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Tech2 News Staff
Nov 28, 2018 11:24 am EST
Over the last five months, physicists from the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Germany have conducted a second series of tests on a nuclear fusion device in order to release the lasting fusion energy from the human imagination.
L & # 39; Team ad that they have come a long way towards this goal, the results of these tests showing that the reactor has broken several world records.
Nuclear fusion reactions
Nuclear power reactors are designed to mimic the mechanism used by stars, including our Sun, to produce an almost infinite amount of heat and light. To do this, it fuses two atoms of hydrogen, which releases huge amounts of energy. This process, called nuclear fusion, is popularly touted as the future of clean and virtually unlimited energy.
The Wendelstein 7-X reactor. Courtesy of image: IPP
Many nuclear power reactors and projects around the world have managed to maintain these fusion reactions for several minutes at a time. But for nuclear fusion reactions to be sustainable, plasma (atoms charged with a gas at very high temperatures) must be suspended by a magnetic field at extremely high temperatures for the atoms to fuse.
The researchers do not know exactly what this temperature should be, but agree that the reaction would require at least six times the central temperature of the Sun: 15 million degrees Celsius.
The stellarator Wendelstein 7-X
The device used by most reactors in the world to attempt these fusion reactions is the donut-shaped tokamak. The German reactor Wendelstein 7-X uses a vertiginous number of twists in which the plasma is contained with the help of a magnetic field. This type of device – a stellarator – uses a complex three-dimensional arrangement of coils and loops to control the flow of hot plasma through the loops of the device, keeping it stable.
The Wendelstein 7-X reactor is the largest stellarator reactor in the world. Courtesy of image: IPP
The Wendelstein 7-X broke all records in producing the highest plasma density (2 x 10 ^ 20 particles per cubic meter) and the highest density of energy (more than one). megajoule), which brings it a little closer to the Power fusion.
The team also reported that for the first time they had 100-second prolonged plasma reactions – another record for a stellarator.
Although the reactor was designed and commissioned for the first time in 2015 as proof of concept and not as a source of real energy, it would demonstrate that stellarators are a good design of fusion facilities nuclear energy – if successful.
For the moment, records and all, it still remains a heavy weight though.
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