Creating a sun in a lab
The Hindu
What is the significance of the recent achievements made in thermonuclear fusion technologies?
Imagine creating an artificial sun on earth that can produce energy from the same process that gives us starlight and sunshine. Two recent achievements have taken us a step closer to this dream. China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) sustained the plasma at 70 million degrees Celsius for 1,056 seconds in January 2022. In February 2022, the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion experiment in Oxfordshire, U.K., produced 59 megajoules (MJ) of energy from thermonuclear fusion. These are dress rehearsals for the upcoming International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a global experiment to generate 500 MW of power by fusing hydrogen atoms into helium atoms by 2035.
In a thermonuclear fusion reaction, lighter atoms like those of hydrogen fuse to produce slightly heavier atoms like that of helium. The whole is greater than the sums; sometimes, the sums are greater than the whole. The mass of one hydrogen atom is 1.007825 Atomic Mass unit (AMU). When four hydrogen atoms are combined, it transmutes into a helium atom. The sum of the mass of four hydrogen atoms is 4.03130 AMU, while the mass of one helium atom is just 4.00268 AMU. As we know, matter is neither created nor destroyed; hence the mass difference 0.02862 AMU is converted into pure energy by way of Einstein's famous formula E=mc2.
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