![]() ![]() Excess heat in this blanket can then be used to make steam to drive turbines and generate electricity. In laboratory plasmas, instabilities tend to promote transport, undermining magnetic confinement strategies and forestalling the development of practical fusion reactors. Energy from these neutrons can be collected in a blanket consisting of a molten mixture of lithium and lead that surrounds the plasma. Plasma physics has been preoccupied with the study of instability since the first experiments in controlled thermonuclear fusion in the 1950s (Bishop, 1958 ). Doughnut-shaped facilities known as tokamaks, such as PPPL’s National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U), pump most of the extracted energy into fast neutrons. PPPL and many labs, universities and private companies around the world are studying the process of creating and optimizing these fusion reactors and developing the technology to convert the fusion energy into usable electricity. Strong magnetic fields or high-powered lasers then confine the plasma into small controllable regions where fusion can happen. They seek to maximize the number of ions in a small region and the amount of time that they stay close together. To do that, fusion reactors heat plasmas to temperatures much hotter than the core of the sun - over 100 million degrees Celsius. On Earth, researchers are trying to build fusion reactors of their own. When contact between ions became so frequent that they got close enough to fuse, the ball of gas ignited and became a star. ![]() At that point, numerous collisions in the sun’s core freed electrons from atoms, creating plasma and leaving behind nuclei called ions. Before the sun formed, it was a cloud of gas mostly made up of hydrogen and some helium. At some point, the cloud became so massive that gravity caused it to collapse in on itself. Experimental studies in plasma physics are primarily concerned with measurements that broaden understanding of basic properties of plasmas and of ions in the plasma environment: transport properties, fluctuations, and influences of plasma fields on the radiative properties of atoms and ions (plasma spectroscopy). The sun’s core is a natural fusion reactor. Scientists are seeking to replicate fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.įusion occurs when the nuclei of light atoms like hydrogen (one proton and one neutron) fuse together and create a new nucleus, releasing energy. Plasma physics is the study of charged particles and fluids interacting with self-consistent electric and magnetic fields. Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, combines light elements in the form of plasma - the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei - that generates massive amounts of energy. ![]()
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