Scientists Make Breakthrough in Achieving Stable Fusion Reaction For Near-Limitless, Safe Energy Source

Scientists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) have discovered a potential way to stabilize fusion reactions in their search for a near-limitless and safe energy source.

The researchers have found a way to build powerful magnets smaller than before that would aid the design and construction of machines that could potentially help the world harness the power of the sun to create electricity without producing greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

Fusion Reaction

They built high-temperature superconducting magnets that are made of material that conducts electricity with little or no resistance at temperatures warmer than before. The powerful magnets would more easily fit within the tight space inside spherical tokamaks.

Spherical tokamaks are shaped more like a cored apple than the doughnut-like shape of conventional tokamaks and are being explored as a possible design for future fusion power plants.

Due to the magnets capable of being positioned apart from other machinery in the spherical tokamak's central cavity to coral the hot plasma that fuels fusion reactions, scientists could repair them without having to take anything else apart, as per Phys.org.

In a statement, a principal engineer at PPPL, Yuhu Zhai, and the lead author of a paper reporting the results in EIII Transactions on Applied Superconductivity, said that in order for this to be done, a magnet with a stronger magnetic field and a smaller size than current magnets is needed.

Zhai added that the only way for us to do such a feat is using superconducting wires, and that was exactly what his team has done. Fusion is the power that drives the sun and stars and is what combines light elements in the form of plasma, the hot charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei, that generates massive amounts of energy.

According to Newsweek, nuclear fusion is the process of joining two atomic nuclei together in order to form a single, larger nucleus whilst releasing energy in the process. Scientists have long been working on nuclear fusion reactors. The main problem has been that they have not achieved a stable reaction that gives more energy than it consumes.

Near-Limitless Energy Source

Tokamaks work by heating hydrogen until it becomes an electrically-charged soup of electrons and atomic nuclei. Powerful magnets then contain this plasma into a safe, stable flow, creating conditions where fusion should be possible.

But in order to perfect the designs of tokamaks, scientists used computer models to predict how the plasma will act under certain conditions. PPPL scientists found that resistivity is an important property of plasma since it can cause instabilities known as edge-localized models (ELMs).

These are essentially small eruptions of plasma and if left unchecked, they could cause damage to fusion reactors which would mean they would need to be taken offline more often for repairs.

The new magnets that the team created take advantage of a technique that Zhai and other researchers refined. With it, the wires do not need conventional epoxy and glass fiber insulation to ensure the flow of electricity, simplifying construction and reducing costs, GreenCarCongress reported.