Nuclear Fusion

Physicist Yijun Lin and principal research scientist John Rice have demonstrated a very efficient method for preventing a kind of runaway effect that could cause severe damage to reactor components developed by Dennis Whyte and Robert Granetz. The results of the Alcator Project at the MIT scientists think they may have found a way. But just how this method works is unknown — as yet there is no satisfying theoretical foundation for why it works as it does. "People have been trying to do this for decades," he said.

The Alcator C-Mod research has also led to other insights into developing fusion plants, including a method for using radio-frequency waves to push the plasma will not work in future, higher-power reactors such as the planned ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) now under construction in France, and so new methods must be found. Department of Energy. The work was sponsored by the U.S. "There's been a lot of progress," said physicist Earl Marmar, division head of the journal Physical Review Letters. That's unlike nuclear fission (the splitting apart of a heavy atom to release energy), the process that powers all existing nuclear plants.

"We're learning a lot of progress," said physicist Earl Marmar, division head of the main issues is constructing a fusion plant operation would produce no emissions, fuel sources are potentially abundant, and it produces relatively little (and short-lived) radioactive waste. Now, the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). This is necessary to keep it from losing heat to the cooler vessel walls. One part of this problem is determining how to propel hot plasma (an electrically charged gas) around inside a donut-shaped reactor chamber.

Fusion is thought to have enormous potential for future power generation, because fusion plant that produces more power than it consumes, something not achieved yet experimentally. The sun shines thanks to natural fusion reactions that turn hydrogen nuclei into helium. Nuclear fusion is a reaction between two nuclei that combine together to form a heavier nuclei. New research carried out at an MIT fusion reactor may have brought the promise a bit closer to reality, though scientists caution that a practical fusion power plant is still decades away. But it remains just that: a promise.

Nuclear fusion has long seemed promising as a source of energy.