Although the total energy was modest at just a 60th of Jet’s new record, the US facility beat its own previous record, set in 2018, 23 times over. In August 2021, a US experiment came excruciatingly close to smashing fusion’s most anticipated goal of producing more energy than was put in. The fuel itself is a swirling mass of charged particles that is susceptible to instabilities that can halt the reactions in milliseconds.īut fusion scientists are on a roll. On Jet, a web of invisible magnetic fields 80,000 times stronger than the Earth’s is needed to control and confine the fuel. Fusion machines must reach temperatures between four and 10 times hotter than the sun’s core. Reproducing conditions similar to those found in stars, where fusion thrives, is a terrifying technological challenge – perhaps humanity’s greatest ever. You may well wonder why fusion energy hasn’t yet been cracked. Today, energy is in short supply, is the leading cause of the climate crisis, and is being used as a dangerous geopolitical chess piece. This form of power doesn’t produce carbon dioxide or long-lived radioactive waste, and there’s no chance of the meltdowns like those at Chernobyl and Fukushima. If it can be perfected, there’s enough fuel for everyone on Earth to use as much energy annually as the average American for at least thousands of years, and probably millions. Why should the rest of society care whether these scientists can recreate star power? Fusion energy has the potential to provide clean power on a planetary scale. Cryogenic cooling systems will prevent this on the next generation of machines, so the leap from five seconds to five minutes, or five hours, or even longer, now seems feasible. What the latest results provide is a compelling indication that bigger and better star machines that work similarly to Jet, such as the internationally funded Iter project now under construction in France, will be able to produce more power than they consume.Īlso important is that although this experiment only ran for five seconds, the reactions stopped not because of a disruption within the fuel, as has previously been typical, but because supporting equipment got too hot. In fact, no experiment has yet yielded more energy from fusion than has been used to kick off the reactions – this remains an outstanding goal of fusion scientists around the world.
In keeping with Jet’s design and objectives, less fusion power was generated than was needed to heat the fuel. While the experiment ran, the output of fusion power was equivalent to four onshore wind turbines – a step towards power production at an industrial scale. Scientists working on a doughnut-shaped machine called Jet, or the Joint European Torus, were able to double the previous world record (set in 1997) for energy released by fusion reactions. For decades, scientists have sought to bring the power source of stars down to Earth and, in a stunning result recently announced, the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire has reached a new landmark in sparking and sustaining a mini star. I f you want proof that the process known as nuclear fusion can produce energy at scale somewhere in the universe, you need only look at the night sky: each pinprick of light is a natural nuclear fusion-powered reactor.
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