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Nuclear fusion offers the tantalizing prospect of a sustainable source of energy that can never be depleted – and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have announced what they describe as a “watershed moment” to make the technology viable.
Fusion occurs when two or more atomic nuclei merge to create larger elements, releasing massive amounts of energy along the way – it’s what powers stars like our own Sun. However, making it work on Earth, in a system that does not use more energy than it produces, has not been possible until now.
Superconducting magnets have already been identified as a way to generate the ultra-high temperatures needed for nuclear fusion, and now researchers have produced the most powerful to date: this is, in fact, the first time that a magnet like this one -It is capable of generating a magnetic field strong enough for fusion to occur.
Magnet test. (Gretchen Ertl, CFS / MIF-PSFC, 2021)
“Fusion is in many ways the ultimate clean energy source,” says geophysicist Maria Zuber of MIT. “The amount of energy available is a real game-changer.”
Made up of 16 stacked plates and about 3 meters (nearly 10 feet) high, the new magnet uses a superconducting material called ReBCO. With a start-up time of around two weeks, it was able to achieve a record magnetic field strength of 20 tesla, which the team says is enough for nuclear fusion to occur.
Now that it has proven its capabilities, scientists at MIT and their collaborators at start-up Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) can begin to figure out how to install the device in a nuclear fusion reactor. A circular tokamak design will be used, where the trapped plasma can be heated to temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius or more, triggering fusion reactions.
With the compact and modular magnet they developed, the research team claims that it is possible to achieve similar performance in reactors 40 times smaller than what would have been necessary before, if one used conventional magnets.
Scaling up technology is crucial to make fusion power generation convenient and cost effective, so that it can be integrated into the power grid.
How the magnet would be placed inside a reactor. (Gretchen Ertl, CFS / MIF-PSFC, 2021)
The fuel used to power the reactor would be the isotopes of hydrogen in water – and since we have an almost unlimited supply of water at our disposal, these reactors could run indefinitely. In addition, they produce very little waste.
All parties involved agree that there is still a lot of work to be done and a lot more obstacles to overcome, but attracting a magnet with those abilities was one of the biggest challenges the team faced – and now this challenge has been met. Now progress can be accelerated on other parts of the project.
And we all know we don’t have time to waste. The Earth’s atmosphere is warming at a catastrophic rate and substantial reductions in carbon emissions are long overdue. Coupled with two things we should already be doing right now – completely phasing out fossil fuels and implementing widely available and highly profitable renewable energy options, a breakthrough in fusion power generation would be exactly what our planet has. need.
The MIT and CFS team hope to have a test plant operational by 2025.
“It’s a great moment,” says Bob Mumgaard, CEO of CFS. “We now have a platform that is both very scientifically advanced, due to decades of research on these machines, and also very commercially interesting.
“What it does is allow us to build devices that are faster, smaller and more cheaply.”
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