"Fifty years ago, they said we were fifty years away from nuclear fusion for general electric power," says Joseph V. Minervini, a nuclear engineer at MIT and member of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project. "We're still decades out."
But now we're 150 tons closer: The world's most powerful magnet, built at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (www-jt60.naka.jaeri.go.jp) in Naka, passed initial operating tests this spring under the watch of Toshinari Ando and Hiroshi Tsuji, among others. The magnet's coil of superconducting wire generated a 13-tesla field. Project leaders hope that forces of this magnitude will be enough to produce plasma, the charged gaseous state that is a precondition of fusion. As Minervini explains, "that will re-create the way energy is released on the sun."
ELECTRIC WORD
The Mirror Hack'd
Eye of the Needle
Vanishing Act
Visualize World Geeks
Habitrail for Humanity
Ultra-Magnetism
