Germany launches fusion project
Scientists begin quest to create sustainable source for clean and safe nuclear power.
GREIFSWALD, Germany — Scientists in Germany flipped the switch Wednesday on an experiment they hope will advance the quest for nuclear fusion, considered a clean and safe form of nuclear power.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald injected a tiny amount of hydrogen into a doughnutshaped device — then zapped it with the equivalent of 6,000 microwave ovens. The resulting superhot gas, known as plasma, lasted a fraction of a second before cooling down again, long enough for scientists to declare the start of their experiment a success.
“Everything went well today,” said Robert Wolf, a senior scientist involved with the project. “With a system as complex as this you have to make sure everything works perfectly, and there’s always a risk.”
Among the difficulties is how to cool the complex arrangement ofmagnets required to keep the plasma floating inside the device, Wolf said.
The experiment in Greifswald is part of a worldwide effort to harness nuclear fusion, a process in which atoms join at extremely high temperatures and release large amounts of energy that’s similar to what occurs inside the sun.
Advocates acknowledge that the technology is probably decades away but say it could replace fossil fuels and conventional nuclear fission reactors.
Construction has already begun in southern France on ITER, a huge international research reactor that uses a strong electric current to trap plasma inside a doughnut-shaped device long enough for fusion to take place. The device, known as a tokamak, was conceived by Soviet physicists in the 1950s and is considered fairly easy to build, but extremely difficult to operate.
TheteaminGreifswald, a port city on Germany’s Baltic coast, is focused on a rival technology invented by the American physicist Lyman Spitzer in 1950. Called a stellarator, the device has the same doughnut shape as a tokamak but uses a complicated system of magnetic coils instead of a current to achieve the same result.
The Polish government, European Union and the U.S. Department of Energy also contributed funding for the project.