Needless to say, the material and technical challenges are extreme.Īlthough all fusion reactors to date have produced less energy than they use, physicists are expecting that ITER will benefit from its larger size, and will produce about 10 times more power than it consumes. Just a few feet away, on the other hand, the windings of the superconducting electromagnets need to be cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero. So enormous amounts of energy are required to heat the plasma, using pulsating magnetic fields and other sources like microwaves. In a tokamak, without such a strong gravitational pull, the atoms need to be about 10 times hotter. Nuclei need to be at a temperature of about 15 million degrees Celsius. In the sun, the extreme gravitational field does much of the work. To fuse, atomic nuclei must move very fast - they must be extremely hot - to overcome natural repulsive forces and collide. ITER’s heat will be dissipated through cooling towers. In a fusion power plant, that heat would be used to make steam to turn a turbine to generate electricity, much as existing power plants do using other sources of heat, like burning coal. Most of the energy will be carried away by neutrons, which will escape the plasma and strike the walls of the tokamak, producing heat. In the ITER tokamak, deuterium and tritium nuclei will fuse to form helium, losing a small amount of mass that is converted into a huge amount of energy. pulls out, it may pull down a lot of good science in the downdraft.”
“If ITER goes forward, it might eat up all the money. “People around the country who work on projects that are the scientific basis for fusion are worried that they’re in a no-win situation,” said William Dorland, a physicist at the University of Maryland who is chairman of the plasma science committee of the National Academy of Sciences. “If you miss this chance, maybe it will never come again.”īut even scientists who support ITER are concerned about the impact it has on other research.
“You have a chance to know if fusion works or not,” he said. Bigot argues that it is in every participating country’s interest to see it through. While it is not clear what would happen to the project if the United States withdrew, Dr. Bigot’s efforts, argue that the project already consumes too much of the Energy Department’s basic research budget of about $5 billion. Some in Congress, including Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, while lauding Dr. Bigot said.Įnergy Department press aides did not respond to requests for comment. “But he has to make some short-term choices” with his budget, Dr. Perry “very open to listening” about ITER and its long-term goals. Bigot met with the new energy secretary, Rick Perry, last week in Washington, and said he found Mr.
(The department also funds another long-troubled fusion project, which uses lasers, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.)ĭr. It is unclear, though, how the project will fare in the Trump administration, which has proposed a cut of roughly 20 percent to the department’s Office of Science, which funds basic research including ITER. The department confirmed its support for ITER in a report last year and Congress approved $115 million for it. A functional commercial fusion power plant would be even further down the road.ĭespite the recent progress there are still plenty of doubts about ITER, especially in the United States, which left the project for five years at the turn of the century and where funding through the Energy Department has long been a political football. That is a half century after the subject of cooperating on a fusion project came up at a meeting in Geneva between President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Rape Allegations: Two women have accused Damien Abad, the newly appointed minister for solidarity and for disabled people, of raping them.New Prime Minister: Élisabeth Borne, the minister of labor who previously was in charge of the environment, will be the second woman to hold the post in France.Macron’s new government combines continuity with change, as newcomers at the foreign and education ministries join first-term veterans.
0 kommentar(er)
