Physicists Overcome Two Key Operating Hurdles in Fusion Reactions
upstart writes:
Physicists overcome two key operating hurdles in fusion reactions:
A team of physicists from several institutions across the U.S. working with a colleague from China, at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, in San Diego, California, has devised a way to overcome two key hurdles standing in the way of using fusion as a general power source.
In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes how they devised a way to raise the density of the plasma in their reactor while also keeping it stable.
[...] It was just in the past couple of years that researchers were able to show that a fusion reaction could be made to sustain itself, and that more power could be produced than was input into such a system.
The next two hurdles to overcome are increasing the density of the plasma in the reactor and then containing it for extended periods of time-long enough for it to be useful for producing electricity. In this new study, the research team has devised a way to do both in a tokamak chamber.
To contain the plasma as its density was increased, the team used additional magnets and bursts of deuterium where needed. They also allowed for higher densities at the core than near the edges, helping to ensure the plasma could not escape. They held it in that state for 2.2 seconds, long enough to prove that it could be done.
[...] The research team acknowledges that their experiment was done in a very small reactor-one with a diameter of just 1.6 meters. For such an achievement to be considered fully successful, it will have to be done in a much larger reactor, such as the one currently under construction in France, which will have a diameter of 6.2 meters.
Journal Reference:
Ding, S., Garofalo, A. M., Wang, H. Q., et al. A high-density and high-confinement tokamak plasma regime for fusion energy [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07313-3)
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