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New Energy World
New Energy World embraces the whole energy industry as it connects and converges to address the decarbonisation challenge. It covers progress being made across the industry, from the dynamics under way to reduce emissions in oil and gas, through improvements to the efficiency of energy conversion and use, to cutting-edge initiatives in renewable and low carbon technologies.
The nuclear fusion race – one small step nearer?
10/8/2022
8 min read
Feature
Scientists at the STFC Hartree Centre and the UKAEA are using supercomputing and artificial intelligence to design technologies such as digital twins to help make fusion energy a commercial reality, within decades hopefully, reports Brian Davis.
There’s a long-running joke that commercial-scale nuclear fusion is always 30 years in the future, regardless of when the question is posed. Hopefully, the tide is turning, with a major nuclear fusion breakthrough earlier this year. In February 2022, a team from the Joint European Torus (JET) project in Oxford managed to generate 59 MJ of energy through nuclear fusion. This was nearly double the previous record set in 1997, according to the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
The results were good news for advocates of nuclear energy as a low carbon alternative to fossil fuels. But there’s still a very long way to go before commercial nuclear fusion is a readily available, efficient, low carbon means of tackling climate change.
Nevertheless, Ian Chapman, CEO of UKAEA, said the results were a ‘landmark’ and will bring us ‘a huge step closer’ to virtually emissions-free energy in the race to decarbonise energy production.