European scientists have taken a significant step closer to mastering a technology that could allow them to one day harness nuclear fusion, providing a clean and almost limitless source of energy, British officials said on Wednesday.
Researchers at the Joint European Torus experiment near Oxford, England, produced a record amount of heat over 5 seconds, which was the duration of the experiment, the UK Atomic Energy Authority said.
The 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy produced were more than double the previous record achieved in 1997.
The agency said that the result was “the clearest demonstration worldwide of the potential for fusion energy to deliver safe and sustainable low-carbon energy.”
“If we can maintain fusion for five seconds, we can do it for five minutes and then five hours as we scale up our operations in future machines,” said Tony Donne, program manager for EUROfusion. “This is a big moment for every one of us and the entire fusion community.”
Atomic Energy Authority chief executive officer Ian Chapman said that the results were a “huge step closer to conquering one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of them all.”
The facility, also known as JET, is home to the world’s largest and most powerful operational tokamak — a donut-shaped device that is considered one promising method for performing controlled fusion.
Scientists who were not involved in the project said it was a significant result, but still a long way from achieving commercial fusion power.
Researchers around the world have long been working on nuclear fusion technology, trying different approaches. The ultimate goal is to generate power the way the sun generates heat, by pressing hydrogen atoms so close to each other that they combine into helium, which releases torrents of energy.
Carolyn Kuranz at the University of Michigan called the development “very exciting” and a step toward achieving “ignition,” or when the fuel can continue to “burn” on its own and produce more energy than what is needed to spark the initial reaction.
Kuranz said that the results appeared “very promising” for ITER, a much larger experimental fusion facility in southern France that uses the same technology and is backed by many European countries, the US, China, Japan, India, South Korea and Russia.
ITER is expected to begin operations in 2026.
Riccardo Betti, a fusion expert at the University of Rochester in New York state, said that the achievement lay mainly in sustaining the reaction at high performance levels for 5 seconds, significantly longer than previously achieved in a tokamak.
The amount of power gained was still well below the amount needed to perform the experiment, Betti said.
Ian Fells, an emeritus professor of energy conversion at the University of Newcastle, described the new record as a landmark in fusion research.
“Now it is up to the engineers to translate this into carbon-free electricity and mitigate the problem of climate change,” Fells said. “Ten to 20 years could see commercialization.”
Stephanie Diem of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said that the technology used by JET to achieve the result, using magnets to control ultrahot plasma, show that harnessing fusion is feasible.
“The next milestone on the horizon for magnetic fusion is to demonstrate scientific breakeven, where the amount of energy produced from fusion reactions exceeds that going into the device,” Diem said.
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