Angela Merkel Attends Momentous Nuclear Fusion Experiment in Germany

Last week, the chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel attended a ground-breaking experiment at the Max Planck Institute in Griefswald, located in the northeast of the country. The experiment involved recreating conditions on the surface of the sun, heating a specially-designed device to 100 million degrees Celsius.

Before being heated to temperatures literally as hot as the sun, the container was injected with a small amount of hydrogen. The intense heat caused the substance to convert into plasma, a gas that can only be created at super-hot temperatures. Once this gas is trapped for long enough, it will act as the catalyst for nuclear fusion to take place. Chancellor Merkel, herself a qualified doctor of physics, switched on the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator, as the device is known.

Fusion not Fission

Existing nuclear technologies rely on the technique of nuclear fission, which creates energy by splitting atoms rather than compressing them.

Though fission is capable of generating huge amounts of power, it involves the use of uranium which can be harmful to the environment and which leaves behind radioactive waste which does not erode quickly. Indeed, the latest techniques of isotope ratio analyses have been applied to the area surrounding the Fukushima power plant in Japan and have found that the ground there is still heavily contaminated with nuclear waste, making it dangerous to humans, animals and plants.

Fusion, meanwhile, produces negligible amounts of waste in comparison. Therefore, many people see it as the ideal long-term replacement for fossil fuels, including John Jelonnek, the leading physicist responsible for installing the high-powered heating elements on the device. “It’s a very clean source of power, the cleanest you could possibly wish for,” he explained to the Guardian.  “We’re not doing this for us but for our children and grandchildren.”

A Rival to French Technology

The W7-X has emerged as a strong rival to the existing fusion technology being investigated by French scientists. Based upon a 1950s Soviet blueprint, the tokamak device traps plasma inside a donut-shaped apparatus and holds it there long enough for nuclear fusion to take place. Though the tokamak is relatively simple to construct, it is an incredibly complex piece of machinery to operate.

The Germans have taken the opposite approach, constructing a device that is very difficult and expensive to manufacture but much easier to use. Indeed, €400 million (£300 million) has already been poured into the W7-X, which is capable of holding the plasma in a state of stasis for much longer, thus enabling fusion to take place more effectively.

It achieves this via the use of gigantic magnets weighing in at approximately 425 tonnes, which hold the plasma in place and prevent it from coming into contact with the cold walls of the device. This ensures the temperature remains at a sufficient level for fusion to take place, and though the technology is still in its infancy (with this being the first time hydrogen has been used in place of helium), scientists are hopefully that it could provide the solution to our long-term energy crisis.

“The impressive results obtained in the startup of the machine were remarkable,” enthused David Anderson, an impartial observer who works as a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin and as such is distanced from the project. “This is usually a difficult and arduous process. The speed with which W7-X became operational is a testament to the care and quality of the fabrication of the device and makes a very positive statement about the stellarator concept itself. W7-X is a truly remarkable achievement and the worldwide fusion community looks forward to many exciting results.”