Nuclear fusion experiment shows the future of energy
Scientists and engineers have announced a record result of supported nuclear fusion, which, according to the researchers, demonstrates the potential of nuclear fusion power plant projects.
Researchers from the EUROfusion consortium more than doubled previous records at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Joint European Torus (JET) site in Oxford using the same fuel blend that will be used by commercial fusion power plants, the UK government said Wednesday.
JET produced a total of 59 Megajoules of thermal energy from the fusion over a five-second period, the duration of the fusion experiment. This is not a huge amount of energy, but it validates the design choices for the ITER fusion mega-research project located in France and supported by China, the EU, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States. On a small scale it did what ITER will do on a larger scale.
“If we can keep the fusion for five seconds, we can do it for five minutes and then for five hours as we increase the size of future machines,” said Tony Donné, EUROfusion program manager.
“For the ITER project, the JET results are one element that makes us confident that we are on the right track as we move towards demonstrating full fusion power,” said Dr. Bernard Bigot, general manager of ITER.
In August 2021, US scientists said they were on the verge of igniting fusion after obtaining a large amount of energy in an experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California.
The amount of energy achieved was still less than the energy put in, but the fact that ignition was achieved for the first time ever is an "important step" in nuclear fusion research, say the scientists.
We are therefore on the verge of achieving nuclear fusion that can be maintained over time. The second step will be to get a positive energy balance, that is, to get more energy than is being fed in. This is not an easy step.
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The article Nuclear fusion experiment shows the future of energy comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/esperimento-di-fusione-nucleare-mostra-il-futuro-dellenergia/ on Thu, 10 Feb 2022 09:00:10 +0000.