With explosives and shock waves: Startup takes unusual route to nuclear fusion
The Canadian start-up General Fusion wants to generate fusion energy using explosives and metal walls. Initial scientific results are promising.
(Image: General Fusion)
While the commissioning of the experimental fusion reactor ITER is expected to be delayed until 2035, private companies want to use the energy from nuclear fusion much more quickly. The Canadian company General Fusion is pursuing a particularly exotic approach.
Innovative technology with liquid metal
General Fusion's fusion reactor will have a combustion chamber made of rotating liquid metal that forms a cylinder. Using mechanical pistons, General Fusion compresses this cylinder into a small sphere while simultaneously injecting hot hydrogen plasma. The compression further heats and compresses the plasma until fusion occurs between the hydrogen atoms. The energy released is transported directly away from the liquid metal. General Fusion has been working on this concept for several years.
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The idea could actually work
Until now, the concept only existed on paper and in simulations. Now, for the first time, researchers at General Fusion have published the results of experiments that show that the idea could actually work: They compressed a hot plasma in a so-called tokamak reactor by igniting high-performance explosives that pushed the metal lining of the reactor inwards.
The explosives had to be placed in a symmetrical arrangement and detonated in a uniformly controlled manner in order to create a radial implosion of the reactor cladding that was as uniform as possible. This is because any asymmetry would have caused disturbances in the compressed plasma.
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Compression for nuclear fusion
During compression, the plasma became about 190 times denser than at the beginning. The temperature rose to 0.63 keV, which corresponds to around seven million Kelvin, and the neutron yield increased to more than 600 million neutrons per second in one compression shot. The results demonstrated "a method that ensures plasma stability and symmetry during compression and confirmed the company's predictions for the rate of plasma heating and increased neutron yield," writes General Fusion.
In early 2025, the company plans to commission its demonstration reactor, the Lawson Machine, and in the following two years demonstrate that they can generate a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction in it.
This article first appeared on t3n.de .
(dmk)
