Nuclear fusion produces record energy in new experiment

At a recent press conference, British scientists announced that the record for energy production with nuclear fusion was broken in the last Joint European Torus (JET) reactor experiment. In tests carried out at the end of last year, a reaction reaching 69 megajoules of production was sustained in 5.2 seconds using only 0.2 milligrams of fuel.

The previous energy production record was 59 megajoules of thermal energy in 5 seconds, and in 2021 this record was held by JET, which has been operating in Oxfordshire since 1983.. The facility, created by a consortium of European countries as a project to research the feasibility of nuclear fusion, reached 150 million degrees Celsius.

Nuclear fusion is the process the Sun uses to produce heat. Researchers hope that the use of this technology could reverse climate change in the future by providing an abundant, safe and clean energy source. The energy produced in five seconds of JET’s farewell test will be enough to power 12,000 homes.According to Mikhail Maslov of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Agency (UKEA).

What were the final moments of the nuclear fusion reactor like?

The JET tokamak is a donut-shaped design. It uses strong magnetic fields to confine plasma and yield helium, the main product of solar nuclear fusion. To achieve this, the reactor beats deuterium and tritium atoms as its main energy source.. In this process, powerful electromagnets produce intense magnetic fields to trap the heated plasma at extreme temperatures.

The final experiments using deuterium-tritium as fuel were carried out at JET in October 2023, but other activities continued to be developed until December, when the machine was completely shut down. However, the decommissioning process will still take 16 years.

Professor Juan Matthews, from the University of Manchester in the UK, told reporters that JET would continue to produce some valuable information even during this dismantling process, such as whether the reactor lining had deteriorated due to contact with the plasma, mainly if the precious tritium (costing R188,000 per gram) $) if reusable.

ITER: JET nuclear fusion reactor replacement

To replace JET, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is being built in France next to the Cadarache research centre. The studies are nearing completion and the first experiments are expected to start in 2025. Tim Luce, vice president of the project, stated that the new tokamak plans to increase energy production to 500 or even 700 megawatts.

Speaking at the press conference, Luce defends the goals on what he calls “factory scale.” “For high power and fusion attainment, the timescale should be increased to at least 300 seconds, but perhaps up to an hour for energy production,” she argues.

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