![]() On the whole, JET was able to produce 65 percent of the energy that went into the experiment. In the 1990s, the European tokamak JET achieved 16 million watts of fusion power for less than a second. One approach: hold plasma fuel with magnets and heat it up Researchers often do this in a tokamak, a donut-shaped reactor (the weird shape helps keep the plasma in place). Here are the two most worth watching.ġ) Magnetic Confinement: The basic principle of magnetic confinement is to hold plasma fuel in place with magnets and then heat it up using a combination of microwaves, radio waves, and particles beams. Scientists researching fusion energy are more interested in hot fusion, which they have been doing the 1930s - the challenge now is just how to turn it into useful energy. No one has ever done cold fusion - although there have been many false claims over the years. Cold fusion is the theoretical fusion of atoms at room temperature. Alexander Joe/AFP/Getty Images Is this the same as cold fusion? Plasma, like lightning, is very difficult to control. These days, the big goal that hasn't happened yet is to make a fusion reactor that produces more energy than it takes in. Researchers have been producing controlled fusion reactions for decades. (Stars and lightning are plasma, as is the luminous matter inside neon signs.) The temperatures needed are so hot that the hydrogen fuel becomes a plasma, a state of matter that exists when a gas's atoms split into positively and negatively charged particles. The required temperatures are so hot that the hydrogen fuel becomes a plasma They heat up the atoms using various tools, including particle beams, electromagnetic fields such as microwaves and radio waves, and lasers. We don't have the technology to recreate the Sun's massive pressures, so researchers have to make up for that by getting hydrogen atoms even hotter than the sun does - in the range of hundreds of millions of degrees Fahrenheit. This pressure, combined with temperatures up to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, gets atoms to fuse together. That mass creates powerful gravitational forces that produce extreme pressures. The sun weighs about 333,000 times more than Earth does. Fusion converts more mass into energy per reaction than fission does. Fusion, by contrast, is when atoms merge together. Nuclear reactors perform fission, which involves splitting atoms apart. ITER Organization Don't our nuclear power plants already do fusion? C is a constant number that is the speed of light in a vacuum.)Īn illustration of the ITER machine, which, if all goes well, will be doing fusion by 2027. This is perfectly acceptable according to Einstein's famous E = mc 2 equation, which says that mass can turn into pure energy and vice versa. When two atoms fuse, they lose a bit of their mass, which is released as energy. Researchers who work on fusion energy are essentially trying to make tiny stars here on Earth. This process is what powers the sun and makes it so hot and bright. ![]() Thermonuclear fusion is the process that occurs when two atoms combine to make a larger atom, creating a whole lot of energy.įusion already happens naturally in stars - including the sun - when intense pressure and heat fuse hydrogen atoms together, generating helium and energy. So here's a guide to how far humanity has come on thermonuclear fusion - and how far we still have to go. Still, the potential pay-off is so massive that countries have sunk billions and billions of dollars into fusion research. Trouble is, the scientific and technical hurdles ahead are still enormous - in fact, we still don't have a full grasp on what all the hurdles might be. Occasionally, they even make some advances - as happened this past winter, when a group of scientists got closer to fusion power than they ever had before. And the promise of fusion power has led researchers to try their best for decades upon decades. Nuclear fusion already takes place in the sun's core, after all. ![]() If we could get fusion power to work, we'd never have to worry about energy again The process is called thermonuclear fusion, and if we could ever get fusion power to work - a big if - we'd never have to worry about our energy problems again. In theory, it's possible to shoot some energy at hydrogen and get even more energy back. ![]()
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