European fusion reactor record result – ‘Towards a future with fusion energy’

There are many research projects trying to create sustainable energy through fusion. One of these is the Common European Ring (JET) in Oxford, UK. The jet heats plasma up to 150 million degrees Celsius in the world’s largest tokamak to start the fusion process.

at tokamacun, a doughnut-shaped structure that surrounds the plasma and is held in place by strong magnetic fields. Magnetic fields also help to heat the plasma because they create strong induction currents in it. When the plasma reaches a sufficiently high temperature, fusion begins and the energy formed in the form of heat is absorbed by the walls of the tokamak.

Now the researchers at JET are there That during a five-second fusion process, they recently managed to get a total of 59 megajoules. The previous record was set at JET in 1997 and was 21.7 MJ.

By comparison, a car that weighs one ton and travels at 160 km/h has a kinetic energy of about one megajoule.

During the experiment, the average power was 11 MW.

Batch Results for Iter

The results are good news for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter), a fusion project under construction in southern France.

ITER, a collaboration between the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States, can be thought of as a larger and more powerful version of the Jet.

The continuous pulsation of deuterium-tritium fusion at this energy level – roughly the industrial scale – provides powerful confirmation for all involved in the global quest for fusion. For the Iter project, the results are a strong source of confidence that we are on the right track as we now move toward demonstrating the full strength of the merger, Iter CEO Bernard Piggott says in a press release.

In the fusion of deuterium and tritium, the nuclei of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium fuse to form a helium nucleus, which is a free neutron and recoverable energy.

The results from Jet are not only positive news for ITER but also a success for the European consortium for the development of fusion energy, Eurofusion, which was formed in 2014.

This achievement is the result of several years of preparation by Eurofusion researchers across Europe. The record shows, and most importantly the things we’ve learned about fusion under these conditions and how it fully confirms our predictions, that we are on the right path toward a future world of fusion energy. If we can keep the merging process going for five seconds, we can do that for five minutes and then five hours as we scale business into future machines, says Tony Donny, Eurofusion project manager, in the press release.