EXPERIMENTS at Princeton University’s tokamak fusion reactor in the
US have pushed the device into the realm of ‘breakeven’, the goal of all
fusion power experiments.
51¶¯Âþs from the university announced two world records this week
in Washington DC. They claimed that the tokamak’s burning fuel, or plasma,
has reached 400 million Degree C and has generated 50 000 watts of power.
In so doing, the test reactor attained a ‘Q-value’ – the ratio of power
output to the energy input – of about 0.7. Anything over 0.5, a level achieved
by fusion scientists in 1988, is considered ‘in the realm of breakeven’,
according to a spokesman for Princeton’s physics laboratory. That is because
the tokamak achieved its 0.7 Q-value with deuterium fuel. The group says
that when it switches to a more powerful mixture of deuterium and tritium
in 1993, the tokamak should reach true breakeven.
