Fusion energy is almost like a unicorn. Everybody would like to have it but seems to be unattainable. ITER – the international experiment is getting more and more expensive and it’s still not finished. But fusion is just soo tempting.
Coil of the Wendelstein fusion reactor. Deutsches Museum, Munich.
Tiia Monto CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons
One of the companies who has succumbed to its temptations is Tokamak Energy from the British Oxfordshire. Currently, they are developing a fusion device called ST40. And on Wednesday 6th of June, they announced they achieved a temperature of 15 million degrees Celsius – higher than at the core of the sun. And they want to start delivering power in 2030.
The key to their success is supposed to small-scale fusion power. The ST40 is only the size of a van. Other fusion reactors are much bigger, some even attack the size of a football field. To get such high temperatures, ST40 is using a technology known as merging-compression. Using this technology you use a spherical tokamak to create two rings of plasma that are later merged into a single radially compressed ring using magnets.
At the moment two main types of fusion reactors are being used. But both use powerful magnetic fields to keep super-hot plasma at its designed place. First are tokamaks – which are shaped like a donut. The second are stellarators – which are shaped like a very abstract donut. Tokamak Energy is pretty obviously using tokamaks.
Their first prototype – ST25 was built in 2013, their second was done by 2015. Now they have their third prototype – the ST40 and soon they want to attack temperatures of up to 100 million degrees Celsius. And in 2025 they want to start using their reactor for industrial purposes and by 2030 they would like to start delivering electricity into the grid. And while that is still a long way ahead it seems we are on the right road towards fusion energy.
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