Will we ever move to clean, sustainable energy? Lately, it seems questionable in this troubled world, but then a couple of stories, days apart, brought some hope. It’s about atomic fusion, which always seems to be way off in the future by decades. But just possibly it’s closer than we think. If achieved, it means clean, limitless, carbon-free energy would finally be here.
In one story, scientists from more than 30 countries reached a milestone with the world’s largest magnet. That massive magnet suspends a flaming hot ball of plasma; the stuff stars are made of, inside the doughnut-shaped fusion reactor called a tokamak.
In a way, it’s like a tiny Dyson sphere, a hypothetical cage-like structure constructed around a star to collect its energy. However, this artificially created ball of plasma would be suspended inside a cage with magnetic fields. Instead of in space, it would be on the ground in France.
Thirty Countries Work for Fusion
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project in southern France announced that the United States had completed and tested the cylindrical central solenoid magnet. According to the Debrief, it’s powerful enough to “levitate an aircraft carrier” and the final step before assembling the fusion reactor.
ITER’s director general, Pietro Barabaschi, compared the milestone to a bottle of wine.
“It is like the bottle in a bottle of wine: of course the wine is maybe more important than the bottle, but you need the bottle in order to put the wine inside,” said Barabasch.
In this metaphor, if this “wine” touched the bottle, it would explode into a billion pieces, which is why the magnet needs to hold the plasma away from its container.
Originally scheduled for completion by 2021, this does seem like a great time for a celebratory glass of wine after years of delays. As The Guardian reported in 2024, there was a long list of problems expected to hold up the project for another decade that year. But now we suddenly see some progress.
Video about the ITER magnet by WION
Harnessing an Artificial Sun
Despite the new progress with the magnet, Barabaschi remains skeptical that anyone will achieve a cost-effective solution within “one or even two decades.”
Whatever delays come next, there is something hopeful. Despite global tensions, the United States, China, Japan, India, Russia and the European Union are working together. Thus, the project shows that the world can put aside political differences for the shared goal of clean and limitless energy.
At the same time, individual countries are pushing forward with their own projects, such as China’s “Artificial Sun,” the EAST tokamak. Next, we’ll look at another promising project in California.
Video by NASASpaceNews about the ITER and East:
Making Fusion the Norm?
As the news announced progress with the ITER project, a California company called TAE Technologies announced a breakthrough with a fusion reactor prototype called “Norm.” Unlike the ITER project, Norm doesn’t require giant magnets.
Instead, Norm uses field-reversed configuration (FRC), which employs magnetic mirrors to trap relatively cool plasma particles “in a to-and-fro motion.” According to Gizmodo, a TAE release claimed these machines could achieve “100 times the fusion output of typical tokamaks with similar magnetic field strengths and plasma volumes.”
With an FRC, a specific kind of plasma created with neutral beam injection generates its own magnetic field. With this process, the company claims the reactor design can be vastly simpler than conventional tokamaks. Even better, they could run at half the cost of older designs.
Next, the company plans to create its sixth-generation reactor, Copernicus, modeled after Norm’s components. And by the early 2030s, they hope to have an operational power plant called Da Vinci. If it all works as planned, fusion power could be just around the corner.
Vide by TAE Technologies:
Featured image: Norm by TAE Technologies/YouTube