Germany Just Switched on a Revolutionary Nuclear Fusion Machine - You possibly didn't notice, but a few hours ago, the world took a huge step on the way to the goal of achieving clean, unlimited energy through nuclear fusion.
Physicists in Germany declared that they've just fired up one of the world's biggest nuclear fusion machines for the first time – and it was effectively able to contain super-hot blobs of helium gas, or else known as plasma.
The 16-metre-wide machine is the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) and it's a type of nuclear fusion device called a stellarator. Researchers have been talking about the huge potential of stellarators for decades, but this is the first time a team has shown that it can yield and control plasma just as well as other fusion reactor designs.
On 10 December, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics tweeted out this unbelievable image of its new machine's first plasma:
Nuclear fusion occurs when atoms fuse together at unbelievably high temperatures and produce energy, and the reason researchers are so excited about it is as it has the potential to yield an almost-unlimited supply of energy from little more than salt water. This is the same process that's fuelled our Sun for the past 4.5 billion years, and is expected to continue doing so for another 4 billion years.
Unlike nuclear fission, which powers today's nuclear power plants, nuclear fusion also doesn't yield any radioactive waste, and is a whole lot safer.
But it's also been extremely tricky for researchers to accomplish, because it needs them to make a device that can produce and control a 100-million-degree-Celsius blob of plasma.
The key to controlling plasma is using superconducting magnets, and researchers have already built numerous working doughnut-shaped fusion reactors known as tokamaks.
But there's a big problem with tokamak reactors – they can only sustain plasma for a maximum of 6 minutes and 30 seconds at a time, which isn't long enough to harvest important energy. In other words, we've previously been able to achieve nuclear fusion, but it consumed way more energy than it generated.
And this is why the launch of the stellarator is so exciting, because it's expected that the device will be able to control plasma for an unheard-of 30 minutes at a time.
In its first run, the machine was filled with helium – an unreactive gas – heated with a laser to about 1 million degrees Celsius. This plasma was sustained for around one-tenth of a second, which may not sound like much, but was enough to show the machine works.
"We’re very satisfied," said Hans-Stephan Bosch, who led the team. "Everything went according to plan."
The next step will be to rise the duration of helium plasma releases, with the final goal of building them up to 30 minutes in length. In January, the researchers will start trying to produce plasma from hydrogen, which is what would be used in a functioning nuclear fusion machine.
To be clear, the point of W7-X has never been to produce energy. This device is simply a proof-of-concept to show that the stellarator concept really works. If all goes to plan, the things we learn from W7-X will help us build the next-generation of stellarators, which could quite factually change the world, and end our dependence on fossil fuels forever. Or as this commenter put it so perfectly on YouTube: "Help us Wendlestein 7-X, you're our only hope."
Skip forward to around the 23.30 mark of this live stream to see the researchers get super pumped when the machine produces plasma for the first time. What a time to be alive.
Physicists in Germany declared that they've just fired up one of the world's biggest nuclear fusion machines for the first time – and it was effectively able to contain super-hot blobs of helium gas, or else known as plasma.
The 16-metre-wide machine is the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) and it's a type of nuclear fusion device called a stellarator. Researchers have been talking about the huge potential of stellarators for decades, but this is the first time a team has shown that it can yield and control plasma just as well as other fusion reactor designs.
On 10 December, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics tweeted out this unbelievable image of its new machine's first plasma:
Nuclear fusion occurs when atoms fuse together at unbelievably high temperatures and produce energy, and the reason researchers are so excited about it is as it has the potential to yield an almost-unlimited supply of energy from little more than salt water. This is the same process that's fuelled our Sun for the past 4.5 billion years, and is expected to continue doing so for another 4 billion years.
Unlike nuclear fission, which powers today's nuclear power plants, nuclear fusion also doesn't yield any radioactive waste, and is a whole lot safer.
But it's also been extremely tricky for researchers to accomplish, because it needs them to make a device that can produce and control a 100-million-degree-Celsius blob of plasma.
The key to controlling plasma is using superconducting magnets, and researchers have already built numerous working doughnut-shaped fusion reactors known as tokamaks.
But there's a big problem with tokamak reactors – they can only sustain plasma for a maximum of 6 minutes and 30 seconds at a time, which isn't long enough to harvest important energy. In other words, we've previously been able to achieve nuclear fusion, but it consumed way more energy than it generated.
And this is why the launch of the stellarator is so exciting, because it's expected that the device will be able to control plasma for an unheard-of 30 minutes at a time.
In its first run, the machine was filled with helium – an unreactive gas – heated with a laser to about 1 million degrees Celsius. This plasma was sustained for around one-tenth of a second, which may not sound like much, but was enough to show the machine works.
"We’re very satisfied," said Hans-Stephan Bosch, who led the team. "Everything went according to plan."
The next step will be to rise the duration of helium plasma releases, with the final goal of building them up to 30 minutes in length. In January, the researchers will start trying to produce plasma from hydrogen, which is what would be used in a functioning nuclear fusion machine.
To be clear, the point of W7-X has never been to produce energy. This device is simply a proof-of-concept to show that the stellarator concept really works. If all goes to plan, the things we learn from W7-X will help us build the next-generation of stellarators, which could quite factually change the world, and end our dependence on fossil fuels forever. Or as this commenter put it so perfectly on YouTube: "Help us Wendlestein 7-X, you're our only hope."
Skip forward to around the 23.30 mark of this live stream to see the researchers get super pumped when the machine produces plasma for the first time. What a time to be alive.
Article Originally Published on ScienceAlert
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