Nuclear fusion technology has long been considered to be a nuclear energy technology that can bring about an energy revolution, safer and more efficient than today's nuclear fission, but it has not yet been successfully put into practical use. Recently, an experimental reactor successfully broke the energy output record, and the technological development has taken another step forward.
Recently, the European Combined Ring Reactor (JET) laboratory in the United Kingdom announced that it had successfully used 0. in an experiment2 mg of fuel produces 69 MJ (megajoules) of energy, breaking the world record. That's about the same amount of energy that 12,000 homes use for 5 seconds. Although the energy output was record-breaking, the power used to control the reaction in this experiment was greater than the amount of electricity output, so the net energy output could not be achieved. The JET reactor has been in use for 40 years and will be retired after this experiment.
Since nuclear fusion is more complex than nuclear fission, and it requires enormous energy to control its reactions, such as the high temperatures required, it is not easy to achieve a net energy output, which was achieved at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States in 2022, but only 25mj。The next milestone in the future should be the International Thermonuclear Fusion Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France, where scientists hope to produce 700 MJ of energy, but it is still far from being put into practical use.
*：new scientist