ITER: The world's largest fusion experiment | The Edge

the acronym it stands for international thermonuclear experimental reactor it's also the Latin for the way and the way forward here is but near pollution free energy but all it is journey began at the height of the Cold War when US President Ronald Reagan met the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at a Geneva superpower summit in 1985 and certain general secretary Gorbachev and would agree that real confidence in each other must be built on deeds not simply words the two cemented closer ties and as well as signing agreements on air safety and environmental issues they formally recognized and emphasized the importance of thermonuclear fusion for peaceful purposes project etta was at that moment officially set in motion now the EU the US Russia China India South Korea and Japan are full members or domestic agencies as they are called working on a project that aims to replace carbon-based energy with a new nuclear option but what exactly are we talking about here well nuclear fusion is the reaction that gives us Sun its energy and scientists want to replicate that process here on earth and it all starts with an atom all atoms consist of electrons surrounding a nucleus that contains protons and neutrons and in every nuclear power station Kirlian operation a free Neutron is sent on a collision course with the nucleus of an atom usually a large one when uranium or plutonium splitting it into two this process of splitting or fission creates energy which nuclear power stations use to heat water that is then used to generate electricity even better during the fission process more neutrons are released and continue their trajectory hitting and splitting other atoms creating a nuclear chain reaction and a stable and sustained release of energy of course some of the Iranian atoms capture neutrons produced during fission and they create radioactive waste which is isolated until it can decay nuclear fusion is the direct opposite deficient and instead of using uranium atoms this process uses atoms found in a substance that makes up 71% of the Earth's surface water hydrogen the H in h2o is nuclear fusion draw material specifically heavy hydrogen atoms such as tritium or deuterium or use in fusion these atoms are sped up heated up and slammed into each other to create helium and a large amount of energy yes Fusion does produce radioactive waste but in contrast efficient the waste has a much shorter lifespan so what's the problem why aren't we just creating energy out of seawater now the journey of nuclear fusion starts with this man Albert Einstein and his most famous equation David Campbell it is director of science and operations explains the equals mc-squared says that you can convert mass into energy so if you take particular what we're doing here is we take the Tyrian and tritium we basically fused them at high temperatures we produced a nuclear reaction you get a helium and you're clear so plus the different the mass of the neutron plus the helium your nucleus is a little bit less than the sum of the masses of the deuterium tritium and it's that little bit less that's the energy you get out of the fusion reactions it's a very small amount it's like four parts and a thousand but it actually is a very large amount we compare with what you get from burning coal or burning petrol you know you know so it's that's why it's sort of so attractive what's being built here in the South of France is a machine that will spin atoms very fast and such high temperatures that plasma is created it's within this plasma that the atoms are slammed into one another creating energy the machine itself is based on a Russian design tokamak a Russian acronym that stands for torus shaped magnetic chamber surrounded by coils to get the nuclei of GM and reviewers you've got to get the gases very hot the Sun produces fusion in the core and 15 million degrees we actually need somewhat more than that to get the terior and tritium to burn you have to produce temperatures of 100 million degrees and lots of assemblies you don't have a items anymore you have nuclei ions and electrons so you have to get the the plasma very hot and we have various ways of doing that you can hit it with electric currents you can heat it with microwaves you can hit it with particle beams so you get the plasma very hot when you get a hold of course you go to a way of confining it you can't just put it in you know put it in a microwave oven and get it hot and that's where the magnetic fields come in because we've ionized the particles at such high temperatures we're confining them through a very strong magnetic field that's the tokamak the magnetic field device that can finds this hot plasma it was at the end of the 1960's that russian scientists revealed their big breakthrough in the understanding of the properties of plasma and nuclear fusion experiments over the two decades that followed didn't exactly live up to the hopes of many creating plasma still eluded them it wasn't until 1997 that a joint European experiment jet based in the UK they'll just the factor of six short in the ignition conditions of a plasma the breakthrough proved that creating fusion energy was possible and so the elusive holy grail of designing machine that could produce more energy than it took to run began in 2007 work began in the South of France on itter the idea was to build the biggest tokamak in the world and produce 10 times more energy than it would take to power it [Music] you can figure out pretty easily what you need to do to get more power out than you put in there's three key parameters there's the temperature of the plasma of the ions there's the density and there's a parameter called the energy confinement time and the easiest way to think of that is how long does it take the plasma to get cold if you turned off all the heating so the parameters we've designed either for our one to two hundred million degrees typical densities we can achieve are about 10 to the 20th particles per cubic meter which doesn't mean anything in absolute numbers but give you an idea the particle density in the atmosphere is a million times that so it's a very very tenuous plasma this third parameter the energy confinement time is the tricky thing we don't really have a good way of calculating alpha from first principles but all these experiments that we've done over the last 50 years I've given us a very good physics basis for knowing how we extrapolate from the existing devices to visa so we can extrapolate from the existing devices and we predict that the energy confinement time later will be about four seconds if you put those numbers together the temperature the density and the energy curve over time you get the parameters called the fusion triple product and that number tells you basically how much more power you'll get out than you put in to build a power plant we estimate that we're going to need a fusion power amplification cue of about 30 so if we can produce 10 in eater then we're a long way down the road towards producing a fusion power plant still watching perfect click here to watch another great video from CNBC international oh and don't forget to subscribe thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: CNBC International TV

Views: 422,184

Rating: 4.7594132 out of 5

Keywords: CNBC, iter fusion reactor, iter fusion, iter fusion reactor documentary, iter fusion video, iter fusion reaction, iter fusion experiment, iter fusion project, iter documentary, iter 2017, iter nuclear fusion, iter progress, iter nuclear reactor, international thermonuclear experimental reactor, what is nuclear energy, what is nuclear fusion, nuclear fusion, nuclear fusion explained, nuclear fusion reactor, nuclear fusion documentary, nuclear fusion experiment

Id: kuq1HU2gYEk

Length: 7min 51sec (471 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 25 2017