![]() ![]() Scientists at the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, UK, announced on 9 February that they had generated the highest sustained energy pulse ever created by fusing together atoms, more than doubling their own record from experiments performed in 1997. Has fusion been achieved?Ī 24-year-old nuclear-fusion record has crumbled. It was however first theorised about a hundred years ago. Nuclear fusion is supposedly ‘always 30 years away‘. This article was originally published in The Oxford Scientist Michaelmas Term 2021 edition, Change. Using intense magnetic fields, ITER will trap a plasma of deuterium and tritium-the heavy isotopes of hydrogen-in a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber and heated to 150 million degrees Celsius. fusion researchers embraced the pilot plant in their new long-range plan. Then fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of perhaps another few decades. There’s huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready for commercialisation. Construction of the entire plant has been underway since 2010 on a 42-hectare site in the countryside of Provence. ITER is a type of magnetic fusion reactor called a tokamak, designed to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale energy source with no carbon emissions. Journalists fight on their own frontline.Normally, fusion is not possible because the strongly repulsive electrostatic forces between the positively charged nuclei prevent them from getting close enough together to collide and for fusion to occur. Russia’s Armed Forces also threatened to shut down the ZNPP if shooting continues. On 18 August, the Russian Defence Ministry claimed that a "massive provocation" could occur on 19 August, during the visit by the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, to Ukraine. ![]()
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