Scientists in the United Kingdom claimed on Wednesday, February 9, that they have produced more energy through nuclear fusion than ever before.
An alternative to nuclear fission used in current power plants, nuclear fusion aims to replicate what is happening at the heart of the sun and is considered by its supporters as the energy of tomorrow, in particular, because it produces little waste – and significantly less radioactive than in a conventional power plant – and no greenhouse gases.
A team of scientists from the Joint European Torus (JET), the world’s largest fusion reactor located near Oxford, managed to generate 59 megajoules of energy from this process in December, more than doubling the previous record set in 1997, according to the British Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
Result “are the clearest demonstration on a global scale of the potential of fusion to provide sustainable energy”, the same source said in a statement.
The JET’s tokamak fusion reactor, a huge donut-shaped magnetic chamber, is the world’s most powerful. Powerful superconducting magnets keep a tiny mixture of deuterium and tritium at its core. These light atoms, isotopes of hydrogen (they have one and two additional neutrons respectively), are heated to temperatures ten times higher than in the center of the sun in order to fuse them into heavier helium atoms. This reaction releases a significant amount of energy: in equal quantities, nuclear fusion can produce four million times more energy than coal, oil or gas.
Nuclear fusion cannot be used as a weapon
The results announced on Wednesday show the possibility of creating fusion energy for five seconds, not enough for the process to be viable. Corn “if we can hold the fusion for five seconds, we can do it for five minutes, and then for five hours” with future more efficient machines, believes Tony Donne, of the EUROfusion consortium.
The data gathered by the Oxford scientists could prove valuable for the ITER fusion reactor, which is even more advanced than the JET and is being built in the south of France. Bernard Bigot, the director General of the ITER international project, welcomed these results, believing that they were now closer to, “industrial scale” production.
International fusion cooperation is broad because, unlike fission, it cannot be used as a weapon. The French project thus involves China as well as the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States.
ITER is nevertheless criticized, especially by environmentalists who see it as a “scientific mirage” and “a financial chasm”.