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UK powered its unusual fusion reactor for the first time
The UK’s fusion reactor, Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak, was powered up for first time this week after building it over 7 years. The £55mn device is looked upon as a testbed for technologies critical to all future fusion reactors, and may provide a new stride into a design of energy-producing facility. Tokamaks have been fighting hard for a decade to generate energy by fusing light elements together.
EUROPEwww.bbc.com
SCIENCEwww.sciencemag.org
Dave
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Tokamaks are inferior to Stellerators, and due to their toroid design struggle to manage and stabilize their magnetic fields. Because of the unstable magnetic fields they require supercomputers to monitor and manage them. Stellerators have more complicated magnetic fields that are stable, do not require supercomputers, achieve a greater mixing of hydrogen and therefore fusion. Then there is the GE piston design, which looks sort of like a fusion combustion engine... And finally there is the pellet design, which drops a plastic cartridge into a chamber and fires a copper slug at it to generate the necessary pressure for fusion.