What is the tokamak and what does it do?

What is the tokamak and what does it do?

The tokamak is an experimental machine designed to harness the energy of fusion. Inside a tokamak, the energy produced through the fusion of atoms is absorbed as heat in the walls of the vessel.

Can a tokamak explode?

During operation, the ITER Tokamak chamber will contain only a tiny amount, less than one tenth of a gram, of hydrogen fuel at any given moment. If disruption occurs during a pulse, the reaction cools and ends. “A nuclear explosion in ITER is simply not possible,” says Loughlin.

What does tokamak mean in English?

toroidal
Definition of tokamak : a toroidal device for producing controlled nuclear fusion that involves the confining and heating of a gaseous plasma by means of an electric current and magnetic field.

How hot is a tokamak?

150 million degrees Celsius
The temperatures inside the ITER Tokamak must reach 150 million degrees Celsius—or ten times the temperature at the core of the Sun—in order for the gas in the vacuum chamber to reach the plasma state and for the fusion reaction to occur.

What fuel does tokamak use?

The fusion reaction in the ITER Tokamak will be powered with deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen. ITER will be the first fusion machine fully designed for deuterium-tritium operation.

Is ITER a tokamak?

First developed by Soviet research in the late 1960s, the tokamak has been adopted around the world as the most promising configuration of magnetic fusion device. ITER will be the world’s largest tokamak—twice the size of the largest machine currently in operation, with ten times the plasma chamber volume.

What are disadvantages of nuclear fusion?

But fusion reactors have other serious problems that also afflict today’s fission reactors, including neutron radiation damage and radioactive waste, potential tritium release, the burden on coolant resources, outsize operating costs, and increased risks of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Can fusion reactor meltdown?

No long-lived radioactive waste: Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. No risk of meltdown: A Fukushima-type nuclear accident is not possible in a tokamak fusion device.

What does a tokamak look like?

Basic tokamak components include the toroidal field coils (in blue), the central solenoid (in green), and poloidal field coils (in grey). A tokamak is a machine that confines a plasma using magnetic fields in a donut shape that scientists call a torus. …

Where is the tokamak?

Others:

Is plasma hotter than lightning?

Yep, the answer is a bolt of lightning, which can reach temperatures of roughly 30,000 kelvins (53,540 degrees Fahrenheit). Dive down to its core, and you’d encounter plasma temperatures of about 15 million kelvins (about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit).

Is plasma as hot as the sun?

The ITER plasma will be ten times hotter than the centre of the Sun. For a physicist, temperature is not only an indication of “cold” or “hot”; it also describes the energy of the particles that make up an object or a particular environment such as a plasma.

What is a tokamak and how does it work?

The tokamak is an experimental machine designed to harness the energy of fusion. Inside a tokamak, the energy produced through the fusion of atoms is absorbed as heat in the walls of the vessel. Just like a conventional power plant, a fusion power plant will use this heat to produce steam and then electricity by way…

What is the meaning of tokomak?

variants: or less commonly tokomak. : a toroidal device for producing controlled nuclear fusion that involves the confining and heating of a gaseous plasma by means of an electric current and magnetic field.

How much does it cost to build a tokamak?

These experiments, especially PLT, put the US far in the lead in tokamak research. This is due largely to budget; a tokamak cost about $500,000 and the US annual fusion budget was around $25 million at that time.