JET's final nuclear fusion experiment produced a record-breaking 69 megajoules of heat. Nice.
Clean energy could be 'closer than ever' after a nuclear fusion machine smashed a record::JET's final nuclear fusion experiment produced a record-breaking 69 megajoules of heat. Nice.
"By my estimate this is enough energy to make over 600 cups of tea," professor Stuart Mangles—a physicist from Imperial College London, England—said in a statement.
Needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Actually capturing the heat for electricity, and getting more electricity out of it than required to run the reactor itself, remain massive open questions that this generation of research reactors does not even begin to tackle.
IIRC, this is a big deal because they are achieving more energy out than they put in.
If I've been reading these correctly they are achieving it with tiny amounts of fuel and slowly working up as they achieve success. I'm seeing these as proof of concept and fantastic steps in the right direction.
In this context, the "energy that they put in" only counts the heating of the plasma. It does not include the energy needed to run the rest of the reactor, like the magnets that trap the plasma. If you count those other energy needs, about an order of magnitude improvement is still required. Possibly more, if we have to extract the energy (an incredibly hard problem that's barely been scratched so far).
So yeah, it's nice to see the progress, but the road ahead is still a very long one.
It doesn't look like they're generating electricity with that energy yet, so while you are correct the person you responded to is also correct in that we still need to prove we can harness it efficiently enough.
I think they'll get there, it just boils down to investment and time.
69 MJ is 19.17 kWh. About 86p of electricity at today's wholesale price in the UK (£45/MWh: today is fairly average).
The research they are doing is great, but there's so much engineering to be done to turn fusion into something practical; something capable of running streams of pulses, not just single ones.
This was the last experiment for this reactor running it outside of design limits.
When it finally works, you will have invented the most expensive form of energy we've ever imagined. Congratulations.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm excited for fusion. Fusion has some amazing potential as a power source and propulsion for space ships. But outside of that application, I don't know... I'm pissemistic. I do not think it will be the global energy revolution so many people seem to think it will be. It will not be unlimited cheap energy, not be a longshot.
Is it unlimited though? I mean sure, the fuel is abundant, we have hydrogen. But the other support materials are quite limited, berillium, helium, nuclear engineers. I don't think we have enough of all of that for an energy revolution.
It's ending because it's old. JET has been running since the 80s. It's successor is ITER, which ran into some delays, but is expected to be finished sometime next year.