The amount of energy produced during a fusion reaction has been broken by scientists in England.
The production of 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds at the Joint European Torus was called a breakthrough by some news outlets and caused quite a lot of excitement among physicists.
It is always 20 years away from fusion electricity production.
We are a nuclear physicist and a nuclear engineer who study how to develop controlled nuclear fusion for the purpose of generating electricity.
The understanding of the physics of fusion has been improved by the JET result. The new materials used to build the fusion reactor's inner walls worked as they were intended.
The fact that the new wall construction performed as well as it did is what distinguishes these results from previous ones.
Nuclear fusion involves merging two atomic nuclei into one compound nucleus. The nucleus breaks apart and releases energy in the form of new atoms and particles. A fusion power plant uses the escaping particles to generate electricity.
There are ways to safely control fusion. Our research focuses on JET's approach of using powerful magnetic fields to confine atoms until they are heated to a high enough temperature for them to fusion.
The fuel for current and future reactor have different amounts of hydrogen and detium in them. Normal hydrogen does not have any particles in its nucleus. Deuterium and tritium each have one protons and two neutrons.
The fuel atoms have to become so hot that the electrons break free from the nucleus for a fusion reaction to be successful. A collection of positive ion and electron are created.
You need to keep heating it until it reaches a temperature over 200 million degrees Fahrenheit. For a long period of time, the fuel atoms must collide into each other in order for the plasma to form.
To control fusion on Earth, researchers developed donut-shaped devices called tokamaks, which use magnetic fields. The donut has magnetic field lines that are similar to train tracks.
When the fuel particles collide, instead of bouncing off each other, the fuel nuclei are able to form. When this happens, they release energy in the form of fast- moving neutrons.
Fuel particles drift away from the hot, dense core and eventually collide with the inner wall of the fusion vessel.
To prevent the walls from degrading due to these collisions, the reactor is built so that they channel the particles toward a heavily armored chamber called the divertor. This removes excess heat to protect the tokamak.
The fact that divertors cannot survive for more than a few seconds has been a major limitation of past reactor. To make fusion power work commercially, engineers need to build a tokamak vessel that will survive for years of use.
The first thing to consider is the divertor wall. When the fuel particles collide with the divertor, they have enough energy to knock atoms loose from the wall material of the divertor.
JET's divertor used to have a wall made ofGraphite, but it traps too much of the fuel for practical use.
JET engineers upgraded the divertor and inner vessel walls around 2011. When the divertor is likely to experience heat loads nearly 10 times higher than the nose cone of a space shuttle reentering the Earth's atmosphere, the highest melting point of any metal was chosen.
The tokamak's inner vessel wall was upgraded. The fusion reactor that uses beryllium has good thermal and mechanical properties, but it doesn't absorb as much fuel.
The energy JET produced was what made the headlines, but we argue that the use of the new wall materials makes the experiment truly impressive because future devices will need these more robust walls to operate at high power for even longer periods of time.
JET is a proof of concept for how to build a fusion reactor.
The most advanced magnetic fusion reactor is the JET tokamak. The ITER experiment is set to begin operations in 2027 and is the next generation of reactor.
ITER, which is Latin for "the way", is being funded and directed by an international organization that includes the US.
The material advances JET showed to be viable will be put to use by ITER. There are some differences. ITER is large. The fusion chamber is more than eight times larger than JET.
Superconducting magnets will be used by ITER to produce stronger magnetic fields for longer periods of time. ITER is expected to smash its fusion records, both for energy output and how long the reaction will last.
ITER is expected to produce more energy than it takes to heat the fuel in a fusion powerplant. The ITER will produce 500 megawatts of power for 400 seconds and only consume 50 kilowatts of energy to heat the fuel, according to models.
This means the reactor produces 10 times more energy than it consumes, a huge improvement over JET, which required three times more energy to heat the fuel than it produced.
The recent record of JET shows that years of research in materials science have paid off and brought scientists to the doorstep of fusion for power generation. The goal of industrial scale fusion power plants will be leap forward thanks to ITER.
Livia Casali is an assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee.
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