CAMBRIDGE – A team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists say they have overcome the biggest obstacle to the development of practical nuclear fusion power technology.
The researchers managed to get a new superconducting electromagnet to generate a 20 tesla magnetic field, a unit that measures the strength of a magnet, which according to an MIT press release is the strongest of its kind ever generated on earth. This is a “major progress” towards practical integration, which many experts say could one day give the world almost unlimited power.
“Fusion is in many ways the best source of clean energy. The amount of available power is really game-changing,” said MIT geophysicist Maria Zuber in a recent release.
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Plasma in Bottles
Strong electromagnets are essential for any successful fusion reactor. The energy generation process itself relies on an ultra-hot plasma which needs to be contained and controlled with a strong magnetic field to maintain a safe and practical fusion reaction.
“The challenges of realizing fusion are both technical and scientific,” said MIT Center for Plasma Fusion and Science, Dennis Whyte, who helped develop MIT’s experimental SPARC fusion reactor, in a release.
In this case, the commercial availability of the new tape-like material allowed the MIT team to create a 20 tesla magnetic field at a facility only a quarter of the size they would need if they used more conventional magnets.
That was a huge advantage to the team’s vision to build a smaller fusion reactor that reached higher temperatures, the opposite approach taken by the ITER team in France, which is a large facility that operates at lower temperatures.
Editor : Marcellus Widiarto
Writer : Selocahyo Basoeki Utomo S
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