Masters of Clockmaking Turn Attention to Fusion

Switzerland, long known for its engineering prowess in fields from timekeeping to coffee making, is turning its eye and resources to a bigger goal–unlocking the promise of fusion.

Officials at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne are busy upgrading their plasma physics center to play a key role in a global effort to turn the fusing of hydrogen atoms into a usable, abundant energy source. Their efforts are expected to contribute to the success of the multibillion-dollar ITER megaproject, whose goal is to create a fusion reactor that produces 500 megawatts of electricity from 50 megawatts of input power.

Scientists have been working on nuclear fusion for decades because huge amounts of energy can be produced from small quantities of common ingredients. In fact, the energy content that can be extracted from two bottles of water and a lithium coin battery is equal to that released by burning around five barrels of oil. And, unlike the fission process, fusion produces no radioactive waste that must be carefully contained for centuries.

The top image shows the inside of the Swiss fusion reactor, a complex machine called a tokamak. Learn more and see an infographic on how fusion works below.

The newly renamed Swiss Plasma Center will focus its efforts on one of the many difficult but essential aspects of fusion that needs improvement before ITER can accomplish its goal. For the fusion reaction to happen, gas must be heated to more than a hundred million degrees Celsius, much hotter than exists at the center of the sun, until electrons are stripped from nuclei and it becomes a plasma.

But anything on Earth heated to that temperature would melt through the material meant to confine it. Instead, physicists use powerful magnetic fields to trap the heated plasma. The magnetic fields are generated inside of a ring-shaped machine called a tokamak, which lies at the heart of the modern quest for fusion.

The plasma center’s machine, the TCV tokamak, is special among others because it can be configured in a number of ways to make confining magnetic fields of different shape. This capable is critical to figuring out which shape will be the most efficient at containing the plasma inside the ITER experimental power plant once it is operational.

Researchers at the plasma center will also work on better ways to heat the plasma and to extract energy and particles within it.

Images courtesy of EPFL.