Scientists just broke a fusion world record – and it lifts the bar for clean energy potential

Scientists have set a new world record for plasma pressure – the ‘key ingredient’ for producing energy from nuclear fusion – which means this clean and sustainable energy source is closer to our grasp than ever before.

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CrazyNeutrino said:

Scientists just broke a fusion world record – and it lifts the bar for clean energy potential

Scientists have set a new world record for plasma pressure – the ‘key ingredient’ for producing energy from nuclear fusion – which means this clean and sustainable energy source is closer to our grasp than ever before.

More…

> To reach the 2.05-atmosphere record, MIT researchers turned the reactor up to 35 million degrees Celsius (63 million degrees Fahrenheit) – over twice as hot as the Sun’s core – holding plasma producing 300 trillion fusion reactions per second for 2 seconds. These three variables – temperature, pressure, and time sustained – act as trade-offs, as previous records from teams from around the world have demonstrated. For example, while the Alcator C-Mod reactor has the top spot in terms of pressure, other reactions have been hotter or lasted longer.

Interesting, I thought they’d given up trying. To instance at the Joint European Torus all the latest research has been on quantifying edge effects and studying the performance of different materials after heavy irradiation.

How does this new peak pressure affect the combination of pressure, temperature and time?

There’s been a lot of tiny steps but no real breakthrough yet as far as I know.