Finally, the Practical Use of Nuclear Fusion

There are hundreds of reactors, known as tokams, in state-funded research facilities around the world, among others. Joint European Bull In the United Kingdom, and ITER, the International Experimental Thermonuclear Reactor, a collaboration of 35 nations in the south of France. Over the decades, researchers have used it to address the challenges of nuclear fusion, a potentially revolutionary technology that could provide essentially unlimited power. Inside a tokamak, powerful magnets are used to hold the rotating plasma at high pressure to fuse the atoms together and reach the tens of degrees required to release energy. Cynics say nuclear fusion is doomed to be a future energy source forever; right now, they are still consuming more electricity than fusion experiments produce.

But Kostadinova and his collaborator Dimitri Orlov were more interested in the internal plasma of these reactors, and realized that it could be the perfect environment to simulate a spacecraft entering the atmosphere of a giant gas. Orlov works in the DIII-D fusion reactor, in an experimental tokama, at the U.S. Department of Energy’s San Diego facility, but his background is in aerospace engineering.

Together, they used DIII-D facilities to perform a series of ablation experiments. Using a port at the bottom of the tokamak, they inserted some carbon rods into the plasma stream, and used high-speed, infrared cameras and spectrometers to track them. how they were dismantled. Orlov and Kostadinova also threw pains carbon pellets entering the reactor at high speed, imitating what the heat shield of the Galileo probe would find in Jupiter’s atmosphere on a small scale.

The internal conditions of the tokamas were remarkably similar in terms of plasma temperature, the rate at which they emitted the material, and even in terms of its composition: the Jovian atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium, while the DIII-D tokamas use deuterium, i.e. hydrogen isotope. “Instead of throwing something at a very high speed, we put a stationary object in a very fast flow,” Orlov says.

They helped validate the experiments presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Pittsburgh this month. ablation patterns NASA scientists developed them using data sent from the Galileo spacecraft. But they also serve as proof of the concept for a new type of test. “We are opening up this new area of ​​research,” says Orlov. “No one has done it before.”

It’s something that’s very much needed in the industry. “There has been a delay in new testing procedures,” says founder Yanni Barghouty. Cosmic Shielding Corporation, a startup that builds radiation shields for spacecraft. “It allows you to make prototypes much faster and cheaper; it’s feedback.”

It remains to be seen whether nuclear fusion reactors will be practical tests; they are incredibly sensitive devices designed entirely for another purpose. Orlov and Kostadinov were given time in DIII-D as part of a special effort to spread scientific knowledge about the reactor, with the goal of safely testing new materials using a port built into the tokamak. But it is an expensive process. It cost the machine half a million dollars a day. As a result, it is likely that this type of experiment will be largely carried out in the future, when there is an opportunity to adjust and improve computer simulations.