There’s probably no better driving goal in a world run by a renewable source of energy than fusion power. This includes fusing hydrogen atoms to create helium by a process that produces an incredible amount of energy. It’s a reaction that happens every moment in the sun, but copying it on Earth is a much more difficult process. However, if we achieve this, we’ll have a healthy source of renewable electricity that fulfills our ever-growing energy necessities.
To that verge, the researchers are hunting after a phenomenon called “ignition,” when a fusion reactor produces more energy than required to establish the initial reaction. A few important attempts are underway to accomplish this goal, containing France’s International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). That action utilizes strong magnets in a tokamak machine to build superheated plasma established by using hydrogen fuel.
One of the limitations in making plasma inside a tokamak is the amount of hydrogen fuel you can inject into it,” Paolo Ricci said in a press release. He is a researcher at the Swiss Plasma Center, “Since the early days of fusion, we’ve known that if you try to increase the fuel density, at some point, there would be what we call a ‘disruption’ basically you totally lose the confinement, and plasma goes wherever.”
Ricci and his team have questioned this long-held assumption in a new paper published on May 6 in the magazine Physical Review Letters. They posted that Greenwald’s limit can certainly be raised to the point where nearly doubling the amount of hydrogen fuel that can go into a tokamak for producing plasma. Their outcomes could lay the groundwork for forthcoming fusion reactors such as DEMO, a successor to ITER that’s currently in the process of eventuareachingeach ignition.
