Laban Coblentz, Head of Communication, ITER gives an absorbing insight into all things fusion and the future of fusion energy.
From its earliest history, the human animal, among all species, has been the most ambitious to dominate its environment: to conquer the earth, the seas, the skies, and – more than half a century ago – making its first forays into space. If Elon Musk and other visionaries have their way, humans will soon become an interplanetary species.
Harnessing nuclear fusion is an equally ambitious goal, but in reverse: bringing a star to Earth. Fusion accounts for more than 99% of the energy of the universe. The fusion reaction powering our Sun at its core – 600 tons of hydrogen converted every second – is our engine of sustained light and heat: the source of all life on our planet. But the Sun accomplishes this feat using gravitation – 300,000 times that of Earth – and a temperature of 15 million degrees. The puzzle of how to replicate this phenomenon, how to “create a star on Earth” as a controlled energy source, has been a science and engineering quest for more than six decades. Many methods have been tried.
The front-runner, by a good measure, is the Tokamak: a toroidal or doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber encasing a second, invisible cage formed by magnetic fields. A gaseous soup made of two forms of hydrogen – deuterium and tritium – is injected into the chamber and heated until it becomes plasma: the fourth state of matter, with the electrons stripped away from their nuclei.
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