We are in the midst of a current event, since this is nuclear fission, commonly known as nuclear energy. It remains to be seen if it is feasible and, above all, it remains to be confirmed that more energy will be recovered than is necessary to maintain the proximity of the elements that must fuse.īut there is an energy that is also infinite, but which already exists. Nuclear fusion is presented as an infinite energy of the future. This is the pace of science funding, legislation and international cooperation do not necessarily shorten the time of discovery. That is why a possible application of energy generation will not be feasible for probably another 50 years. All this is to study physics and start designing future reactors. Again, as with JET, it will take years of experimentation before we can move on to the next phase. The EU is contributing about 45% of the budget, and the other countries each contribute about 9%. It is so far removed from any industrial application that the EU, Russia, China, South Korea, Japan, India, and the US are collaborating on it by sharing the know-how that will be acquired. It aims to demonstrate the feasibility of self-powering the reactor with tritium at a temperature of 150 million degrees. The ITER project under construction in Cadarache (near Aix-en-Provence) is also an experimental tool. This remark is not made to diminish the scale of the success, but to make it clear that for the time being it is only a question of research and that nuclear fusion should not be used as a headlong rush in the race for the energy transition.

This is much better than in the previous experiment when ten times as much energy had to be used. But to obtain this fission energy, it was necessary to spend three times as much electrical energy. It should be noted, however, that despite this enormous success, the reactor only operated for five seconds, generating 11 to 12 MJ each second for a total of 59 MJ, which represents 16 kWh, or the energy of 1.4 litres of petrol. This is one of the objectives of the ITER project, but the experiments of JET do not have this objective. The aim of the fusion experiments is to self-generate deuterium and tritium to keep the reaction going. And finally, it is a step that will accelerate the implementation of the ITER project, as JET will operate under technological conditions similar to those of ITER on the day it is commissioned.

Secondly, it is a success for the EU and more specifically for the Euratom Treaty signed in Rome in 1957, because despite the Brexit the project has remained European. Firstly, JET is the world’s largest fusion reactor and has achieved a world record for the duration and power. Jef Ongena, a leading expert on nuclear fission who works at the Belgian Military Academy and the Jüllich Nuclear Research Centre (near Aachen), considers this breakthrough a triple success. Twenty-five years separates these experiments, so much so that in between these two successes, there has been extensive research to advance knowledge and technology. The JET experiment generated 59 megajoules (MJ) of energy for the first time, far more than the previous record set in 1997 when the machine produced 16 MJ for 0.5 seconds.

This is a Russian acronym coined by its designer, the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. This huge toroidal magnetic chamber of superconducting magnets is called a tokamak. It is understood that no material can withstand this temperature, which is why this reaction must take place in a magnetically confined reactor. To enable fusion to take place, the atoms need to be at temperatures of around 150 million degrees, so they are plasma at this temperature. Attempts are being made to achieve reactions on Earth similar to those that take place in the sun. In both cases, these reactions correspond to Einstein’s famous equation E= mc 2.įusion research has been going on at the JET since it opened 38 years ago. Fission, on the other hand, is the release of energy from heavy atoms such as uranium that split into lighter elements, with this change in mass releasing gigantic amounts of energy. Atomic fusion consists of releasing energy by reducing the mass of two light atoms (deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen) when they fuse into helium atoms. The Joint European Torus (JET) team located in Culham near Oxford has just taken a step forward in the scientific progress of nuclear fusion.

Nuclear energy fission