Scientists make key breakthrough in pursuit of virtually limitless energy source: ‘Critically important’

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, recently developed a potentially groundbreaking theoretical model with game-changing implications in the field of nuclear fusion, The Debrief reported.

Back in May, CNN profiled one lab’s ongoing efforts to harness nuclear fusion as a hotly anticipated source of clean energy via a prototype of a reactor known as a tokamak. The outlet characterized nuclear fusion as the “key to producing virtually unlimited, clean electricity” throughout the United States.

Tokamaks contain and heat the ionized plasma gas used in the process. To achieve nuclear fusion, plasma gas is heated “to temperatures in excess of 150 million degrees Celsius.”

That prototype tokamak could generate up to “10 million times more [energy] than coal or natural gas while producing no planet-warming pollution,” CNN asserted, adding that fuel for nuclear fusion is environmentally abundant in seawater and lithium.

Laypeople might ask why a technology with such immense promise to change the world is not yet in widespread use — but scientists are steadily advancing what we need to know to get there, and the theoretical model in question might eliminate a major hiccup in the process.

The study was published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed physics journal Physical Review Letters, addressing a broader, persistent puzzle in nuclear fusion modeling.

As The Debrief explained, physicists must first run intricate computer simulations to predict how plasma gas will react and behave in a tokamak — and they’ve routinely encountered problems “accurately capturing the width of the turbulent region” between the plasma’s core and edges.

That issue is known as the “shortfall problem,” and it has hampered physicists’ ability to advance the technology, introducing disruptive ambiguity in their calculations.

In their abstract, the study’s authors identified the “dynamics of edge-core coupling” as a “critically important” aspect of achieving clean, scalable energy through nuclear fusion and endeavored to pin down what’s going on with volatile plasma edges.

The turbulence stems from irregularities that face outward, known as “blobs,” as well as inward-facing edges called “voids.” Of the two, voids proved much harder to observe — but the newly published research sheds light on that frustrating knowledge gap.

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Researchers cited the “heretofore ignored process of void emission” as their starting point. They posited that the inward movement of voids created plasma “drift waves” that transfer energy and momentum, potentially accounting for the “local turbulence” impeding simulations. 

“The detailed mechanism of this process has remained a mystery until recent experiments observed that regular, intense gradient relaxation events generated blob-void pairs very close to the last closed flux surface,” the authors said in their abstract.

Should this theoretical model be validated, the researchers’ findings could help resolve the irregularities impeding physicists’ calculations and usher in related advancements.

In conclusion, the authors asserted that their model “shows promise to resolve several questions surrounding the shortfall problem,” potentially bringing nuclear fusion — which has been called the “holy grail” of clean energy — closer to viability at a commercial scale.

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