BOSTON – Scientists have been working feverishly to decipher the process that would allow them to harness nuclear fusion, which is considered to be the “holy grail” of energy sources.
One of the most difficult challenges in modern science has been to recreate fusion on Earth, which promises a future of clean, renewable energy. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which will be the largest device of its sort ever built and the flag-bearer for nuclear fusion, is at the forefront of this research.
On 11 May, the ITER Project achieved the major assembly milestone, as the first sub-section of the ITER plasma chamber was successfully lifted out of tooling and lowered into the machine well.
In February, scientists working in the United Kingdom announced that they had generated and sustained a record 59 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds in a giant donut-shaped machine called a tokamak.
It was barely enough to power one house for a day, and it consumed more energy than it produced. Nonetheless, it was a truly momentous event. It demonstrated that nuclear fusion could be sustained on Earth.
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