Post by account_disabled on Feb 27, 2024 1:43:45 GMT -5
Nuclear fusion reactor in Korea reaches million degrees Celsius.
A nuclear fusion reactor developed by researchers at Seoul National University (SNU) in South Korea reached temperatures above million degrees Celsius, bringing us one step closer to nuclear fusion energy, New Scientist reported.
Nuclear fusion is a promising method of energy generation, as massive amounts of energy are released when two nuclei with low atomic weights are combined. The most significant advantage of nuclear fusion is that the end product of the process is not radioactive and ther Brazil Mobile Number List efore does not require containment measures from nuclear fission technology.
Our Sun produces its energy with nuclear fusion, but humanity is still a few decades away from harnessing nuclear fusion. Like the Sun, we need high temperatures inside a fusion reactor for the process to work. High temperatures convert matter into plasma, which must then be contained; Cooling too quickly can damage the reactor chambers.
Ways to contain plasma
Scientists are still looking for ways to contain the plasma inside the nuclear fusion reactor. One such method is the use of magnetic fields to create an edge transport barrier (ETB), which creates a sharp cut in pressure near the reactor wall to prevent heat and plasma from escaping . Another is to create a higher pressure closer to the center of the plasma, called the internal transport barrier (ITB).
Yong-Su Na and his colleagues at SNU used a modification of the ITB technique and achieved a lower plasma density. Their experiments carried out at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) appear to increase temperatures in the core of the plasma, which, on this occasion, exceeded million degrees Celsius.
This is a critical step in nuclear fusion as we need to maintain high temperatures to extract energy from the process. Both ETB and ITB are known to create instability. However, the method used by the KSTAR researchers demonstrated stability and only had to be stopped due to hardware limitations.
Can this be scaled?
The researchers do not fully understand the mechanisms at play that made the plasma stable at such high temperatures, but they believe that fast ion-regulated enhancement (FIRE) or more energetic ions in the plasma core were integral to the stability.
The KSTAR device has now been turned off and the carbon components of its inner walls are being replaced with tungsten to improve the reproducibility of the experiments, New Scientist said in its report. Researchers are hopeful that future experiments will be longer and help them move toward a nuclear fusion reactor.
Experts told New Scientist that such discoveries were definitely advancing the field of nuclear fusion. However, the problems of technology were now moving away from physics. The most important question to address is whether we can harness the energy of a nuclear fusion reactor in an economical way where the heat can be used to get some work done. Without this, the technology will not scale.
Fortunately, we can expect more answers to our questions when an international collaboration for nuclear fusion, ITER, attempts to produce power in the world's largest nuclear fusion reactor by
The findings from the work done at KSTAR were published in the journal Nature.
Summary
Nuclear fusion is one of the most attractive alternatives to carbon-dependent energy sources. However, harnessing the energy of nuclear fusion on a large reactor scale still presents many scientific challenges despite many years of research and continued advances in magnetic confinement approaches.
State-of-the-art magnetic fusion devices cannot yet achieve sustainable fusion performance, requiring a high temperature above million kelvin and sufficient control of instabilities to ensure steady-state operation on the order of tens of seconds. Here we report experiments on the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research device that produces a plasma fusion regime that satisfies most of the above requirements: thanks to the abundance of fast ions that stabilize the central plasma turbulence, we generate plasmas at a temperature of millions of kelvin with a duration of up to seconds without instabilities at the edges of the plasma or accumulation of impurities.
A low plasma density combined with a moderate input power for operation is key to establishing this regime by preserving a high fraction of fast ions. This regime is rarely subject to disruption and can be reliably maintained even without sophisticated control and therefore represents a promising path toward commercial fusion reactors.
A nuclear fusion reactor developed by researchers at Seoul National University (SNU) in South Korea reached temperatures above million degrees Celsius, bringing us one step closer to nuclear fusion energy, New Scientist reported.
Nuclear fusion is a promising method of energy generation, as massive amounts of energy are released when two nuclei with low atomic weights are combined. The most significant advantage of nuclear fusion is that the end product of the process is not radioactive and ther Brazil Mobile Number List efore does not require containment measures from nuclear fission technology.
Our Sun produces its energy with nuclear fusion, but humanity is still a few decades away from harnessing nuclear fusion. Like the Sun, we need high temperatures inside a fusion reactor for the process to work. High temperatures convert matter into plasma, which must then be contained; Cooling too quickly can damage the reactor chambers.
Ways to contain plasma
Scientists are still looking for ways to contain the plasma inside the nuclear fusion reactor. One such method is the use of magnetic fields to create an edge transport barrier (ETB), which creates a sharp cut in pressure near the reactor wall to prevent heat and plasma from escaping . Another is to create a higher pressure closer to the center of the plasma, called the internal transport barrier (ITB).
Yong-Su Na and his colleagues at SNU used a modification of the ITB technique and achieved a lower plasma density. Their experiments carried out at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) appear to increase temperatures in the core of the plasma, which, on this occasion, exceeded million degrees Celsius.
This is a critical step in nuclear fusion as we need to maintain high temperatures to extract energy from the process. Both ETB and ITB are known to create instability. However, the method used by the KSTAR researchers demonstrated stability and only had to be stopped due to hardware limitations.
Can this be scaled?
The researchers do not fully understand the mechanisms at play that made the plasma stable at such high temperatures, but they believe that fast ion-regulated enhancement (FIRE) or more energetic ions in the plasma core were integral to the stability.
The KSTAR device has now been turned off and the carbon components of its inner walls are being replaced with tungsten to improve the reproducibility of the experiments, New Scientist said in its report. Researchers are hopeful that future experiments will be longer and help them move toward a nuclear fusion reactor.
Experts told New Scientist that such discoveries were definitely advancing the field of nuclear fusion. However, the problems of technology were now moving away from physics. The most important question to address is whether we can harness the energy of a nuclear fusion reactor in an economical way where the heat can be used to get some work done. Without this, the technology will not scale.
Fortunately, we can expect more answers to our questions when an international collaboration for nuclear fusion, ITER, attempts to produce power in the world's largest nuclear fusion reactor by
The findings from the work done at KSTAR were published in the journal Nature.
Summary
Nuclear fusion is one of the most attractive alternatives to carbon-dependent energy sources. However, harnessing the energy of nuclear fusion on a large reactor scale still presents many scientific challenges despite many years of research and continued advances in magnetic confinement approaches.
State-of-the-art magnetic fusion devices cannot yet achieve sustainable fusion performance, requiring a high temperature above million kelvin and sufficient control of instabilities to ensure steady-state operation on the order of tens of seconds. Here we report experiments on the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research device that produces a plasma fusion regime that satisfies most of the above requirements: thanks to the abundance of fast ions that stabilize the central plasma turbulence, we generate plasmas at a temperature of millions of kelvin with a duration of up to seconds without instabilities at the edges of the plasma or accumulation of impurities.
A low plasma density combined with a moderate input power for operation is key to establishing this regime by preserving a high fraction of fast ions. This regime is rarely subject to disruption and can be reliably maintained even without sophisticated control and therefore represents a promising path toward commercial fusion reactors.