New energy record ‘resounding confirmation’ for fusion quest

Tech promises abundant low-carbon energy

FUSION researchers have achieved a record-breaking sustained burst of energy that they say is the clearest indication in a quarter of a century that fusion technology can produce abundant low-carbon energy.

Experiments at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in the UK produced a total of 59 MJ of heat energy from fusion over a five second period, beating the previous record of 22 MJ set at the facility in 1997. While the duration may sound short, it was limited by JET’s copper electromagnets, which are not cryogenically cooled so can only handle the heat load from the high-energy plasma discharges for five seconds.

Tony Donné, Programme Manager for the EUROfusion consortium that oversees the research, said: “If we can maintain fusion for five seconds, we can do it for five minutes and then five hours as we scale up our operations in future machines.”

EUROfusion consists of 30 research organisations from 28 European countries, which plan on using the lessons learned at JET to produce net fusion energy at a larger facility called ITER that is being constructed in France.

Bernard Bigot, Director General of ITER, said: “A sustained pulse of deuterium-tritium fusion at this power level – nearly industrial scale – delivers a resounding confirmation to all of those involved in the global fusion quest.”