LONDON, England: European scientists have announced that they have made a major breakthrough in their efforts to develop practical nuclear fusion.
The British Laboratory Joint European Torus (JET) surpassed its own world record for the amount of energy extracted by combining two forms of hydrogen.
If nuclear fusion can be successfully recreated, it has the potential to provide virtually unlimited resources of low-carbon, low-radiation energy.
The experiments produced 11 megawatts of power for five seconds, more than doubling in similar tests in 1997.
Dr. Joe Milnes, chief operating officer at the JET reactor lab, said: “The JET experiments brought us one step closer to fusion power,” as reported by the BBC.
The ITER plant in the south of France, with the support of world governments, including EU member states, the United States, China and Russia, is expected to be the last step in proving that nuclear fusion can reliably supply energy in the second half of this century.
Instead of splitting atoms, as in the case of the fission reactions that drive existing nuclear energy stations, fusion works on the principle that energy can be released by forcing atomic nuclei together.
The JET lab, located in Culham, Oxfordshire, has been pioneering this fusion method for almost 40 years.
Dr. Arthur Turrell, author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion And The Race To Power The Planet, noted, “This is an amazing result, because they managed to demonstrate the greatest amount of energy produced from the fusion reactions from any unit in history.”
Many technical challenges also remain, working in Europe by the Eurofusion consortium, which consists of around 5,000 science and engineering experts from the EU, Switzerland and Ukraine.
Source: sn.dk