Seattle-based Zap Energy is to investigate the feasibility of piloting a fusion reactor to transition a coal power station from fossil fuels.
With a $1 million grant from the Centralia Coal Transition Board (CCTB), Zap Energy intends to assess the potential for siting its fusion reactor at TransAlta’s Big Hanaford power plant, Washington’s only remaining coal power plant.
A combined fusion energy and power plant operations team will undertake a detailed feasibility study, with one goal to determine what parts of the plant’s existing infrastructure and technology might be used by a future fusion plant.
“Since our home is in the state of Washington, when we started thinking about where we might locate our first plant, it made sense to look for a natural fit locally,” says Ryan Umstattd, VP of Product at Zap Energy.
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“It turned out that the site at Centralia offers several unique benefits.”
The initial assessment is that the site is about the right size and that an installation could reuse existing power and cooling infrastructure such as transmission lines and cooling ponds.
With such reuse of infrastructure, the costs of retrofitting the plant or other such fossil fuel based plants, would be much reduced.
In addition to studying the technical design of a plant, the project will look at preliminary environmental and safety estimates and undertake local community education and outreach.
Under state legislation coal power is being fully phased out in Washington. TransAlta is transitioning the Centralia facility with the first unit having been retired at the end of 2020 and the second unit due at the end of 2025.
TransAlta set up the Centralia Coal Transition grants to help fund projects that support the transition and introduce alternative energy and other environmentally beneficial technologies.
Z-pinch fusion
Zap Energy is pioneering the so-called Z-pinch fusion technology, which has the potential to provide fusion in a relatively compact system, without the need for bulky magnets.
In Z-pinch fusion a line of plasma carrying an electrical current generates its own magnetic field that ‘pinches’ the plasma until it is hot and dense enough for fusion to occur. The concept has been under development since the late 1940s but overcoming instabilities in the plasma has limited its advance.
Zap Energy’s approach is based on sheared flow stabilisation to confine and compress the plasma and then sustain it by suppressing the instabilities.
The temperature and density of the plasma depends on the current used to make the Z-pinch and Zap Energy’s goal is to go to higher and higher currents, with 500kA reached so far but around 650kA required to achieve energy breakeven – where the energy coming out starts to exceed the input energy.
Above that the energy gain increases and for example at 1MA should reach a factor ten, while 1.5MA and above is required for commercial operations.
Zap Energy reached the 500kA level last year and since then has been advancing its next, fourth generation platform, FuZE-Q, which is envisaged to be able to reach the breakeven energy, with the first plasma creation therein announced in June.
At the same time, the company also announced $160 million Series C funding from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Shell Ventures along with existing investors including Energy Impact Partners and Chevron Technology Ventures.
“The team at Zap are getting closer to mass-manufacturable fusion reactors small enough to fit inside a garage,” Clay Dumas, a founding partner at Lowercarbon, which led the Series C round, commented at the time.
