Essay by Eric Worrall
No doubt nuclear fusion is just 20 years away, just like last time…
New Record: Reactor Crosses ‘Crucial Milestone’ in Achieving Nuclear Fusion
TECH 22 February 2025
French scientists on Tuesday announced that they had reached a “crucial milestone” in the long road towards nuclear fusion by managing to maintain raging-hot plasma for a record 22 minutes.
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The WEST tokamak machine in southern France managed to maintain plasma for 1,337 seconds on February 12, France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) said in a statement.
This “smashed” the previous record set in China last month by 25 percent, said the CEA, which runs the tokamak machine.
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The goal is to prepare the ground for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being built in France, she added.
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It had been scheduled to go online this year, but repeated setbacks, delays and spiralling costs have postponed operations until at least 2033.
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What is missing from this French announcement is how long that plasma would have to burn to produce a true return on energy.
The big problem with fusion plasmas, aside from stability, is something heated to millions of degrees really wants to radiate its heat. ITER is an attempt to keep the plasma hot by making the plasma really big – taking advantage of the improved surface area to volume ratio of larger objects. Heat generation is governed by volume, while heat radiation is governed by temperature and surface area.
There is also a rarely mentioned problem that the radiation from fusion plasmas tends to destroy its containment vessel. The radiation is so intense a sustained plasma, even if contained, would cause mechanical damage to the containment vessel, leading to rapid structural failure. Solving that may require exotic self healing ceramic alloys or technologies not yet invented.
One government at least is not allowing such obstacles to dent their optimism. They are so confident, in 2023 they started construction on the first commercial British fusion reactor, promising local voters the fusion reactor would be providing jobs and economic prosperity by 2040.
I’m sure construction of a commercial nuclear fusion reactor isn’t just a cynical ploy to win votes from people politicians have no intention of helping. I mean, British politicians wouldn’t do that, would they?
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