The Tech News AUGUST 29, 2016 IRENE ADLER
The ultimate race all the scientists in the world are competing for constructing the very first nuclear fusion machine. This machine will have the ability to imitate the energy generating process that has been constantly been fueling our Sun for 4.5 billion years! Consequently, the whole mankind will have access to the cleanest, safest and technically an infinite level of energy.
The severity of this competition is also driving the government of the USA to assist the physicists for designing this new and feasible nuclear fusion reactor and it’s also going to be highly efficient.
Not only this machine will be marvelously efficient, but also be able to dissipate million times more energy per mass than any coal mining energy reactors. However, there is also an awful downfall related to the nuclear fusion reactor, which is handling radioactive wastes in massive numbers.
Engineers are currently focusing their attention on designing the smaller version of such nuclear fusion reactors that not only discharge 0% waste but also the purest form of energy one can ask for. I believe, once they have managed to invent something like this, we will no longer have to suffer from the energy crisis, which we have been frequently trying to achieve for the past 60 years.
The makers of this technology must also remember that fusion reactors will require an insane amount of heat; the environment must be as hot as the sun itself.
“During the process of nuclear fusion, atoms’ electrons are separated from their nuclei, thereby creating a super-hot cloud of electrons and ions (the nuclei minus their electrons) known as plasma.”
Said by Daniel Oberhaus to Motherboard who mentioned another problem,
“The problem with this energy-rich plasma is figuring out how to contain it since it exists at extremely high temperatures (up to 150 million degrees Celsius, or 10 times the temperature at the Sun’s core). Any material you can find on Earth isn’t going to make a very good jar.”
China, on the other hand, has claimed to have successfully created hydrogen plasma by constantly heating the hydrogen gas at 49.99 million degrees celsius while sustaining it for 102 seconds! So far the idea remains unattainable.
Physicists at the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory now believe that they have really found a cleverer way of achieving this task.
There are going to be new changes added to the already existing nuclear reactors. The British made Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak and the National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade are the existing nuclear reactors, these will shorten the time period required to generate the unimaginable amount of energy with tremendous efficiency.
So far, all we can now do is to wait and find out how the US Physicists can successfully build this brand new innovation the whole world is patiently waiting for.