The experimental Joint European Torus has doubled the record for the amount of energy made from fusing atoms — the process that powers the Sun.
The Joint European Torus tokamak near Oxford, UK, is a test bed for the world’s largest fusion experiment, ITER, in France.A 24-year-old nuclear-fusion record has crumbled. Scientists at the Joint European Torus near Oxford, UK, announced on 9 February that they had generated the highest-ever sustained energy from fusing together atoms, more than doubling their own record from experiments performed in 1997.
“JET really achieved what was predicted. The same modelling now says ITER will work,” says fusion physicist Josefine Proll at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, who was not involved in JET’s research. “It’s a really, really good sign and I’m excited.
JET contained two types of heavy hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, in fusion experiments performed last year.In an experiment on 21 December 2021, JET’s tokamak produced 59 megajoules of energy over a fusion ‘pulse’ of five seconds, more than double the 21.7 megajoules released in 1997 over around four seconds.
Last year, the US Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility set a different fusion record — it used laser technology to produce the highest fusion power output relative to power in, a value called Q. The facility produced a Q of 0.7, where 1 would be breakeven — a landmark for laser fusion that beat JET’s 1997 record. But the event was short lived, producing just 1.9 megajoules over less than 4 billionths of a second.
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