To capture the sun’s power source here on Earth, what’s needed is a way of capturing and containing something that hot - 100,000,000 degrees or more - by suspending it in a way that prevents it from coming into contact with anything solid. But the process requires temperatures far beyond what any solid material could withstand. “It’s really a watershed moment, I believe, in fusion science and technology,” he says.įusion is the process that powers the sun: the merger of two small atoms to make a larger one, releasing prodigious amounts of energy. Whyte, who is the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, says this week’s demonstration represents a major milestone, addressing the biggest questions remaining about the feasibility of the SPARC design. It’s really a fundamentally new energy source.” But once the technology is proven, he says, “it’s an inexhaustible, carbon-free source of energy that you can deploy anywhere and at any time. “The challenges of making fusion happen are both technical and scientific,” says Dennis Whyte, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, which is working with CFS to develop SPARC. That demonstration device, called SPARC, is targeted for completion in 2025. With the magnet technology now successfully demonstrated, the MIT-CFS collaboration is on track to build the world’s first fusion device that can create and confine a plasma that produces more energy than it consumes.
#Reddit cfs how to
We just have to figure out how to utilize it.”ĭeveloping the new magnet is seen as the greatest technological hurdle to making that happen its successful operation now opens the door to demonstrating fusion in a lab on Earth, which has been pursued for decades with limited progress.
#Reddit cfs full
“The amount of power that is available is really game-changing.” The fuel used to create fusion energy comes from water, and “the Earth is full of water - it’s a nearly unlimited resource. “Fusion in a lot of ways is the ultimate clean energy source,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and E. That advance paves the way, they say, for the long-sought creation of practical, inexpensive, carbon-free power plants that could make a major contribution to limiting the effects of global climate change. That successful demonstration helps resolve the greatest uncertainty in the quest to build the world’s first fusion power plant that can produce more power than it consumes, according to the project’s leaders at MIT and startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS).
5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth.
It was a moment three years in the making, based on intensive research and design work: On Sept.
0 kommentar(er)
