“UK’s nuclear fusion site ends experiments after 40 years“
Esme Stallard, BBC News (October 13, 2023)“‘It felt brilliant. One thing is to work on a design, another thing is to operate it.’
“Barry Green recounts the moment in June 1983 when the JET fusion laboratory in Oxford undertook its first experiment.
“For the next four decades, the European project pursued nuclear fusion and the promise of near-limitless clean energy.
“But on Saturday the world’s most successful fusion experiment will wind down….
“…In 1958, when the United States’ war research on fusion was declassified, it sent Russia, UK, Europe, Japan and the US on a race to develop fusion reactions for energy provision….”
This is a quick update on something I wrote back in May, 2022: “TAE and ITER: A Few Steps Closer to Fusion Power“.
ITER research will keep going: in France.
I gather that ITER started out as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and has had a name change or two since then.
England’s fusion research isn’t over, although the tokamak torus at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, UK, is being decommissioned.
The BBC News piece says they’ll be studying the reactor’s materials. That should show them how they’ve changed in the four decades since it was built. And that will help develop construction and maintenance procedures for future reactors.
I’m keeping this short, since there’s more to say about Sedna, the Oort cloud, and all that, than I expected.
I’ve talked about fusion power and more-or-less-related topics before:
- “Fusion Rocket Engines, SETI and Science: Seriously“
(July 29, 2023) - “TAE and ITER: A Few Steps Closer to Fusion Power“
(May 21, 2022) - “Power and Climate“
(July 1, 2018)
