In its final experiments before being shut down for good last year, the UK's JET reactor set a world record for the energy output of a fusion reaction
The UK’s 40-year-old fusion reactor achieved a world record for energy output in its final runs before being shut down for good, scientists have announced.59 megajoules of heat energy . But in its final tests in late 2023, it surpassed this by sustaining a reaction for 5.
2 seconds while also reaching 69 megajoules of output, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel. This equates to a power output of 12.5 megawatts – enough to power 12,000 homes, said Mikhail Maslov of the UK Atomic Energy Authority at a press conference on 8 February.waste created by fission, but we don’t yet have a practical way to harness this process in a power plant. JET forged together atoms of deuterium and tritium – two stable isotopes of hydrogen – in plasma to create helium, while also releasing a vast amount of energy. This is the same reaction that powers our sun. It was a type of fusion reactor known as a tokamak, which contains plasma in a donut shape using rings of electromagnets. Scientists ran the last experiments with deuterium-tritium fuel at JET in October last year and other experiments continued until December. But the machine has now been shut down for good and it is being decommissioned over the next 16 years.at the University of Manchester, UK, says JET will reveal many secrets as it is dismantled, such as how the lining of the reactor deteriorated through contact with plasma and where valuable tritium – worth around £30,000 a gram – has embedded in the machinery and can be recovered. This will be vital information for future research and commercial reactors. “It’s great that it’s gone out with a little flourish,” says Matthews. “It’s got a noble history. It’s served its time and they’re going to squeeze a bit more information out of it during its decommissioning period as well. So it’s not something to be sad about; it’s something to be celebrated.”We visited the UK's fusion tokamak, JET, to see how four decades of experimentation is paving the way for ITER, the next-generation reactor in FranceTim Luce, deputy head of the ITER construction project, told the press conference that ITER will scale up the energy output to 500 megawatts, or possibly even 700. “These are what I usually call power plant scale,” he said. “They’re at the lower end of what you would need for an electricity generating facility. In addition, we need to extend the timescale to at least 300 seconds for the high fusion power and gain but perhaps as long as an hour in terms of energy production. So what JET has done is exactly a scale model of what we have to do in the ITER project.” There are other approaches to creating a working fusion reactor being pursued around the world as well, such as the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. This bombards capsules of fuel with immensely powerful lasers, a process called inertial confinement fusion, and has managed to unleash
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