Scientists in the United Kingdom announced today that nuclear fusion has produced more energy than ever before, entering a new phase in the production of clean and cheap energy.
Nuclear fusion aims to reproduce what is happening in the Sun’s core and is considered by its proponents to be the energy of the future, because it produces only a little waste – and this is clearly much less radioactive than a conventional nuclear power plant – and no gases cause the greenhouse effect.
A team of scientists from the Joint European Torus (JET), the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor in Oxford, has produced 59 megajoules of energy in 5 seconds, more than doubling the previous record dating back to 1997, according to the British Energy Agency. .
These results “are the clearest evidence worldwide of fusion potential for sustainable energy production,” the British Atomic Energy Authority said in a statement.
JET’s tokamak fusion reactor, a huge donut-shaped magnetic chamber, is the most powerful in the world.
At its core, superconducting magnets hold a mixture of deuterium and tritium, hydrogen isotopes, that are heated to temperatures ten times higher than those in the center of the Sun to create plasma, leading to the union of the isotope nuclei and their fusion to creating heavier helium atoms and releasing a colossal amount of thermal energy.
Nuclear fusion allows four million times more energy to be produced than coal, oil or gas, under highly safe conditions.
The results announced today show that it is possible to generate power for 5 seconds, and then for 5 hours with future more powerful devices, says Tony Down of the EUROfusion consortium.
The data gathered by Oxford scientists could prove valuable for the Iter reactor, which is even more advanced than the JET and is being built in Cantaras in southern France.
Bernard Bigo, general manager of the international Iter program, welcomed the results of the research, estimating that they are now approaching the “industrial scale” of production.
International cooperation on nuclear fusion is wide-ranging because, unlike nuclear fission, it cannot be used as a weapon. China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States are participating in the French program.
Source: ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ
Source: Capital
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