Project cuts turbulence to boost output from fusion reactors

However, despite years of research into the process, challenges remain about how to create and maintain the extremely high temperatures and pressures needed for sustained fusion.

One important factor is turbulence, which can decrease the temperature and pressure of the plasma inside the reactor, reducing the amount of fusion power that can be generated.

Now researchers at York University are investigating ways to suppress this turbulence, in the hope of increasing the amount of fusion power that can be produced by reactors such as the ITER Tokamak project in southern France.

The EPSRC-funded project, which also includes the UK Atomic Energy Authority as well as researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Strathclyde and Warwick, is also aiming to investigate ways in which the same amount of fusion power can be generated from smaller reactors, which would be cheaper and quicker to build and commercialise.

To generate thermonuclear fusion, a plasma of deuterium and tritium contained within a magnetic field must be heated to 100 million degrees Kelvin – ten times the temperature at the centre of the sun. This causes the nuclei to fuse together to form a heavier nucleus, helium, releasing large amounts of energy in the process.