A new effort using a fuel called trtium in fusion energy experiment offers hope in the development of fusion energy as a viable alternative sustaining energy source. The experiment creates opportunities for physicists to pursue further fusion energy development. Having sustained a fusion event for five seconds, physicists hope to scale up from seconds to hours, creating potential vast sources of readily-created portable energy anywhere in the world.
That’s the general idea behind technologies like fusion energy, to create ways for humans to create from indigenous resources as much as possible (though not entirely) most of their essential needs, with energy being a high priority (behind food and water, but even these can be enhanced by energy resources).
As we often point out with emerging technology, the tech itself is a neutrality, a tool that can become a tool of oppression or free associative sustainable self-reliance. Fusion energy tech could be locked behind Intellectual Property firewalls, used to create subscription services with morality code terms of service attached to them. Fusion energy tech could enable a people in the middle of a desert to create communities of green thanks to the power source provided by the fusion of molecules alone.
We may be a couple decades away from fusion energy becoming a viable energy source, but there’s no reason for free associative minded folks to try to develop open source tech alternatives that are better than the IP-controlled tech the powers that be are developing.
Nuclear Fusion Reactor Sets Landmark Energy Record Using Tritium Fuel
From www.iflscience.com
2022-02-09 12:09:00
Excerpt:
A new landmark has been passed on the quest for fusion power with a new record for energy released. However, while the announcement marks a step towards the goal of powering the world from the same energy source as the stars, it is also a reminder of how far there is to go.
Models of fusion reactors suggest the optimum fuel will be a mixture of tritium – an isotope of hydrogen, made up of one proton and two neutrons – and deuterium. Yet, paradoxically, almost all fusion research has been done on ordinary hydrogen or deuterium.
Now, however, the first fusion experiments conducted using tritium since 1997 have produced a record amount of energy for a fusion reactor over a period of five seconds – 59 megajoules. The results were described at a press conference today.
….“The record, and more importantly the things we’ve learned about fusion under these conditions and how it fully confirms our predictions, show that we are on the right path to a future world of fusion energy. If we can maintain fusion for five seconds, we can do it for five minutes and then five hours as we scale up our operations in future machines,” Professor Tony Donné of EUROfusion said in a statement seen by IFLScience.
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