New Zealand enters race for nuclear fusion with unique approach
A New Zealand company has become the first in the nation’s history to turn on a fusion machine.
OpenStar technologies reached a crucial milestone in the development of nuclear fusion-first plasma. This is the moment a fusion device creates and confines a super-hot cloud of ionised gas.
Nuclear fusion is the process by which stars generate energy. Extreme temperatures and pressures in a star’s core force the nuclei of atoms to fuse together. This releases huge amounts of energy. Replicating this process on Earth could resolve energy problems, but such a fusion reactor remains a thing of the future.
Temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius are required to fuse of atoms on Earth.
“At OpenStar, we’re trying to build this thing called a levitated dipole and we’ve just achieved our first plasma,” nuclear physicist and OpenStar founder and CEO Ratu Mataira tells Cosmos.
A dipole is a system where the positive and negative charges are separated.
“Dipoles are the only configuration of plasma that you can build in a lab or in an industrial setting, and find stably arranged in nature,” he adds. “That gives us a foundation to think we can scale this up, put more heat into it and build a fusion machine. But what we’ve effectively turned on most recently is a magnetosphere inspired by the magnetospheres around planets.”
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