Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 11, 1993 TAG: 9312110148
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PLAINSBORO, N.J. LENGTH: Medium
The successes Thursday and Friday raised Princeton University researchers' hopes of someday harnessing an inexhaustible, clean source of energy, and of getting the money to build more-advanced experimental fusion reactors.
About 500 visiting scientists and staff at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory were on hand when its experimental fusion reactor generated the first record - the equivalent of 3 million watts of power - just before midnight Thursday.
They clapped and cheered just as loudly Friday afternoon during three more successful experiments, the last of which produced 5.6 million watts, said Dale Meade, deputy director of the lab financed by the federal Energy Department.
"This is the one we really wanted," Meade said, adding that the lab's scientists were "busy validating the data and seeing what we can do to make the number even bigger."
Late Friday night, after two more experiments were conducted, the reactor produced the equivalent of a record 6.4 million watts, Meade said.
The project's goal had been to reach the 5-million-watt level by the start of the scientists' Christmas break Dec. 17. In the next nine months, they expect to increase the output to 10 million watts, enough to power about 3,000 homes.
That's still less than half the 24 million watts needed to run the reactor. Previous experiments have consumed several times the energy they produced.
Besides boosting the reactor's output, the scientists have much to learn from the physics of each reaction. That will help them design more-advanced reactors, potentially leading to commercial fusion reactors by the year 2035.
Many spent decades - even entire careers - doing the research leading up to these experiments.
"We're trying to replicate the sun here on Earth," Meade said. "What we have is a piece of the sun, and it's confined in a [magnetic] field, and it's producing fusion energy."
Fusion, the process that powers the sun, is a reaction in which lightweight atoms, such as hydrogen, are squeezed together at high temperatures to fuse, releasing energy in the process. The researchers' goal: to harness more energy from the reaction than the millions of watts needed to run the mammoth reactor.
by CNB