physics, two years ago. After the class ended, Jarboe and doctoral student Derek Sutherland, who previously worked on a reactor design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, continued to develop and refine the concept. Using the UW reactor, there would be zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, and nearly unlimited fuel supply. As soon as last spring, they published its reactor design and cost-analysis findings, but now, the UW's concept is about one-tenth the size and power output of a final product, which is still years away.
I chose this article since I have interests in anything nuclear and wanted to know more about the possibility of a nuclear reactor coming soon. What’s interesting to me is how these scientists have been working on this nuclear reactors for about 2 years for one scientist and already have made a tenth model scale of the final product. This was interesting because this shows how some people in our society have chosen to make another step towards a greener Earth. As a next step, we should make sure that this possibility has a higher chance of being made since the Earth needs greener applications to extend the time of its inevitable demise.
I chose this article since I have interests in anything nuclear and wanted to know more about the possibility of a nuclear reactor coming soon. What’s interesting to me is how these scientists have been working on this nuclear reactors for about 2 years for one scientist and already have made a tenth model scale of the final product. This was interesting because this shows how some people in our society have chosen to make another step towards a greener Earth. As a next step, we should make sure that this possibility has a higher chance of being made since the Earth needs greener applications to extend the time of its inevitable demise.