![]() ![]() India’s declared net-zero goal in 2070 allows us enough time for fusion to become a practical and preferred complement to renewables. Recent advancements in the science and technology of nuclear fusion should accelerate our interest and investment in fusion. India is not endowed with required resources either for hydrocarbon energy or nuclear fission-based energy. India’s own attempt at an experimental fusion reactor continues with the SST-2 tokomak at the Institute of Plasma Research in Gujarat. In continuation, 35 nations, including India, are collaborating to build the world’s largest tokamak, a magnetic fusion device capable of demonstrating the feasibility and scaling of nuclear fusion. India joined the US, UK, EU, Japan and Russia in a consortium to establish ITER, a collaborative international project to develop fusion for peaceful purposes. Soon thereafter, UK scientists at the Joint European Torus (JET) laboratory announced that they had generated a record breaking 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy.Įven though there has been significant progress, international collaboration will be required to surmount continuing practical challenges. ![]() In January this year, China’s EAST reactor established a record-breaking sustained reaction of 17 minutes. In addition to the LLL announcement, 2022 has been a landmark year for fusion technology developments. Despite that promise, self-sustaining, positive net-energy fusion technology has proved to be difficult to engineer until now. Fusion can be generated from ubiquitous sources, be extremely efficient and clean, and leave no radioactive residue. Nuclear fusion releases nearly four million times more energy than coal, oil or gas, by fuel weight, and four times as much as fission technology. Scientists at LLL are confident of 4- or 5-times conversion ratio from a similar reaction within a few years. The experiment produced 3.15 megajoules of energy relative to the 2.05 megajoules of energy expended for the lasers, an efficiency ratio of 1.5 times. The significance of the recent announcement is that for the first time, more energy was produced from the fusion reaction than went into the lasers used to power the reaction. The resulting strike generated helium gas, neutrons and large amounts of energy. Scientists at the LLL targeted 192 laser beams on a DT target smaller than the size of a pea. Scientists are currently focusing on the deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion reaction (both are heavy isotopes of hydrogen). Similar to fission, Einstein’s mass energy equivalence provides the theoretical framework for fusion as well.įusion can involve many different elements that are light. Since that time, much effort has gone into making nuclear reactors safe and reliable. Rapid strides were made during and after World War II, first to develop fission bombs and then to adapt fission for civilian nuclear technology. This provided empirical proof of Einstein’s theoretical work on mass energy equivalence first proposed in 1905. The use of the term ‘fission’ and experimental calculation of the energy released were first made by German physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, working under Niels Bohr, in 1939. Rutherford established the nuclear structure of the atom and radioactive decay as a nuclear process. The great experimental physicist Ernest Rutherford demonstrated radioactivity and performed the first artificially induced nuclear reaction in 1917. William Rontgen discovered ionising radiation (x-rays) a century later and Pierre and Marrie Curie gave the name ‘radioactivity’ to the phenomenon of decay with energy release. The science and subsequent technology of nuclear fission began with the discovery of uranium in 1789 by Martin Klaproth, a German chemist.
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