In fission, heavy uranium atoms are broken down into smaller atoms to release energy. There are two ways of creating nuclear energy: fission, used in current nuclear power plants, and fusion. (Photo by Efman via Shutterstock) The energy of the future Meanwhile, private nuclear fusion projects have been booming in recent years.Ī Tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. That is only about 3% of the energy contained in 1kg of crude oil, but it was another milestone. Back in August 2021, the National Ignition Facility at the US’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory also heralded a breakthrough using a different approach: it deployed powerful lasers to start a fusion reaction that generated 1.3 megajoules (MJ). It reached two milestones: a one-million-ampere current and a 1,000-second duration 100-million-degree temperature (that is five times hotter than the sun). Earlier this month, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor eclipsed previous records by sustaining a high plasma temperature for minutes (1,056 seconds). “But more seriously, many things are happening right now in the field,” De Temmerman adds. In fact, the joke has become so hackneyed over the decades it has been banned by editors at the Economist. This will prove fusion not only works as an experiment, but works economically on the scale of a power plant.“The old joke is that nuclear fusion is 30 years away and always will be,” quips Greg De Temmerman, managing director of Paris-based energy think tank Zenon Research. The challenge now is to develop the technology and engineering of tokamaks to capture fusion neutrons and produce electricity. ITER will demonstrate the physics of controlling a power plant-scale fusion plasma. The JET experiments are vital for the next large international experiment, ITER, and will also influence the design work of demonstration fusion powerplants, DEMO and STEP.ĬCFE is part of a worldwide research programme to show that fusion is viable. However, research into reducing these requirements – notably through the use of superconducting magnets – is underway. Today’s tokamaks have high auxiliary power requirements to run the heating systems and energise the magnetic coils. During this experiment, JET averaged a fusion power of around 11 megawatts. JET has produced a record-breaking 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy over a five second period (the duration of the fusion experiment) using deuterium and tritium – the same fuel mix that will be used in future powerplants. Researchers have overcome many of the scientific hurdles in fusion – developing a good understanding of how to control and confine the hot plasma of fuels. CCFE’s goal is to develop fusion reactors using the tokamak concept. The most advanced device for this is the ‘tokamak’, a Russian word for a ring-shaped magnetic chamber. One way to control the intensely hot plasma is to use powerful magnets. A plasma with millions of these reactions every second can provide a huge amount of energy from very small amounts of fuel. The gas becomes a plasma and the nuclei combine to form a helium nucleus and a neutron, with a tiny fraction of the mass converted into ‘fusion’ energy. To produce energy from fusion here on Earth, a combination of hydrogen gases – deuterium and tritium – are heated to very high temperatures (over 100 million degrees Celsius). This is the opposite of nuclear fission – the reaction that is used in nuclear power stations today – in which energy is released when a nucleus splits apart to form smaller nuclei. When light nuclei fuse to form a heavier nucleus, they release bursts of energy. Fusion is the process that takes place in the heart of stars and provides the power that drives the universe.
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