The experiment is a stepping-stone toward full-scale fusion power.
There’s no perfect form of energy. Coal and natural gas emit carbon dioxide. Solar and wind are intermittent. Nuclear is costly and creates radioactive waste. Geothermal and hydro are location-specific. Fusion would be about the closest we could get to a clean, abundant, sustainable way to produce electricity—except scientists haven’t yet figured out how to do it at scale.
Last week, however, a team in France got a step closer when they kept a plasma reaction going for longer than ever before.
Nuclear fusion uses extremely high pressures and temperatures to force hydrogen atoms to combine, or fuse. It’s what happens in stars—including the sun—and the reaction generates massive amounts of light, heat, and energy. Recreating this process in a controlled way on Earth is, unsurprisingly, an incredibly complex endeavor.
For a fusion reaction to work, the hydrogen atoms being used as fuel need to get hot enough that the electrons break away from the nucleus. This creates plasma—an energetic slurry of positive ions and negatively charged free electrons—which needs to be heated even more, until it reaches temperatures over 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million Celsius). Then the super-hot plasma needs to be kept in a confined space long enough that the atoms collide and fuse.
This reaction can take place in a donut-shaped device called a tokamak. Tokamaks, which are one of several fusion reactor designs, use magnetic fields to coax particles in one direction, adding energy in the form of heat until the particles are moving so fast that when they collide, their nuclei fuse.
A key challenge is keeping the reaction going in a stable manner without damaging the reactor or causing a malfunction. This is what the WEST reactor in France accomplished last week by keeping a plasma reaction going for 1,337 seconds, or over 22 minutes. The existing record of 1,066 seconds—itself more than double the prior best result—was set by the EAST reactor in China a month ago.
“WEST has achieved a new key technological milestone by maintaining hydrogen plasma for more than twenty minutes through the injection of 2 [megawatts] of heating power,” Anne-Isabelle Etienvre, director of fundamental research at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), said in a statement. “Experiments will continue with increased power.”
Two megawatts is enough to power hundreds of homes (though exactly how many varies by region and time of year). The reaction reached temperatures over 50 million degrees Celsius—90 million degrees Fahrenheit—which is hotter than the core of the sun. However, it did not reach fusion temperatures. The experiment was more about learning to control the plasma as a step toward fusion.
The team’s next goal is to keep a plasma reaction going for even longer, and at hotter temperatures. The WEST reactor is not set up to become a commercial reactor; rather, the studies done there are being used as data for bigger reactors, namely France’s International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), currently under construction.
Despite setting a record for duration of a plasma reaction, CEA’s announcement acknowledges that there’s a long way to go before fusion energy can be produced at scale.
“It is unlikely that fusion technology will make a significant contribution to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050,” they write. “For this, several technological sticking points need to be overcome, and the economic feasibility of this form of energy production must still be demonstrated.”
Though the holy grail of clean energy may still be decades away, at least we’re taking baby steps towards it.
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* This article was originally published at Singularity Hub
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