German scientists succeeded in creating hydrogen plasma in their fusion reactor known as a stellarator this past Wednesday. The device is truly staggering in its cost, and its power. Taking 19 years and around 1.2 billion euro, the stellarator consists of 425 tons of superconducting magnet coils that form a vacuum tube to suspend the plasma, which is created by heating hydrogen gas to 80 million degrees Celsius. [1] For a point of reference, the center of the sun is only around 10 million °C. [2] The reactor is made to run the experiment for up to a half hour, but as this was the first trial with hydrogen the operators wanted to avoid any unnecessary risk by running it for longer than a second or two. [3] This is truly a milestone for fusion technology because creating and maintaining hydrogen plasma is the first step in fusing two nuclei because they have thus been stripped of their electrons and may collide to form a helium nucleus, yielding large amounts of energy. [4] However, there remains a long road of scientific progress ahead before we can sustainably run fusion reactions and harness the resulting energy, and there is the problem of the low abundance of elemental hydrogen on earth. That being said, if we can master these challenges we will be able to meet all of our energy needs in a sustainable way by harnessing the same power as the sun.
Sources:
- http://motherboard.vice.com/read/nuclear-fusion-hit-a-massive-milestone-in-germany?trk_source=homepage-lede%3Futm_source%3Dvicenewsfb
- http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/ask/7-How-hot-is-the-Sun-
- http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/02/03/world/europe/ap-eu-nuclear-fusion.html?_r=0
- http://www.planete-energies.com/en/medias/close/about-nuclear-fusion