© REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier
An alliance of 35 countries has finished laying the groundwork for one of humanity's most ambitious experiments - to harness nearly unlimited amounts of energy by creating 'small stars' on Earth.
The extreme heat and gravity inside the core of the Sun and other stars make hydrogen atoms collide and fuse into heavier helium atoms, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process.
Scientists want to replicate a similar mechanism on Earth in order to generate energy that will be efficient, renewable and carbon emission-free, so it will not cause climate change.
Moreover, controlled fusion reactions are projected to create four million times more energy than the burning of coal, oil or gas,
and four times as much as nuclear power plants. However, the design of a large-scale fusion device
requires immense resources, so a decade ago 35 countries combined their efforts to
build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). The reactor is being constructed outside the Cadarache research center in southern France, and the EU, the US, Russia, India, South Korea and Japan are among the participants in the ambitious project.
Fusion is facilitated by high temperature, which triggers the high-energy collision of the atoms, and dense plasma, which
makes such collision more likely. To control the reaction, the scientists are planning to build a tokamak,
an experimental doughnut-shaped vessel-like device, capable of confining and controlling the ultra-hot plasma with powerful magnets. The idea of tokamaks was
suggested by the Soviet physicists in the 1950s, and the first workable small-scale tokamaks were
designed by a team led by Lev Artsimovich in the late 1960s.
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