The prospect of harnessing the power of the stars has moved a step closer to reality after scientists set a new record for the amount of energy released in a sustained fusion reaction.
The UK-based Jet Laboratory – in the English village of Culham, near Oxford, – has managed to break its own record for the amount of energy released in a sustained fusion reaction. The laboratory’s experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power) – more than doubling the previous record of 21.7 megajoules set in 1997 by the same facility.
Five seconds is the limit the machine can sustain the power before its magnets overheat. A magnetic field is needed to contain the high temperatures required to carry out the fusion process, which can be as high as 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the center of the sun.
The BBC notes that while it’s not a massive energy output – just enough to boil close to 60 kettles’ worth of water – it does further validate design choices for an even bigger fusion reactor being constructed in France.
JET was the first device to produce controlled fusion power with deuterium and tritium and holds the world record for fusion power. In recent years, JET has carried out a lot of important work to assist the design and construction of ITER, its international successor, which is being built in France.
“These landmark results have taken us a huge step closer to conquering one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of them all,” said Prof Ian Chapman, the chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, according to The Guardian. “It’s clear we must make significant changes to address the effects of climate change, and fusion offers so much potential.”
How does nuclear fusion work?
As the name suggests, nuclear fusion is the fusing of two or more atoms into one larger one, a process that unleashes a tremendous amount of energy as heat. These same fusion reactions power the sun, but at considerably lower temperatures.
Nuclear power used today is created by a different process, called fission, which relies on splitting, rather than fusing, atoms. The process creates waste that can remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years, and it’s also potentially hazardous, as was seen in the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
A fusion reactor, like the one at the Jet Laboratory, produces very little waste and requires only small amounts of abundant, naturally-sourced fuel, including elements extracted from seawater.
Experiments at JET have focused on whether fusion is feasible with a fuel based on two isotopes of hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium which combine to form helium gas.
“Our experiment showed for the first time that it’s possible to have a sustained fusion process using exactly the same fuel mix planned for future fusion power plants,” Tony Donné, CEO of EUROfusion, said at a press conference, according to CNN News.
The Jet Laboratory results are seen as a huge boon for ITER, a fusion megaproject in the south of France supported by the US, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, and Russia. The ITER project is 80 percent built and aims to begin nuclear fusion sometime in 2025-26.
