University of Washington (UW)

Controlled fusion has long been thought of as an ideal energy source—safe, clean, abundant, and dispatchable. Fusion is on the cusp of demonstrating net positive energy gain, spurring interest in both the public and private sectors to adopt a more aggressive development path toward a timely, grid-ready demonstration. A critical need today is to increase the performance levels and the number of lower-cost fusion approaches that might eventually lead to commercial fusion energy with competitive capital cost and levelized cost of energy. To address this need, the BETHE program supports (1) advancing the performance of earlier-stage, lower-cost concepts, (2) component-technology development to lower the cost of more-mature concepts, and (3) capability teams to assist multiple concept teams in theory, modeling, and diagnostic measurements.

The University of Washington will advance the technical viability of a novel method, Imposed-Dynamo Current Drive (IDCD), for sustaining and heating spheromak plasmas as the basis of compact, low-cost fusion power plants. A traditional tokamak fusion reactor has a toroidal confinement area, similar shape to a donut, with a hole in the middle. The spheromak reduces the size of the hole as much as possible, resulting in a spherical plasma shape similar to a cored apple. IDCD can efficiently couple large amounts of power to the plasma at much lower costs relative to other methods of higher-frequency plasma heating. The proposed R&D aims to achieve spheromak ion and electron temperatures > 100 eV during sustainment on an existing experimental prototype. Other R&D activities include computational tasks to support both the scientific and engineering design of next-step prototypes with higher fusion performance. This project will increase the technological readiness level of this lower-cost fusion concept to encourage further development toward commercial fusion energy with both public and private support.