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The is a horse Archers in ancient Iran had a trick known as Parthian shooting. As they retreated after a charge, they twisted in their saddles so they could fire a final volley. This is not a good way to describe the announcement made by European Joint Taurus controllers on February 8th (jet), a nuclear fusion experiment conducted at Culham, England. After 40 years of business, jet The store will be closed in December. But his one result last year on his last run on October 3 produced a great shot for Parthia.
Fusion reactors are sometimes said to mimic the process that keeps the sun shining. That’s not very accurate. The raw material for solar fusion is protons, the lightest and most abundant hydrogen nuclei. The process of turning them into helium nuclei (two protons and two neutrons) involves several steps.The approach used in jetA type of nuclear reactor called a tokamak works by reacting together two heavier types of hydrogen nuclei, deuterium, which has a proton and neutron, and tritium, which has two protons and neutrons, to form a single Generate helium in steps. Both solar and terrestrial transmutation release large amounts of energy, but produce different subatomic byproducts. In the former case, there are two positrons and two neutrinos, and in the latter case, there is one neutron.
jetThe reaction vessel was, as the name suggests, toroidal in shape. A magnetic field traps deuterium and tritium within this donut-shaped cavity and heats them, creating a 90 cubic meter volume of plasma (a gaseous substance in which the nuclei and electrons are separated). At a temperature of 150 meters Kelvin, colliding atomic nuclei in such a plasma fuse.
jet It has never pretended to be a prototype for commercial power production. It was there to study the physics of soluble plasma, not to release more energy than was expended. But last October, operators turned the dial up to 11, and on one occasion achieved continuous fusion for 5.2 seconds, producing 69 megajoules of energy and an average output of 13 megawatts. Although small by the gigawatt standards of modern power plants, this is a record for a tokamak and a good step in the right direction. However, there is a lot of debate about what happens next.
Some people see it as ITER, an experimental tokamak being built in France by a government consortium. It will have nine times the normal plasma volume when it opens on a date yet to be determined. jet. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, in Massachusetts, a private company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building one. sparkthe tokamak is scheduled to be operational next year. spark plasma volume is lower than jet However, advances in design using superconducting magnets require that they emit twice as much energy as they put in. The company hopes this will be the last step before it becomes a fully commercial machine.
In addition to these projects, a second civilian nuclear reactor is planned in Culham itself by a company called Tokamak Energy. Other companies in North America and the UK are also joining the fray, taking a different approach to tokamaks. The British government also wants to participate with a tokamak-type rocket. step. However, all of these companies are supported by: jetDecades of results. Now, we bid farewell to one of the mainstays of fusion research. ■
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