A breakthrough has been made in the new method of controlled nuclear fusion. How is it different from the traditional method?

The speed of development of human civilization essentially depends on how energy is obtained. When it comes to future energy, the most anticipated is controlled nuclear fusion.

Why? Because all the energy on Earth originally comes from nuclear fusion, and the main body of this nuclear fusion is the sun. The sun is essentially a huge nuclear fusion reactor, and nuclear fusion is actually the process of two light atoms combining into a heavy atom and releasing energy. Since this process will cause mass loss, and the lost mass will be released in the form of energy, the energy generated is very huge. If this energy is released in an instant, it will produce a devastating force. The hydrogen bomb uses this principle. Although the essence of the hydrogen bomb is nuclear fusion, this kind of nuclear fusion is uncontrollable. In order to produce energy that can be used by humans, it must be controllable.

The so-called controlled nuclear fusion is to allow the entire fusion process to proceed slowly, that is, to control its reaction speed. This itself is not difficult. The difficulty lies in what to use to hold the reactants.

Extremely high temperatures and pressures are required to promote fusion reactions. The reason why the sun can become a luminous and hot star is because it has enough mass to have extremely high pressure inside. Therefore, under the action of high temperature and high pressure, fusion reactions occur. It is basically impossible to simulate the huge pressure in the core of the sun on Earth, so higher temperatures are required to promote fusion reactions. The metal with the highest melting point known so far is tungsten, which has a melting point of about 3410°C, and the substance with the highest melting point that humans can currently produce is tantalum hafnium pentacarbide, which has a melting point of 4215°C. They are both far below the temperature required for controlled nuclear fusion.

Obviously, there is currently no material that can be used to contain the reactants, so the only way is to find a way to confine the reactants.

At present, the theoretically feasible confinement methods are mainly divided into two categories, namely magnetic field confinement and inertial confinement. Inertial confinement is to use the inertial effect of particles to constrain the particles themselves to prevent the reactants from coming into contact with any substance. Human experience in inertial confinement is relatively limited, and no country has made significant technological breakthroughs, so magnetic field confinement is still the main research direction at this stage. Using magnetic fields to confine high-temperature plasma is a method that humans have both a theoretical basis and practical experience, because as early as the 1950s, humans created a magnetic field confinement device, the tokamak device.

A tokamak is a non-contact annular container.

Its internal structure is roughly like this: a ring-shaped vacuum chamber with a coil wound around the outside of the vacuum chamber. When the coil is energized, a huge spiral magnetic field is generated, which heats and promotes nuclear fusion reactions, and confines the reactants to prevent them from coming into contact with any material. At present, the research on magnetic field confinement in various countries in the world is based on the tokamak device, and China is in a world leading position. Previously, we have achieved 70 million degree long pulse high parameter plasma to maintain operation for 1056 seconds in experiments, and the temperature of 120 million degrees has reached 101 seconds. According to the current progress, we expect that the demonstration project may achieve power generation in 2030, and as for the final commercial power generation, the time is still difficult to predict.

While all countries are focusing on tokamak devices, a startup technology company has taken a different approach, developing a new method to constrain controlled nuclear fusion and claims to have achieved experimental success.

The Seattle-based startup is called Zap Engergy. The method they developed is also magnetic field confinement, but it is not based on a tokamak device. The tokamak device relies on a large number of magnets, coils, and shielding materials to generate a magnetic field, which makes it expensive. The method developed by Zap Engergy does not use these at all. They use plasma to achieve self-confinement. This makes perfect sense in theory, because plasma itself is charged. Since it is charged, it can form a magnetic field. So how do these charged plasmas form a magnetic field to achieve self-confinement? This is a secret.

Zap Engine did not disclose the specific details of the technology, but only announced the success of the experiment and that it ultimately achieved energy balance, meaning it was able to generate positive profits.

This magnetic confinement method has another advantage, that is, it is small in size and can be made modular and used in combination or alone, which means it can be applied in remote areas. If Zap Engineering is true, this new technology is much lower in cost than traditional technology and may accelerate the commercialization of controlled nuclear fusion. Of course, this is just an optimistic assumption based on what we know so far. Since we don't know the details of this new technology, we can't judge whether it will eventually succeed, let alone infer the time when it will be applied to commercial power generation.

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