I'm just throwing down an historical marker here. Some MIT physicists founded a company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems. That company has achieve a 20 Tesla magnetic field with a high-temperature super-conducting magnet.
The magnet that was tested last week was about three meters tall and half that wide. It's powered by coils of a high-temperature superconducting material called ReBCO and operates at about 20 Kelvin. (In superconductivity, 20 K counts as high-temperature, as more typical superconducting materials need to be at less than 5 K.)
The magnet is designed such that production of similar magnets can be scaled-up to mass-production levels should it be successful in a net-positive power-producing fusion reactor.
"Performance of this magnet is similar to a non-superconducting one that was used in an MIT experiment that concluded its experiments five years ago," said MIT's Whyte. "The difference in terms of energy consumption is rather stunning. That magnet, because it was a normal copper conducting magnet, consumed approximately 200 million watts of energy to produce the confining magnetic field. This magnet was around 30 watts, so a factor of around 10 million decrease in the amount of energy that was needed to provide the confining magnetic field."
The Commonwealth Fusion Systems magnet also faces challenges that one-off research reactors don't. It is designed for scaling to rapid production, which means a more modular design. The hardware is composed of a stack of thin coils called "pancakes," each with its own sensors and control hardware. There are about 270 kilometers of superconducting material in the magnet, but the material is distributed among all these individual pancakes.
This could be a milestone in the achievement of fusion nuclear power.
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