Five seconds, 59 megajoules: A new record for tokamak fusion

Enlarge / The interior of JET, configured as a scale model for ITER, overlaid with an image of a plasma present in the tokamak during experiments. (credit: EUROfusion)

On Wednesday, the EUROfusion consortium announced that the Joint European Torus (JET), located near Oxford in the UK, had set a new record for released energy. Over the course of a five-second "pulse," 59 megajoules of energy were released, double the previous record for tokamak fusion set at JET in 1997.

Despite the impressive numbers, the results are still well short of the break-even point where the fusion energy released would match the energy input required to trigger the fusion. Still, the work provides an important validation of the approach being taken at the next major fusion project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER.

Two ways to fuse

Fusion takes place when atomic nuclei are brought close enough together that they merge, creating a heavier element. It's the process that powers stars, and it could produce vast amounts of energy from small amounts of hydrogen isotopes if we could reproduce the temperatures and pressures found in stars here on Earth. So far, we've taken two main approaches to the process.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments