Do you have the manual? It might be possible to configure a non-beeping mode. (I recently learned this was the case with my Panasonic model, to great delight.)
This cannot work: the power balance doesn't close for a 25 MWe tokamak. Otherwise people would have made plans to build one already. Tokamaks want to be big for physics reasons, way before economics reasons. This is part of why DEMO is so big. If ARC could be any smaller it would be.
Plasma physicist here. While this is an idea worthy of study, the answer to the (spaceweatherarchive.com) title question is "no". The researcher's article makes simple errors in what they call " undergraduate physics" (electricity and magnetism), in basic plasma physics, and in basic algebra.
As one straightforward example, their estimate of the (change in) Debye length ignores that their equations (2 and 3) are in terms of the square of the Debye length, so the purported change should be only sqrt as large.
As another example, it's not clear why the author focuses on aluminium in the upper atmosphere, or worries about small particles of aluminium shielding the earth's magnetic field from space. While a conductive shell can shield a changing magnetic field, it needs to have long-range conductive paths. A mesh has this property, but a mesh is not the same as a suspended dispersed powder, even if the individual powder particles are conductive on the nano-scale.
Actually, I think the strength of modern steels is a limiting factor for fusion magnets. Plasma "beta"s are only a few %, so for a few atmospheres of plasma pressure your magnetic cage needs to be like a pressure vessel that contains hundreds of atmospheres. And with large holes poked through it for access. If you look at CFS's magnet test from last summer, there's a huge amount of steel.
I thought they were ultimately limited by problems of corrosion at the electrodes?
Helion's scheme to turn fusion heat into pushing E&M fields back through their magnet to generate electricity is pretty different from a standard MHD generator.
It'll ultimately be dissipated by infrared radiation into space. Earth receives something like 173,000 terawatts of radiation from the sun; this is equal to the amount radiated out as infrared, except for the "radiative forcing" which is the amount by which the world is heating. Radiative forcing is currently something like 1000 TW. All of human civilization is powered by something like 20 TW.
If we want to stop global heating we need to use a fraction of those 20 TW to "turn the ship" of size 1000 TW.
It sounds like they're trying to build a device with a distribution of ions in velocity space which is very far from the equilibrium Gaussian-type distribution ('Maxwellian'). This is difficult because there will be about a million collisions for every fusion reaction that happens, and collisions tend to redistribute velocities toward the equilibrium. Collisions between unlike particles (different species of ions, or ions vs electrons) will also cause diffusion in physical space. This could cause ions to leave the chamber much more quickly.
It's pretty different. This is pulsed; LM's was going to be steady state. LM's design had magnets internal to the plasma which has significant difficulties.
The proposed fuels are different.
As far as I can tell LM's fusion project has stopped.
For a long time fusion was funding constrained: there were many more ideas than could be tested and examined under government budgets. In the US nearly all funding went to one concept, the tokamak. While the tokamak has achieved the best performance thus far, there's now sufficient interest in fusion that less-well-developed ideas are being tried, in order to not put all the eggs in one basket.
It's not plausible that even fusion power plants would make energy 'basically free'.
1) Fusion plants still require site infrastructure, power conversion technology, waste heat removal, and (though not for this particular concept) steam generators (or other fluid cycle generators). These have significant capital costs but finite lifetimes. You're right that the variable cost of energy is pretty low, probably comparable to current fission plants, but that's still more expensive than the variable cost of electricity from solar and wind.
2) The price of electrical transmission and distribution starts to become important (I forget what the typical cost of that today is, but it's a few cents/kWh.) This doesn't matter if you can put a small power plant at your local industrial park though.
3) There's a big difference between $0.05/kWh, $0.02/kWh, $0.01/kWh, and $0.005/kWh, and then a huge difference to 'true zero'. This is because there's probably lots of industrial processes that we might like to do if electricity and heat were cheaper than it is today, each becoming reasonable at a certain price. There could be a large market at each price floor 'step'.
4) Yeah, the fuel is abundant, which is good, but fuel costs are not significant drivers of the cost of fission.
While not free, I'd like to think that fusion will help make a world with energy much cheaper than the world without fusion.
There are more plausible and less plausible concepts/companies out there.
Helion in particular was founded by respectable scientists who have a background in plasma physics, and they've developed their idea pretty quietly for the last 10 years, only de-stealthing this summer (presumably after reaching a key milestone). What they're trying to do is difficult, but I wouldn't say it's snake oil.
There's some interesting arguments in favor of the combination of magnetic and interial approaches. This is broadly known as 'magneto-inertial fusion', and there's a continuum of ideas between 'mostly inertial' and 'mostly magnetic'. I'd put Helion's approach far toward the magnetic side.
SPARC is very important, but it's a physics demonstration facility, not a reactor. Its not going to generate any electricity. CFS (SPARC's parent company) will use SPARC to demonstrate that their magnet technology and plasma physics can be scaled to a reactor -- I think they're aiming for 2030 or 2035 to 'put electrons on the grid' with their 'ARC' reactor. SPARC stands for 'smallest possible ARC'.
Compared to CFS's approach, Helion's approach is different in two or three key ways.
First, it's a different fusion reaction, which has important engineering consequences. The reaction that Helion wants to use generates fewer damaging neutrons, which makes the rest of the reactor easier to engineer and eliminates several tricky subsystems.
Second, it's a different geometry, which does not require huge powerful steady-state superconducting magnets. However, it does require very fast magnets.
It's a pulsed machine (they would fire several shots per second; each shot lasts on the order a milliseconds if I recall). So it requires more pulsed power systems and the components may need a different kind of high-repetition lifecycle testing.
Third, they want to use a 'direct energy conversion' scheme, which means eliminating the need for gas turbines (i.e. steam turbines) coupled to generators. This is important since the heat exchangers and turbines make up very roughly half the cost of a traditional power plant, so this would allow the electricity price to be lower by about a factor of two!
Helion's scheme would require a specific isotope of helium, of which there's not much of in current stockpiles. Assuming that you had some He-3, remember that since this is a reaction between nucleons, the typical energy scales are a million times higher than typical chemical energy scales. Therefore the amount of fuel (in kg) is a million times smaller. And so, there's a significantly larger margin for extracting and purifying the helium fuel from whatever source.
> Will the total output in electricity be greater than the inputs for this?
Yup, that's the goal!
> Extra: what happens if there’s too much expansion or things are too hot?
Fusion reactions are difficult enough that if it were physically possible to make them run 'hotter' or release energy faster, frankly we would already be doing so.
> Could this explode or implode? If so would it be a huge deal?
The radiation risks from fusion are orders of magnitude smaller than from nuclear fission power. We still need to think about them and make sure that plants are safe, but it should be significantly easier to manage.
No currently operating device is 'attempting' to achieve Q_total; they are all physics experiments, not simply searching for a magic combination of knobs that will ignite the plasma.
The Europeans are doing quite a bit of preliminary design scoping and engineering for DEMO, a 'demonstration' reactor which is supposed to come after ITER and generate net electricity, but there's not been a site selected, for example. Similarly, Chinese researchers are working on their CFETR, 'Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor'.