European scientists are getting close to creating an “artificial sun”. The record has been broken

thermonuclear fusion is a process that “supplies” the stars with energy, like our sun, So, solutions for fusion energy developed by scientists – not only from Europe, but also, for example, from China, They are sometimes called the “artificial sun”.

From a physical point of view, fusion is the process of joining two atoms together to form another atom. Incidentally, energy is emitted. Since the nuclei of atoms are positively charged, they repel each other.

However, they can be forced to collide, for example by compressing plasma with a laser pulse or by accelerating atoms by heating gas to very high temperatures of 80 or 100 million degrees. The higher the temperature, the faster the speed and the greater the chance of atoms colliding.

Experts believe that mastering thermonuclear fusion will give us in the long run A source of clean electricity that requires a small amount of fuel to produce, and which can be obtained from all over the world from inexpensive materials. In addition, fusion is inherently safe because it cannot initiate an uncontrollable process, as is the case with atomic fission.

For years, scientists have been trying to perfect the next steps in this process. And they succeeded.

On Wednesday, an international team of experts announced that standard fusion reactions have been carried out. The experiment was conducted at the Joint European Tokamak (JET), which is established and operated in Culham, UK As a joint initiative of the European Community since 1977. A tokamak is a magnetic trap used to generate hot plasma.

Fusion can be performed in a variety of devices, star instruments or tokamak, where the main chamber is in the form of a hoop. It is carried out in a special tank at very low pressure. The plasma is too hot to come into direct contact with the tank walls. It is installed in a compressed shaft inside the ring due to a strong magnetic field. The energy is released in the form of heat that can be converted into electricity.

The Poles are also participating in the European EUROfusion consortium that conducted the experiment.

As a result of an experiment by European scientists, fusion reactions release a total of 59 megajoules of energy as heat during the five-second plasma discharge phase. Expressed in units of energy (energy per unit time), JET The average power output was just over 11 megawatts (megajoules per second) in five seconds.

If we could control fusion for five seconds – we could do it for five minutes and then five days as we scale into the future, said Tony Donny, EUROfusion Program Manager.

According to Monika Kopkovska, EUROfusion board member, fusion energy “is the future” and “the world needs clean, low-emissions and unlimited energy”.

The previous energy record from 1997 (also set by JET as well as for deuterium and tritium) was Less than 22 megajoules of total energy and 4.4 megawatts of energy Average over five seconds (more than 2.5 times less than the new record).