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Possibility of Nuclear Fusion
17 January 2023
EIRNS—Oil Price.com had an article Jan. 14, “Nuclear Fusion Has Gone from Pipe Dream to Possibility,” with ITER officials commenting on how important the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak’s (EAST) achievement of complete plasma stability is for the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) 35-nation project. In fact the smaller and lower-power EAST device at Hefei, China, with sufficient funding from the Chinese government, is really replacing ITER as an international tokamak project given all the latter’s construction delays. Scientists and engineers from Russia, Korea, India, Australia and Germany work with the EAST team. It is the first tokamak to use superconducting magnets for both the toroidal and poloidal magnetic fields holding the plasma—which is planned for ITER.
EAST has confirmed in the past month the achievement (in 2022) of a “plasma super-I mode,” in which a stable plasma was maintained for nearly 20 minutes not only in the deep plasma, which has been done in other experiments, but at the edges of the plasma as well, preventing them from interacting with the walls. Engineers working on EAST describe the plasma as “calm” for long durations—it is clearly self-organizing. Furthermore no impurities accumulated within the plasma for the entire duration of the pulse. This was at about 70 million degrees Centigrade and with a power output of about 10 MW. The result was further described in World Nuclear News Jan. 9. [pbg] See also:
‘60 Minutes’ Covers Fusion Breakthrough EIRNS—“From a machine, a star is born,” concluded the 13-minute segment on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” about the December breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Viewers are treated to a walkthrough of the facility—the 192 lasers, using, briefly, 1,000 times the power of the national grid—and the actual target used for the successful ignition experiment was shown on camera. The nature of the recent breakthrough—its combination of electromagnetic and inertial confinement—was not addressed. The NIF would of course not be a model for a commercial power plant—in addition to needing much more efficient lasers, the effort to create thousands of targets per hour would be impossible. Look forward to an upcoming interview with Paul Gallagher of ExecutiveIntelligence Review and Fusion Magazine, for more. |
