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The speed of human civilization development essentially depends on the way of energy acquisition. When it comes to future energy, the most eye-catching thing is controllable nuclear fusion .
Why? Because all the energy on the earth originally came from nuclear fusion , and the main body of this nuclear fusion is the sun. The sun is essentially a huge nuclear fusion reactor, and nuclear fusion is actually the process of two light atoms aggregated into one heavy atom and releasing energy. Since this process will cause mass loss, and the lost mass will be released in the form of energy, the energy it generates is very huge. If these energy is released in an instant, it will produce the power of destruction. The hydrogen bomb uses this principle. Although the essence of a hydrogen bomb is nuclear fusion, this nuclear fusion is uncontrollable. If it wants to generate energy that can be used by humans, it must be controlled.
The so-called controllable nuclear fusion is to make the entire fusion process slow, that is, to control its reaction speed. This is not difficult in itself. The difficulty lies in what to use to store reactants.
To promote fusion reaction , it requires extremely high temperature and pressure. The reason why the sun can become a luminous and hot star is because it has enough mass to have extremely high pressure inside, so under the action of high temperature and high pressure, the fusion reaction occurs. On Earth, it is basically impossible to simulate the huge pressure of sun core , so it is necessary to facilitate fusion reactions to a higher temperature. Currently, the metal with the highest melting point is metal tungsten , which has a melting point of about, while the substance with the highest melting point that humans can manufacture is tantalum tetracarbide, which has a melting point of far lower than the temperature required for controlled nuclear fusion.
Obviously, there is no substance that can be used to hold reactants at present, so we can only try to restrict the reactants.
Currently, the theoretically feasible constraint methods are mainly divided into two categories, namely magnetic field constraints and inertial constraints. Inertial constraints are to use the inertia of particles to restrain the particles themselves and prevent reactants from contacting any substance. Human beings have limited experience in inertial constraints, and at present, no obvious technological breakthroughs in various countries, so magnetic field constraints are still the main research direction at this stage. Using magnetic fields to constrain high-temperature plasmas is a method that has both theoretical foundation and practical experience for humans, because as early as the 1950s, humans created a magnetic field constraint device, namely the tokamak device.
Tokamak device is a non-contact ring container.
Its internal structure is generally like this: an annular vacuum chamber, with a coil wound on the outside of the vacuum chamber, and when the coil is energized, a huge spiral magnetic field will be generated, which heats and causes nuclear fusion reactions, and constrains the reactants therein to avoid their contact with any substance. At present, various countries in the world have conducted research on magnetic field constraints based on the tokamak device, while China is in the world's leading position. Previously, we have achieved the 10,000-degree long pulse high parameter plasma maintaining operation seconds, and the temperature of 120 million degrees of operation time also reaches seconds. At the current progress, we expect that demonstration engineering power generation may be achieved in the year, and as for the final commercial power generation, the time is still difficult to predict.
While countries are focusing on the tokamak installation, a startup technology company has taken a different approach and developed a new method to constrain controllable nuclear fusion and claims to have achieved experimental success.
This startup in Seattle is called "ZapEgergy". The methods they developed are also magnetic field constraints, but are not based on tokamak devices. The tokamak device relies on a large number of magnets, coils and shielding materials to generate magnetic fields, which makes it expensive, and the methods developed by ZapEgergy do not use these at all. They use plasma to achieve self-constraint.This makes sense in theory, because the plasma itself is charged. Since it is charged, a magnetic field can be formed. So how do these charged plasmas form magnetic fields to achieve self-constraint? This is a secret.
ZapEngergy did not publish the specific details of the technology, but only announced the success of the experiment and finally achieved the balance of energy revenue and expenditure, which means that it can generate positive returns.
, the magnetic constrained method, has another advantage, that is, it is small in size, can be made into modular, can be used in combination or alone, which means it will be applied to remote areas. If, according to ZapEngergy, this new technology is much lower in cost than traditional technology, it may accelerate the commercialization of controlled nuclear fusion. Of course, this is just an optimistic idea that we continue to know what we are currently doing. Since we do not understand the details of this new technology, we cannot judge whether it will be successful in the end, and we cannot infer the time it will be applied to commercial power generation.
