Japan has thrown its hat into the race to achieve viable fusion energy with a new massive project.
According to Interesting Engineering, Japan has announced the Fusion by Advanced Superconducting Tokamak project, or FAST. The country hopes the project will "demonstrate an integrated fusion energy system that combines energy conversion, including electricity generation and fuel technologies."
According to the report, the project plans to use high-temperature superconducting coils to generate the plasma needed for fusion, and it will be smaller than other tokamaks, which is hoped will reduce manufacturing costs and time.
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The goals of the project include creating a sustained burning plasma (which is crucial to generating energy); successfully demonstrating a tritium fuel cycle, in which the tritium created in the fusion process is purified and cycled back through the reactor, making it closer to a closed-loop system; extracting and converting the energy generated into usable electricity; and ensuring system integration and safety.
"FAST is the world's first initiative to extract fusion energy from a plasma while integratively demonstrating plasma sustainment and addressing engineering challenges," the project said in a statement. "The project aims to achieve the demonstration of fusion energy power generation by the 2030s."
A tokamak is a reactor structure involving magnetic coils to generate a twisted magnetic field that traps plasma and forces it to fuse, generating massive amounts of energy in the process.
Multiple groups have been working hard on achieving fusion. A Seattle-based company released a new design for its Z-Pinch device, while a San Francisco company is hoping to achieve the feat through the use of lasers. MIT researchers believe they have found a way to make the tokamak structure more efficient than before by removing helium atoms from the walls of the structure.
Although commercial power plants fueled by fusion could still be more than a decade to decades away, scientists are driven by the potential of this technology as a "holy grail" for supplying abundant, almost pollution-free energy.
FAST's researchers hope to show that their model can generate 50 to 100 megawatts of power and will have a discharge duration of 1,000 seconds. They hope to run the reactor for a total of 1,000 hours during its testing phase, and preliminary designs for the project should be complete in 2025.
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