After almost a century of research and experimentation, even a private company succeeds in this goal, at relatively low costs
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves himThe British private company Tokamak Energy, based in Oxford, has announced the achievement of an incredible milestone: for the first time, inside a magnetic toroidal chamber, it has been reached the record temperature of 100 million degrees centigrade (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), represent nearly seven times the core temperature of the Sun.
The result was achieved after more than half a century of studies and experiments, which went in the direction of producing electricity starting from a practically unlimited source and without consequences for the environment - an attractive prospect, considering that we are currently still dependent on sources. highly polluting fossils, such as oil and coal.
Tokamak is a Russian term that can be translated with magnetic toroidal chamber: it is a donut-shaped machine where a gas (usually hydrogen) is in a hot and rarefied state called plasma and is kept away from the internal walls thanks to a strong magnetic field generated outside the tube. Inside the tokamak it is possible to give life to controlled thermonuclear fusion processes for the production of energy: the nuclei of the different atoms fuse together, releasing a large amount of energy (in the form of heat) without the production of radioactive waste typical of nuclear fission processes - as in traditional power plants.
Easy to say in theory, but much more difficult in practice: in fact, obtaining and maintaining the balance between the three main factors in the process - namely heat, pressure and time - is far from simple. The first tokamak experiment it was developed in the 50s in the Soviet Union: it was a simple hollow ring surrounded by coils responsible for the magnetic field inside, in which hydrogen atoms were introduced which, brought to the plasma state, gave rise to nuclear fusion. Since then, a long way has been made to try to produce interesting amounts of energy, greater than those necessary to initiate the reaction.
In the last seventy years, most of the tokamaks developed sThey have been financed with government funds, which have given rise to extremely high-cost and risk-free machinery. In recent decades, however, a parallel line of research has developed, financed by private companies - such as Tokamak Energy - which aims at lower cost reactors that can be put on the market.
Reactors built with generous government funds have already hit a record 100 million degrees in the fusion process, but Tokamak Energy it is the first "commercial" reactor to have crossed this milestone with a much lower cost: "only" 50 million pounds were needed to finance the project and construction of the reactor.
The most important innovation brought by the British company certainly lies in the shape given to the tokamak: having abandoned the traditional donut shape, the new reactor has a spherical shape that makes it more compact and more sustainable from an economic point of view, as it requires many fewer coils for the creation of the magnetic field inside (resulting in a more intense field).
The company is now working to further improve the project and create a new even more advanced tokamak, which will be presented in a few years. The goal is to commercialize this device within the next decade.
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Fonte: Tokamak Energy
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