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Magnetic Confinement Fusion
| Article
# : |
13746 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
4,234 Words |
| Author
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Samuel A. Cohen
Samuel A. Cohen is a lecturer in the Department of Plasma
Physics and Astrophysical Science at Princeton University. He
is currently doing research on the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor
at Princeton and is a collaborator on the International
Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor design project in Munich,
West Germany. |
A balance between the global demands for fuel and our long-term ability to satisfy them lies at the heart of world economic health. Will the fundamental and perceived requirements for heat, motive power, and electricity exhaust our natural resources, amplify tensions in the Middle East, and poison the air and water of future generations? Or will international collaboration provide solutions in this complex situation? Continuing attention to these issues has led to improvements in energy-producing technologies based on coal, oil, fission, hydrothermal, solar thermal and photovoltaic, coal gasification, and synthetic fuels; and for each of these, environmental impact, reliability, and cost must be evaluated.
In addition to all of the existing energy technologies, a new technology, based on nuclear fusion, promises to make a major contribution to safe energy production in the next century. With a potentially inexhaustible fuel supply and with no danger of Chernobyl-type accidents, fusion has been the dream of countless physicists for more than 30 years. However, the pursuit of this dream--the development of a power-producing fusion reactor--has required mastering a complicated technology and gaining knowledge of previously unknown laws of physics. This research has led to two distinct approaches to achieving the conditions for power-producing fusion. One approach--inertial confinement fusion--utilizes powerful laser or particle beams striking a target pellet of frozen hydrogen. This will be featured in a later article.
The present article concentrates on the alternate and historically prior approach--magnetic confinement fusion--where research has now brought us to the edge of power production. Within the next five years, such a device is likely to produce tens of megawatts of fusion-generated power. With this achievement, researchers will be able to move more directly toward realizing their 30-year old dream.
Nuclear Fusion
When they are finally built some time in the early twenty-first century, the first generation of fusion reactors is likely to use a mixture of two different isotopes of hydrogen--deuterium (D = H21) and tritium (T = H31)--as fuel. In contrast to common hydrogen whose nucleus consists of one proton, the nuclei of deuterium and tritium contain one proton plus one neutron and two neutrons, respectively. A virtually inexhaustible supply of deuterium may be easily extracted from ordinary seawater. The lightweight element lithium (3p, 3n) could be used as the raw material from which tritium can be
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