Nuclear power, be it fission, which we have now, or fusion, which seems to always be some years in the future, is actually everything the "green" energy fans claim to want, and more than that. Like their favorite wind and solar schemes, nuclear power is clean, with no carbon emissions other than the collateral emissions from things like transport delivering fuel, maintenance, and repair parts. Unlike their favorite wind and solar schemes, nuclear power is a high-energy-density source, it is reliable, and it is constant.
So, it's a trifle baffling why the climate scolds and "green" energy people oppose nuclear power at every turn. Of course, now, that means fission power. The scolds and the greens haven't weighed in all that much on fusion power yet, probably because a working, grid-scale fusion reactor is still X number of years in the future, and will be for some time.
But what about a hybrid reactor? A company called Zap Energy claims to have something new in the works: An integrated fission/fusion system.
Zap Energy, which has been in the fusion business for nearly a decade, last week announced it was moving in a radical new direction – building the world’s first integrated fission and fusion nuclear energy company. Zap’s principals argue that a false wall exists between fission and fusion, whereas they are two points along the same technological continuum, and developing them together accelerates deployment of both.
Zap’s core mission, according to co-founders Benj Conway, Uri Shumiak, and Brian A. Nelson, remains the commercialization of fusion using the sheared-flow stabilized (SFS) Z-pinch, initially developed in Japan. But, he adds, “We also believe the energy transition cannot and should not wait for fusion alone.”
To jumpstart the company’s new direction, Zap recruited Zabrina Johal from Canadian nuclear firm AtkinsRéalis to serve as CEO. Johal, a former U.S. Navy nuclear propulsion officer, will lead the development of an integrated nuclear platform that brings together fission, fusion, and hybrid systems to deliver scalable, carbon-free power.
There are, reportedly, technical hurdles, but some of those hurdles apply to any fusion system as well: Materials capable of withstanding neutron bombardment and surface-of-the-sun level temperatures, just to name one. But work on these problems is ongoing, and once the initial materials work is figured out, the rest is a matter of engineering.
There's more:
Johal says that, rather than pursue fusion in isolation, Zap’s integrated platform is designed to deliver near-term, bankable power through compact, modular fission systems and exploit deep technology overlaps between fission and fusion, particularly in liquid-metal power systems (where Zap has developed world-leading expertise), neutron environments, and high power density design that can speed progress across both technologies.
In a Z-pinch system, plasma is produced by applying a high-voltage pulse across an anode-cathode gap of cylindrical geometry that is either pre-filled with gas or bridged by an array of (typically tungsten) wires. The plasma is imploded by the azimuthal magnetic field produced by the axially flowing discharge current, and the kinetic energy is converted to thermal energy and radiation as a hot, dense core is formed at the center.
The Japanese abandoned research on the Z-pinch process after the Fukushima incident. The chief obstacle to the technology was that the Z-pinch plasma would become unstable and thus uneconomic. Shumiak and Nelson, during their research at the University of Washington, developed the sheared-flow stabilization technique in which the plasma particles are made to move at different velocities and cannot “change lanes.”
Would that solve the problem? Dammit, Jim, I'm a biologist, not a nuclear physicist! Even so, I can see some issues with this kind of process; for one thing, it's not clear how the methods described could produce and maintain the continual plasma required for a fusion system. And, then, to name the elephant in the room: Will it scale up? Is this something that works in a lab, but not at grid-scale? I don't see any indication that Zap is at that point yet.
But let's just assume for a minute that this process works and yields significant advantages.
Read More: Will New Nuclear Fusion Designs Disrupt SMRs Before They Launch?
MIT Scientists: Fusion Power Breakthrough Now Nearing Economic Reality?
What will the "green" energy people and the climate scolds likely have to say? My guess is that they won't like it. They don't like fission power, after all, and this new system retains a fission process. They don't like fission. They don't like the fissile materials required to make it run. They don't like the nuclear waste products, even though with modern reactors, that waste is minimal, and we have places to safely store it, if we choose to take advantage of them. The climate scolds in particular seem to object to any new fission systems, even though, again, these power plants are everything they claim to want, and more.
We solve today's problems with tomorrow's technologies. This, a hybrid fission/fusion system, looks like tomorrow's tech, or maybe the day after tomorrow. As for the possible development of any practical application of this, as in a working, grid-scale reactor system capable of delivering electricity to the consumer, I think that, for now, we can safely file this under "we'll believe it when we see it."
