Facts about Fusion Reactors

1. 08

   Inertial confinement fusion at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility requires compressing fuel pellets to densities 100 times greater than lead to trigger thermonuclear reactions.

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2. 07

   Stellarator fusion reactors, first developed in Germany during the 1950s, use twisted magnetic field geometries instead of tokamak designs to confine plasma more stably.

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3. 06

   Tokamak reactors use powerful magnetic fields exceeding 10 Tesla to confine plasma hot enough that hydrogen nuclei fuse at temperatures surpassing the sun's core.

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4. 05

   National Ignition Facility in California achieved net energy gain in December 2022 by using 192 laser beams to compress hydrogen isotopes, producing 3.15 megajoules of energy output from 2.05 megajoules of input.

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5. 04

   Deuterium-tritium fusion reactions, the fuel combination used in most experimental reactors, release approximately 17.6 megaelectronvolts of energy per reaction.

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6. 03

   China's EAST reactor achieved a plasma confinement record of 120 million degrees Celsius sustained for 101 seconds in 2016.

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7. 02

   JET, Britain's Joint European Torus, maintained a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius in 1997, a record that stood for decades.

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8. 01

   The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor ITER in France aims to achieve 10 times more energy output than input by 2025.

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