Physicists will use ice as fuel for a fusion reactor

Usually, scientists in experiments to create fusion reactors and tokamaks usegaseous

An international team of physicists from Princeton University has been working for several yearsconducts experiments on the DIII-D tokamak.operation of one of the key components of the future device — the fuel injection system into the reactor.

During the study, scientists presented a replacementtraditional gas injectors - a special ice cannon, which can accelerate microscopic granules of ice to a speed of 1 km / s, after which they are already introduced into the clouds from the plasma inside the tokamak.

This type of fuel will increase the productivity of the tokamak, scientists say.

At the end of last year, Chinese physicists warmed upplasma inside the East superconducting installation for thermonuclear fusion up to 100 million degrees Celsius. This is six times the temperature of the solar core, which heats up to 15 million degrees Celsius.

Charged and heated plasma particles in a tokamakheld by magnetic fields that appear from the plasma itself. This allows for the constant heating of atoms and to keep the plasma ring in one place. At the same time, scientists in a similar German tokamak hold plasma with the help of magnetic coils - they make atoms much more stable, however, they do not allow plasma to be heated to super-temperatures.

Recently it became known that in Russia by 2030hybrid fusion reactor may appear. The idea of ​​creating a hybrid reactor belongs to the Russian scientist Igor Kurchatov. In 1951, he noted that almost all of the energy on Earth (98%) is contained in three elements - uranium-238, thorium and interchangeable deuterium and lithium. Another 2% are concentrated in oil and gas.