Germany makes big leap towards clean energy

Scientists in Germany switch on nuclear fusion experiment

Germany is getting closer to nuclear fusion — the long-held dream of unlimited clean energy which has the potential for unlimited amounts of clean power. There are a number of challenges to harnessing this power — researchers need to build a device that can heat atoms to temperatures of more than 100 million °C (180 million °F).

German scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Greifswald, joined by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, injected hydrogen into the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device and heated the gas into plasma for a moment, according to the press release.

“With a temperature of 80 million degrees and a lifetime of a quarter of a second, the device’s first hydrogen plasma has completely lived up to our expectations,” Hans-Stephan Bosch, whose division works on the Wendelstein 7-X, said the press release.

After almost nine years of construction, work and more than a million assembly hours, researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Greifswald are set to do just that by heating a tiny amount of hydrogen until it becomes as hot, hopefully, as the center of the Sun.

The resulting super-hot gas, known as plasma, lasted just a fraction of a second before cooling down again, long enough for scientists to confidently declare the start of their experiment a success.

“Everything went well today,” said Robert Wolf, a senior scientist involved with the project. “With a system as complex as this you have to make sure everything works perfectly and there’s always a risk.”

Among the difficulties is how to cool the complex arrangement of magnets required to keep the plasma floating inside the device, Wolf said. Scientists looked closely at the hiccups experienced during the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland more than five years ago to avoid similar mistakes, he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, center, who holds a doctorate in physics, personally pressed the button at Wednesday’s launch of an experiment they hope will advance the quest for nuclear fusion, considered a clean and safe form of nuclear power. AP Photo

Why is Nuclear fusion power such a big deal?

The production of hydrogen plasma is key to harnessing the clean, limitless energy of nuclear fusion – the process that powers our Sun. If we can achieve controlled nuclear fusion, it would quite literally change the world, because it would replace fossil fuels and nuclear fission facilities as a cheaper, more efficient, and more sustainable source of energy. “

“It’s a very clean source of power, the cleanest you could possibly wish for. We’re not doing this for us, but for our children and grandchildren,” one of the team, physicist John Jelonnek from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, told the Associated Press.

Nuclear fission, which is what our current nuclear facilities achieve, generates energy by splitting the nucleus of an atom into smaller neutrons and nuclei. While fission is super efficient – the amount of energy it releases is millions of times more efficient per mass than that of coal – it requires very careful (and costly) management of dangerous radioactive waste.

Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, produces huge amounts of energy when atoms are fused together at incredibly high temperatures – but produces no radioactive waste or other unwanted byproducts.

Germany makes big leap towards clean energy

Scientists in Germany switch on nuclear fusion experiment

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