Hotter than the center of the Sun was the plasma (an electrically charged gas) obtained by the private Tokamak Energy last month in England. He achieved this by heating hydrogen to a temperature of 15 million degrees inside an experimental reactor.
It was one more step in the race to tame an artificial mini-auction to get its energy milked. The concept behind is known as nuclear fusion and, unlike nuclear fission - which derives energy by pulverizing atoms and generating waste that remains for decades - here what is achieved with high temperature is to unite the nuclei of two atoms to form one different, which means releasing heat, as it happens inside the Sun. Its raw material (hydrogen) is cheap and the radioactive waste lasts less time.
The British project wants to take advantage of ITER, the experimental mega-reactor that has been building, for a decade, an international consortium led by the European Union in Cadarache, in the middle of the French countryside. The ITER will be completed in 2025, when it is expected to generate its first plasma, but it is estimated that only in 10 more years it would be able to produce energy efficiently.
A similar path in terms of deadlines follows 10 national research programs in the United States, Korea, China and the United Kingdom, each with a budget of around 100 million dollars and which, to a greater or lesser degree, have already achieved their goals. small artificial suns and even generate energy, but tiny.
But as it seems to happen in the space race to Mars, the private could advance in several years. Counting Tokamak Energy, at least 20 private companies are developing their own projects in a reserved way and only know about them when they obtain favorable results. "This does not mean that what they do is not of quality, only that we do not have enough information to know it," acknowledges the physicist of the U. de Chile Leopoldo Soto.
While mergers have been achieved experimentally for more than 50 years, another thing is that they are long enough in time to take advantage, recognizes Soto. For that it is necessary to get temperatures close to 100 million degrees, 10 times that of the Sun's core. At that temperature, the plasma would be stable enough, so that a sufficient amount of nuclear reactions can be produced that result in an amount of energy greater than injected.
At Tokamak Energy they say they could get a plasma of 100 million degrees as early as next year. If that goal is met, the company plans to produce energy on an industrial scale by 2025, when ITER will just start its experiments, which would be a major blow for the international consortium. "Our goal is to make fusion energy a commercial reality by 2030," says Jonathan Carling, CEO of Tokamak Energy.
But it is not enough to reach high temperatures. Another obstacle to a stable fusion is that there are still no materials that resist the damage to which the walls of the experiment will be subjected by containing the plasma from which the artificial sun is formed, says Soto, who in the Chilean Nuclear Commission has successfully developed mergers at a minimum scale.
For the plasma to be tamed, one of the options is to be contained within a kind of magnetic prison.
In the case of ITER, the first of the 18 magnets that will form this shield is already built. To get an idea of the dimensions of the experiment, each magnet measures the equivalent of a four-story building and weighs more than a Boeing 747. The plasma is confined to the shape of a picard, but transfers its heat to the walls. The longer the content, the more efficient the process will be and the less damage the reactor will cause.
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