MHD Energy Conversion Revisited: Turning Mr. Hyde back into Dr. Jekyll

We revisit an old idea, using MHD energy conversion as a topping cycle for industrial scale nuclear power plants, both fusion and fission. If successful, such a topping cycle could increase the standard steam cycle plant efficiency from 35% to over 55%, an obviously worthwhile goal. The revisit is motivated by three reasons, one societal, two technical. First, concerns about CO2 emissions and climate change are far more serious today than during the MHD era, which effectively ended in the 1990’s. Improving efficiency helps by making nuclear power substantially more economically competitive. Second, there have been technological advances, primarily the development of high field (B>15T) HTS magnets, compared to the B<5T fields available during the MHD era. Higher B should improve MHD performance and reduce capital cost. Third, a first-principles analytic theory has been developed that predicts the critical condition on the seed number density to stabilize the previously show-stopping ionization instability, which led to serious performance deterioration in early experiments. Detailed results for the optimized design of Hall MHD generators will be presented. We revisit an old idea, using MHD energy conversion as a topping cycle for industrial scale nuclear power plants, both fusion and fission. If successful, such a topping cycle could increase the standard steam cycle plant efficiency from 35% to over 55%, an obviously worthwhile goal. The revisit is motivated by three reasons, one societal, two technical.



This work is supported by the BT Charitable Foundation and US DoE grant xxxxxxx