Scientists have stocked up on energy – Kommersant FM

The fusion reactor in Oxford set a world record for the amount of energy generated – the Joint European Torus installation operated for six seconds and during this time produced almost 70 megajoules of thermal energy. The experiment was further proof that thermonuclear energy can be converted for scientific purposes.

However, this project currently has no commercial prospects due to high costs and lack of technology, says nuclear physicist Andrei Ozharovsky: “For scientific achievements, of course, this is a worthy step. But it would be a big mistake to say that this has anything to do with the energy sector, that is, with the sector of the economy. They have not yet learned how to obtain electrical energy using such installations, and there are no prospects for when they can become part of the economy, that is, the electric power industry.

Even if in 20 years they create an industrial installation that actually generates electricity, it will be much more expensive than the one that exists now.

The business interests of scientific groups create an information bubble around this so that they, too, are given money for this. Here they constantly pass off one thing as another: scientific success as technological success.

Considering thermonuclear energy as an alternative to other, actually existing energy sources is a mistake for one simple reason: thermonuclear energy does not exist, there are no projects. It is not said where exactly the electricity will be produced.

In addition, I have not heard of any businessman somewhere starting to build a device to generate electricity and make a profit. There are big doubts that even if it is developed, someone will buy it. For example, the Large Hadron Collider costs billions of euros, but no one ever said it would produce electricity and be commercially viable. No, it’s a scientific instrument.

Many countries – China, Japan, EU members – are joining this British project in droves. But the race is for science, not economics, that’s the difference. It seems to me that this technology does not have a bright future. We have the Sun, the Sun has been working stably for the last 4 billion years and will continue to work for about the same amount of time. And humanity has much more prospects for improving the use of the energy of this star.”

The main goal of experiments on fusion reactors is to create a new source of clean and sustainable energy. And this direction in the end may indeed turn out to be promising, noted Boris Zhuikov, chief researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences:

“The goal, of course, is to provide a virtually inexhaustible source of energy, figuratively speaking, to light the Sun on Earth.

But the second enormous advantage is that the reactive waste, which is always present, is much less here than when operating conventional nuclear reactors. These two advantages – inexhaustible raw materials and less waste – make this project very attractive.”

This is not the first time that scientists have set a record for energy yield in thermonuclear fusion. So, in the spring of 2023, the experiment became successful in China, and in the summer – in the USA.

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Dennis Bespalov