Fusion experiment succeeds thanks to MIT students
Fusion is the energy source that will allow us not to have to worry about this issue in the future. Virtually unlimited, without pollution, without toxic waste… it is what “lights up” the stars, what will be able to illuminate planet Earth without depending on gas, oil or the incidence of sunlight.
The problem with fusion is that it requires very advanced technology to achieve it, but little by little we are seeing progress on the subject, and MIT has just given more information on this point.
Several MIT students were the ones who contributed to the success of a landmark fusion experiment in which ignition by fusion was achieved for the first time in a laboratory.
It’s something that researchers around the world have been trying for more than 50 years, and it’s only recently become a reality thanks to the High Energy Density Physics (HEDP) group at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
They used inertial confinement fusion, which uses 192 lasers to implode a pellet of fuel in search of ignition (they illuminated the inside of a small gold cylinder encapsulating a spherical capsule filled with deuterium-tritium fuel in their quest to produce energy from significant fusion). They did it in 2021, and after a year they have published the results.
The implosion produced 1.37 megajoules, and the result has been published in Physical Review Letters after 1 year of the experiment.
It is a result that shows that the ignition threshold is a real concept, and that a fusion plasma can be ignited in a laboratory producing energy.
The students involved from the MIT Physics Department included Neel Kabadi, Graeme Sutcliffe, Tim Johnson, Jacob Pearcy, and Ben Reichelt; students from the Department of Nuclear Sciences and Engineering included Brandon Lahmann, Patrick Adrian, and Justin Kunimune.
Former student Alex Zylstra, now a physicist at LLNL, was the experimental leader of this implosion experiment.
