Photo Credit: DIII-D National Fusion Facility
Experiments at San Diego’s DIII-D National Fusion Facility have demonstrated that a new plasma configuration could help increase the stability of tokamak fusion reactors and inform future designs.
Nuclear fusion holds the promise of virtually limitless energy with a low-carbon impact, and new discoveries are helping to speed its development from theoretical to real-world applications.
A report by Interesting Engineering shared that a plasma configuration known as “negative triangularity” has shown that it can meet the high-performance conditions needed for a sustained fusion reaction, while also addressing heat-management challenges inside the reactor.
In fusion reactions, atoms are fused together to produce energy similar to the natural process that occurs inside the sun. Those particles need to be heated to over 180,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit to maintain a reaction and generate energy consistently.
Doughnut-shaped tokamak devices magnetically confine superheated plasma, and to maximize energy output, plasma pressure, current, and density must all be maintained at high levels, the U.S. Department of Energy explained in a statement.
The negative triangularity method adjusts the shape of the plasma flow within a tokamak into an inverted “D” shape, so that the curve points towards the interior wall of the reactor.
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Recent results from this study have shown that this formation can help produce plasmas that exceed the conditions required for fusion power plants, the DOE explained.
The results also indicated that this unique shape may help solve core-edge integration issues, since keeping the plasma core hot while keeping the edge cool has been a challenge in fusion reactors.
The fusion community has been “surprised” by the outcome of these experiments, according to the DOE, since it believed that negative triangularity would result in less stable plasma fields and not more stable ones, as the results showed.
“These findings suggest a potential innovative design path for future plants,” the DOE added in the statement.
Most fusion reactors use a combination of deuterium and tritium as fuel, and only a few grams are present in a reaction at any given time, according to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor team.
Deuterium can be distilled from water and is a virtually inexhaustible resource. Tritium can only be found in trace quantities in nature, but it can be produced through interactions with lithium, which is available in sufficient quantities to operate fusion power plants for more than 1,000 years, ITER explained.
A 1,000-megawatt coal-fired power plant requires nearly three million tons of coal per year, per ITER, while a fusion plant with the same output capacity would only need around 551 pounds of fuel to operate each year.
Fusion would be the perfect complement to other renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power, and it would help lower energy costs for consumers while reducing the need to use dirty fuels for energy.
Although the DIII-D National Fusion Facility completed its experimental campaign focused on assessing the potential of negative triangularity plasma shapes in 2023, the results are only now being released.
This was the first in a series of publications that will explore the promising potential for this discovery in the quest for clean and sustainable fusion energy solutions.
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