Just one day before it was shut down due to lack of funding, the nuclear fusion reactor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology broke a world record for the highest plasma pressure ever produced on Earth.
At over 2 atmospheres of plasma pressure, the plasma inside the Alcator C-mod tokamak reactor reached over 35 million degrees Celsius for just 2 seconds, about twice as hot as the reactions happening in the center of the sun. Harnessing the power of a star on our own planet could generate vast amounts of energy – the reactor carried 1.4 million amps of electrical current, all taking place in a volume of just 1 cubic meter.
The same reactor set the previous record of 1.77 atmospheres in 2005.
While some argue that fusion reactors are a costly white elephant gift from the universe, others say that the research could unlock nearly limitless clean energy. The Department of Energy ceased funding to the reactor in 2012, due to the need to balance its benefit against that of ITER, a $30 billion superconducting reactor in France which has been touted as essential to a clean energy future. Congress restored funding for the Alcator reactor through Sept. 30, 2016.
In the effort to go for the gold just before the project would be shut down, the MIT team pushed the reactor to its limits, said Martin Greenwald, deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, at Gizmodo.
The Alcator C-Mod’s tokamak shape, a donut-shaped chamber named for a transliteration of the Russian word for “toroidal chamber,” is unique among compact high-magnetic-field reactors. It generates a high-energy magnetic field over 160,000 times more powerful than the Earth’s own field in order to create the plasmas and keep them stable.
The Department of Energy hopes that ITER, which is also a tokamak reactor, will be able to reach 2.6 atmospheres when it gets up to speed with its full capabilities in 2032. Meanwhile, MIT’s fusion group at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center will continue to work on adapting high-temperature superconductors to produce strong magnetic fields that require no electricity.
The record-breaking reaction from MIT was presented at the International Atomic Energy Agency Fusion Energy conference in Japan on Oct. 17.
