A Fusion Machine Maintained Plasma for an Astonishing 22 Straight Minutes
WEST and other tokamaks are paving the way for ITER which, upon completion, will be the largest tokamak in the world.
Though we have a long way to go before carbon emissions are a thing of the past, every time a tokamak keeps plasma going just a little longer, we get that much closer.
As Earthlings with a planet under threat from pollution, extinction, and climate change, we need to reach net zero carbon emissions. And to do that,we're going to need alternative power sources. Nuclear fusion is one alternative source of power that could eventually make fossil fuels obsolete.
Earth may someday survive on nuclear fusion by using tokamaks. These donut-shaped machines confine plasma with magnetic fields so that that particles can reach the condition necessary to fuse together and release energy. The only issue is that these plasmas are unstable and don't last long.
Recently, WEST, (tungsten (W) Environment in Steady-state Tokamak), one of the EUROfusion medium-size tokamaks run from the CEA Cadarache site in southern France, broke the record for time maintaining a plasma. The machine—which has insides made of tungsten and was boosted with a surge of 2 megawatts of power—was able to hold on to the hydrogen plasma at about 50 million °C (122 million °F) for 22 minutes, or 1,337 seconds.
This is right on the heels of WEST's counterpart EAST (located in China), which previously broke the record in January. EAST is called an 'artificial Sun' for a reason. In a way, producing energy with a tokamak is like harnessing the power of a star. Stars run on nuclear fusion, fusing hydrogen atoms together to create helium until they run out and either continue to exist as faint ghosts of themselves (white dwarfs), or—if they happen to be especially massive stars—go supernova and collapse into black holes.
WEST's record resulted from the pursuit of something enormous. Ultimately, CEA researchers want to achieve control over their plasma, which is a sort of fluid of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons. Plasma instability can be caused by magnetic fields, temperature, and any other conditions that cause turbulence among particles.
For optimal plasma control, a tokamak should not malfunction from plasma behavior, or pollute the plasma in any way. Everything in the machine that comes in contact with the plasma should also be resistant to plasma radiation. To those ends, the tungsten in WEST boasts several advantages. Tungsten has the highest melting point of all metals, making it especially resilient to the extreme temperatures required for nuclear fusion. It also conducts heat efficiently, and has little effect on neutrons or fusion fuels.
WEST and EAST—along with JET (Joint European Torus), Japan's JT-60SA, and Korea's KSTAR—are the predecessors to the even more powerful ITER, which is currently being built in southern France and will be, upon completion, the world's largest tokamak. ITER, however, is not expected to be start running until the mid to late 2030s. So, for now, researchers will keep experimenting with higher levels of power and keep trying to hang on to hot plasmas for increasing stretches of time.
'WEST has achieved a new key technological milestone,' Anne-Isabelle Etienvre, Director of Fundamental Research at the CEA, said in a press release. 'Experiments will continue with increased power. This excellent result allows both WEST and the French community to lead the way for the future use of ITER.'
Unlike a star there is no danger of a human-made machine morphing into a black hole after burning out its fuel. However, if we want to achieve even a fraction of stellar power, we're going to need an immense amount of energy, and WEST just took us a few steps forward.
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