The Marvel movie version of Tony Stark graduated from MIT in the early 1990s. He built an ARC reactor at Stark Industries later on, but apparently, some of the initial research he did as an undergrad stuck around in some notebooks somewhere on a dusty shelf at MIT. It took them only a few decades, but a team of MIT researchers has been able to develop tentative plans for a fully armed and operational ARC fusion reactor of their own.
With this massive boost in power, MIT has been able to design a much smaller (and therefore cheaper) reactor that can still produce significant amounts of electricity. The first prototype ARC reactor would be a 270 MWe power plant, producing between three and six times as much energy as it requires to keep itself running. The reactor, which would generate enough energy to power some 100,000 homes, would be relatively compact at half the size of ITER. It would have the added benefit of having a module core, making it much easier to both service and experiment with.
Arc Reactor Blueprints Pdf Freel
The reactor design would also be simplified through the use of a liquid (a fluorine lithium beryllium molten salt) as a shielding material, a neutron moderator, and a heat exchange medium. The liquid coats the reactor, gets heated by the fusion going on inside, and then is fed through a high-efficiency Brayton cycle engine to generate electricity.
This type of fusion reactor exists today at research pilot scale. The reactor pictured, ITER, is under construction and is planned to be the first fusion reactor large enough to produce a net gain of energy. Basically, it mashes two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, together at such high energies that they combine into one atom. When they fuse, the reaction produces helium and a free neutron. Critically, helium+neutron has less mass than deuterium+tritium, and the missing mass is converted to energy. That energy can be captured as heat to run a traditional steam-driven turbine (like any other power plant).
So what does the arc reactor's torus (donut) shape tell us? It means there are charged particles moving in a circle, contained by a magnetic field. High-energy particles usually have high energy because they're moving very fast, and magnetic fields can curve the motion of charged particles. Curving the particles' motion into a circle keeps them in one place long enough to get them to collide.
You may notice that current fusion reactor designs have a lot of magnet coils on the outside of the torus, whereas the Stark Industries arc reactor has a viewing window. Plasma containment is the single biggest challenge for hot fusion, but the arc reactor makes it look effortless. From this, we can conclude that a key technology in the full-scale arc reactor is a way to contain the reaction in a self-sustaining ring. This line of reasoning is definitely backed up by the toroidal field lines drawn in the Stark Industries arc reactor blueprints:
There is also a remarkable lack of cooling loops, turbines, or anything that a traditional thermal reactor would require. Which means the arc reactor produces electricity directly, rather than by first generating heat. This observation jives with the fact that the megawatt-scale reactor in Tony's chest does not roast him alive. So it cannot be a hot-fusion reactor, or a traditional thermal-fission reactor. Back to the drawing board!
Since we know the device uses charged particles travelling within a ring of electromagnets, I surmise that a tiny amount of Pd-103 is ionized by an electric arc (thus the reactor's name, and start-up power requirement), which then allows Pd-103+ to be circulated at high velocity within the outer ring of the device. The ionization acts to delay the electron capture step until the atom encounters a free electron, and the high kinetic energy due to velocity increases the chances of electron capture occurring once an electron is encountered. In effect, the radioactive decay of Pd-103 can be started, stopped, and throttled by the device simply by controlling the ionization and circulation of the Pd-103.
The device's geometry and electromagnetic fields route the high-energy electrons from the Pd-107 core towards the outer ring. There, the electrons are captured by high-energy Pd-103 ions. This electron capture process emits gamma rays, which are deflected inward to catalyze the beta decay of the Pd-107 core. We have some good evidence for this gamma ray emission, because the suit's chestpiece unibeam weapon is clearly an emission of a large number of high-energy photons directly from the arc reactor. Normally, the gamma rays are directed inward to catalyze the device's operation, but they can be directed outward in a concentrated energy beam weapon:
I can't speak for the next-gen "new element" arc reactor, but presumably, it replaces the palladium isotopes with a hypothetical element that also undergoes gamma-ray-mediated beta decay, but in a less-toxic and higher-output fashion.
It could be caused by the ionization arc, but I think Cherenkov radiation is a much better explanation. This is a special type of light emission that occurs when an energetic particle (such as electron) enters a medium (like water or air) at a speed faster than the speed of light in that medium. The high-energy electron flux within the arc reactor would be a natural fit to generate this effect. This is a picture of an actual nuclear reactor producing Cherenkov radiation:
Notice the similarities? Unlike electrical arcs, the light from Cherenkov radiation is quiet, cool-blue, and fricken' awesome. This is a no-brainer -- the arc reactor's glow is definitely being produced by high-energy electron flux.
Another aspect of the original model palladium arc reactor was poisoning due to "palladium toxicity." It's very possible that palladium is simply being ejected from the device into Tony's blood by all the high-energy collisions going on, but this doesn't explain the freaky circuit-looking lines on his chest, and it doesn't explain why doctors can't help him.
So you see, everything fits together perfectly. The evidence all points towards the arc reactor relying on a Pd-103/Pd-107 radio-isotopic decay cell to produce electrical current. I will start working on my own arc reactor prototype and will post updates when I produce a working replica.
Fusion power is a proposed form of power generation that would generate electricity by using heat from nuclear fusion reactions. In a fusion process, two lighter atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus, while releasing energy. Devices designed to harness this energy are known as fusion reactors. Research into fusion reactors began in the 1940s, but as of 2022, only one design, an inertial confinement laser-driven fusion machine at the US National Ignition Facility, has conclusively produced a positive fusion energy gain factor, i.e. more power output than input.[1][2][3]
Fusion processes require fuel and a confined environment with sufficient temperature, pressure, and confinement time to create a plasma in which fusion can occur. The combination of these figures that results in a power-producing system is known as the Lawson criterion. In stars, the most common fuel is hydrogen, and gravity provides extremely long confinement times that reach the conditions needed for fusion energy production. Proposed fusion reactors generally use heavy hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium and tritium (and especially a mixture of the two), which react more easily than protium (the most common hydrogen isotope), to allow them to reach the Lawson criterion requirements with less extreme conditions. Most designs aim to heat their fuel to around 100 million degrees, which presents a major challenge in producing a successful design.
Multiple approaches have been proposed to capture the energy that fusion produces. The simplest is to heat a fluid. The commonly targeted D-T reaction releases much of its energy as fast-moving neutrons. Electrically neutral, the neutron is unaffected by the confinement scheme. In most designs, it is captured in a thick "blanket" of lithium surrounding the reactor core. When struck by a high-energy neutron, the blanket heats up. It is then actively cooled with a working fluid that drives a turbine to produce power.
Another design proposed to use the neutrons to breed fission fuel in a blanket of nuclear waste, a concept known as a fission-fusion hybrid. In these systems, the power output is enhanced by the fission events, and power is extracted using systems like those in conventional fission reactors.[11]
A deep reinforcement learning system has been used to control a tokamak-based reactor. The AI was able to manipulate the magnetic coils to manage the plasma. The system was able to continuously adjust to maintain appropriate behavior (more complex than step-based systems). In 2014, Google began working with California-based fusion company TAE Technologies to control the Joint European Torus (JET) to predict plasma behavior.[49] DeepMind has also developed a control scheme with TCV.[50]
The diagnostics of a fusion scientific reactor are extremely complex and varied.[57] The diagnostics required for a fusion power reactor will be various but less complicated than those of a scientific reactor as by the time of commercialization, many real-time feedback and control diagnostics will have been perfected. However, the operating environment of a commercial fusion reactor will be harsher for diagnostic systems than in a scientific reactor because continuous operations may involve higher plasma temperatures and higher levels of neutron irradiation. In many proposed approaches, commercialization will require the additional ability to measure and separate diverter gases, for example helium and impurities, and to monitor fuel breeding, for instance the state of a tritium breeding liquid lithium liner.[58] The following are some basic techniques.
The reactant neutron is supplied by the D-T fusion reaction shown above, and the one that has the greatest energy yield. The reaction with 6Li is exothermic, providing a small energy gain for the reactor. The reaction with 7Li is endothermic, but does not consume the neutron. Neutron multiplication reactions are required to replace the neutrons lost to absorption by other elements. Leading candidate neutron multiplication materials are beryllium and lead, but the 7Li reaction helps to keep the neutron population high. Natural lithium is mainly 7Li, which has a low tritium production cross section compared to 6Li so most reactor designs use breeder blankets with enriched 6Li. 2ff7e9595c
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