This may resemble a distillery, but what it will generate isn’t for drinking. It will serve up streams of atoms and ions to make the energy of the sun right here on Earth through nuclear fusion.
Called SPIDER and due for completion next year, this facility in Padua, Italy, will help fine-tune what will become the key heating source for ITER, the world’s first experimental fusion reactor. ITER is under construction in southern France and due to be ready in 2025.
Within the ITER tokamak reactor – a reaction chamber shaped like a doughnut – two forms of hydrogen – deuterium and tritium – will be smashed together in a plasma to fuse and form helium atoms as “ash”, plus high-energy neutrons that can be harnessed to drive turbines.
To create the plasma, the temperature within the tokamak must be raised to 300 million°C – about 10 times the temperature of the sun – and the heat for that will come from two high-energy beams of deuterium fired simultaneously into the tokamak.
SPIDER will test how beams of deuterium atoms behave in a smaller, experimental reaction chamber, how much heat they generate and how to control the temperature within the reactor.
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