Fusion Power: A Step Closer
By Anne Pawsey
Today mankind is one step closer to creating power by nuclear fusion, which could help solve our energy requirements. Chinese scientists have achieved positive results from their new fusion reactor, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST).
EAST is a new reactor and this was just an initial test, running for almost five seconds and producing 500 KiloAmps of electricity. In the future it is hoped that the reactor will run for a 1000 seconds (that’s 16 mins 40 secs in real money) and generate considerable amounts of power.
You may well be wondering what all the fuss is about. The key is that this is no ordinary nuclear reactor - it uses fusion power to produce energy and may well be the power source of the future.
Fusion is the process that powers our sun and all other stars. At the high temperatures and pressures inside the stars, hydrogen atoms can collide and fuse to create helium. This process gives off large amounts of energy and is known as thermonuclear fusion, or just plain fusion for short. Back on earth scientists seeking to recreate this process use heavy and super-heavy hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) as it’s slightly easier.
EAST is a new reactor and this was just an initial test, running for almost five seconds and producing 500 KiloAmps of electricity. In the future it is hoped that the reactor will run for a 1000 seconds (that’s 16 mins 40 secs in real money) and generate considerable amounts of power.
You may well be wondering what all the fuss is about. The key is that this is no ordinary nuclear reactor - it uses fusion power to produce energy and may well be the power source of the future.
Fusion is the process that powers our sun and all other stars. At the high temperatures and pressures inside the stars, hydrogen atoms can collide and fuse to create helium. This process gives off large amounts of energy and is known as thermonuclear fusion, or just plain fusion for short. Back on earth scientists seeking to recreate this process use heavy and super-heavy hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) as it’s slightly easier.
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Seen as a power source of the future, fusion is clean and uses abundant raw materials. The basic fuels for a fusion reactor are water and lithium, a bath tub of water and the lithium from one laptop battery can produce as much energy as burning 40 tonnes of coal. (NB throwing your laptop in the bath won’t have the same effect.) The end product is simply helium so there is no nasty radioactivity to worry about. So what’s the catch?
The problem is that to get fusion to work you have to recreate conditions similar to those found in the sun: lots of very, very hot gas. Gas so hot it’s no longer a true gas but plasma at a temperature of over 100 million ºC. In order to get gas to this temperature you need huge amounts of energy. And there is another problem: plasma can’t be allowed to touch anything; if it does it stops being plasma and what ever it touched just tends to stop being… well, anything really.
To contain the plasma, scientists use a magnetic field in the shape of a donut, this is known as a Tokamak (which Russian for donut-shaped magnetic field). Creating this magnetic field needs even more energy and this is fusion’s Achilles’ heel. In order to get the reaction going you need to put in huge amounts of energy, in theory you put in less than you will eventually get out but this hasn’t generally been the case. Plasma is also very unstable so it doesn’t hang around for long.
It is hoped that the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) will be able to run for even longer and actually output useful amounts of power. EAST is part of the ITER program and will allow scientists to test ideas before putting them into ITER.
Even with all these developments it is thought that commercial fusion power is about 40 years away from being viable in the meantime scientists will continue to develop the technology so that we can have an abundance of cheap, clean power.
Read more of Anne's pennings here. There's even a photo too.
The problem is that to get fusion to work you have to recreate conditions similar to those found in the sun: lots of very, very hot gas. Gas so hot it’s no longer a true gas but plasma at a temperature of over 100 million ºC. In order to get gas to this temperature you need huge amounts of energy. And there is another problem: plasma can’t be allowed to touch anything; if it does it stops being plasma and what ever it touched just tends to stop being… well, anything really. To contain the plasma, scientists use a magnetic field in the shape of a donut, this is known as a Tokamak (which Russian for donut-shaped magnetic field). Creating this magnetic field needs even more energy and this is fusion’s Achilles’ heel. In order to get the reaction going you need to put in huge amounts of energy, in theory you put in less than you will eventually get out but this hasn’t generally been the case. Plasma is also very unstable so it doesn’t hang around for long.
It is hoped that the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) will be able to run for even longer and actually output useful amounts of power. EAST is part of the ITER program and will allow scientists to test ideas before putting them into ITER.
Even with all these developments it is thought that commercial fusion power is about 40 years away from being viable in the meantime scientists will continue to develop the technology so that we can have an abundance of cheap, clean power.
Read more of Anne's pennings here. There's even a photo too.
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