Kurzweilai – Controlling nuclear fusion instabilities
Kurzweilai – Controlling nuclear fusion instabilities
19 January 2012
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) physicists have succeeded for the first time in preventing the development of instabilities in a nuclear fusion reactor. It’s an important step forward in the effort to build the ITER fusion reactor, currently in development in Southern France.
Nuclear fusion is an attempt to reproduce the energy of the Sun in an Earth-based reactor system. When gas is heated to several million degrees, it becomes plasma.
Sometimes in the plasma, an instability will appear and grow large enough to perturb the plasma, making it vibrate despite the presence of the magnetic field in which it is contained. If the plasma touches the walls of the reactor, it will cool rapidly and create large electromagnetic forces within the structure of the machine.
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