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Nuclear fusion–fission hybrid (hybrid nuclear power) is a proposed means of generating power by use of a combination of nuclear fusion and fission processes. The concept dates to the 1950s, and was briefly advocated by Hans Bethe during the 1970s, but largely remained unexplored until a revival of interest in 2009, due to the delays in the ...
In 2024, Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced plans to build the world's first grid-scale commercial nuclear fusion power plant at the James River Industrial Center in Chesterfield County, Virginia, which is part of the Greater Richmond Region; the plant is designed to produce about 400 MW of electric power, and is intended to come online in ...
As of 2022, the record for energy production using nuclear fusion is held by the National Ignition Facility reactor, which achieved a Q of 1.5 in December 2022. [15] Beyond just heating the plasma, the total electricity consumed by the reactor and facilities will range from 110 MW up to 620 MW peak for 30-second periods during plasma operation ...
The result was a scientific wonder, a feat that researchers had hoped to create in a laboratory since scientists first started bandying about the idea of using controlled nuclear fusion to produce ...
With the goal of breakeven (a fusion energy gain factor equal to 1) now in sight, a new series of machines were designed that would run on a fusion fuel of deuterium and tritium. These machines, notably the Joint European Torus (JET) and Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR), had the explicit goal of reaching breakeven.
In December 2020, the Chinese experimental nuclear fusion reactor HL-2M achieved its first plasma discharge. [143] In May 2021, Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) announced a new world record for superheated plasma, sustaining a temperature of 120 M°C for 101 seconds and a peak of 160 M°C for 20 seconds. [ 144 ]
The deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion reaction is considered the most promising for producing fusion power. Schematic of a DEMO nuclear fusion power plant. When deuterium and tritium fuse, the two nuclei come together to form a resonant state which splits to form in turn a helium nucleus (an alpha particle) and a high-energy neutron. 2 1 H + 3 1 H ...
Toroidal machines can be axially symmetric, like the tokamak and the reversed field pinch (RFP), or asymmetric, like the stellarator.The additional degree of freedom gained by giving up toroidal symmetry might ultimately be usable to produce better confinement, but the cost is complexity in the engineering, the theory, and the experimental diagnostics.