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A fusion reactor in southern France, called WEST, just achieved an important milestone that brings us one step closer to clean, sustainable, nearly limitless energy.
For fusion to happen on Earth, the fuel needs to reach at least 50 million degrees Celsius. One of the main obstaclesfaces is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to generate those extreme temperatures, and, so far, reactors can't sustain a plasma long enough to gain an energy surplus that could be put toward commercial use. So, for now, fusion reactors typically consume more energy than they produce.
Originally, WEST contained carbon walls. While carbon is easy to work with, Delgado-Aparicio said, it also absorbs tritium, a rare "We can detect how it moves inside, we can follow it, we can study its transport inside the machine," Delgadot-Aparicio said, which could help build future methods for keeping the plasma free of impurities like blobs of tungsten that cool it down.
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