German scientists claimed that they have reached a milestone in a quest to derive energy from nuclear fusion, billed as a potentially limitless, safe and cheap source.
The success comes as a culmination of a nearly two decade project.
After spending a billion euros ($A1.5 billion) and nine years on construction work, physicists working on a German project called the “stellarator” said on Thursday that they had briefly generated a super-heated helium plasma inside a vessel — a key point in the experimental process.
“We’re very satisfied,” said Hans-Stephan Bosch at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald.
“Everything went according to plan.” For all its promise, nuclear fusion has proven elusive and highly costly to achieve.”
The idea is to heat atoms to temperatures of more than 100 million degrees, so that their nuclei fuse.
The first plasma in the 16-metre-wide machine, from one milligram of helium gas heated by a 1.8-megawatt laser pulse, lasted one-tenth of a second and reached a temperature of about one million degrees, the institute said in a press release.
The team will next try to extend the duration of the plasma and to find out the best way of producing it.
Next year, it hopes to switch over to hydrogen, the actual target of the study, as opposed to helium.
