ITER: Assembly of world's largest nuclear fusion reactor begins | DW News

now it's being seen as the great hope for generating clean power nuclear fusion today scientists in france start assembling an enormous international nuclear fusion reactor known by the acronym eta french president emmanuel macron is hosting a ceremony to mark the milestone it's already taken 10 years in a global scientific effort to get this far and now the main construction of the huge complex in southern france will begin with components sent from all over the world the idea is to create energy not by splitting atoms like nuclear power stations do now but by fusing them together [Music] for decades scientists have been trying to tap into the power that drives the sun nuclear fusion the hope is that it can be used to meet tomorrow's energy demands the basic science is that in conditions like those found in the sun such as very high temperatures hydrogen atoms will fuse create helium and release a lot of energy the hydrogen could be extracted from seawater making it a practically unlimited resource fusion is basically the the opposite of conventional nuclear so in nuclear power you're splitting a heavy element and that releases energy but you end up with the the products afterwards which can be quite hard to handle fusion is is not a a chain reaction so there's no possibility for it to run away which is what causes meltdown scientists at this startup in the uk are working on nuclear fusion one of the biggest hurdles they face is how to get more energy out of the process than they have put in researchers in southern france are also working on fusion the international project eater is building a giant experimental reactor it seeks to use heat to cause hydrogen to fuse the reactor design is what's called a tokamak a huge hollow donut filled with super hot hydrogen plasma that flows through it like a ring of lightning held in place by powerful magnets it has proved to be a major technical challenge and it's still hard to predict how fusion energy can be fed into the power grid many think it could take at least two more decades before this problem can be solved we are now joined by hartmut zom one of the german scientists involved in the eta project professor tsom the tocomark reactor in france is a giant experiment involving scientists from across the world what is it hoping to achieve so what it's hoping to achieve is the proof of principle that we can get net energy from nuclear fusion on earth as was said this is the source of the energy of of the stars of our sun for example so we're fusing hydrogen nuclei we have to make these very hot its gas which goes up to 100 million degrees we have made this possible in our experiments already but we always had to put in more energy to heat up the gas then the energy which is released from nuclear fusion eta will be the first experiment that shows that we can get a net gains or more energy from fusion than we deposit in the plasma to heat it now nuclear fusion has been called the holy grail if you like of clean energy is it really as safe and green as it's cracked up to be okay that of course depends who is going to crack it up to be so i think it's it's clear that it will be sustainable because the primary fuels are deuterium which is a hydrogen isotope from seawater and lithium from which we generate the tritium the other hydrogen isotopes are lithium and deuterium are very widespread across the world and they are enough to sustain for hundreds and thousands of years hundreds thousands of years our energy demand so it's clearly sustainable it is clean in the sense that it does not produce any co2 or any uh emission of gases which you do not want in the atmosphere it is also safe because it cannot have this sort of uncontrolled meltdown of all the device also the energy contained in it is not enough for this it does however produce radioactive wastes so the structural materials around of which the machine consists will be activated but different from fission these will have a half-life time that after say a hundred years you could touch and reprocess them very different from the millions of years we are talking fission where you really have to put things deep underground and store it away for long term so there is no long-term storage envisaged for the radioactive stuff which comes out of nuclear fusion reactors all this sounds fantastic and ideal therefore when can we expect to see our energy needs powered by nuclear fusion okay this this depends a bit on your strategy so if you do this sequentially like we do in the eu we will have ether going into operation projected in up to five years from now and then showing the net energy gain around 2035 we would then decide to build a follow-up real reactor which would also produce net electricity to the net which could do this by in the 2040s or say 2050 and then it could be deployed however if you are more hungry for energy like the chinese for example they are thinking about building a demonstration reactor in parallel to ether so this could produce electricity by 2035 or 40 or so so 10 to 15 or 20 years earlier and so the deployment could also be these 10 to 15 years earlier it depends a bit on your strategy and how much you want it hartmut zone from the max planck institute thank you so much sir you're welcome

Channel: DW News

Views: 393,654

Keywords: DW News, iter, iter fusion, iter fusion reactor, iter fusion reactor animation, iter fusion reactor 2020, iter fusion reactor explained, iter fusion nuclear, iter fusion reactor update, iter fusion 2020, nuclear fusion, nuclear fusion iter, nuclear fusion explained, nuclear fusion reactor, nuclear fusion energy, nuclear fusion clean energy, nuclear fusion safe

Id: bAw-rdl9YZg

Length: 6min 15sec (375 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020