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HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
Thermonuclear installation. History of invention and production
Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us Scientists have been dealing with the problem of using thermonuclear reactions for energy purposes for many years. Unique thermonuclear installations have been created - the most complex technical devices designed to study the possibility of obtaining colossal energy, which is released so far only during the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. Scientists want to learn how to control the course of a thermonuclear reaction - the reaction of combining heavy hydrogen nuclei (deuterium and tritium) with the formation of helium nuclei at high temperatures - in order to use the energy released during this for peaceful purposes, for the benefit of people.
There is very little deuterium in a liter of tap water. But if this deuterium is collected and used as fuel in a thermonuclear installation, then you can get as much energy as from burning almost 300 kilograms of oil. And to provide the energy that is now obtained by burning conventional fuel mined in a year, it would be necessary to extract deuterium from the water contained in a cube with a side of only 160 meters. The Volga River alone carries about 60000 such cubic meters of water to the Caspian Sea every year. For a thermonuclear reaction to occur, several conditions must be met. Thus, the temperature in the zone where heavy hydrogen nuclei combine should be approximately 100 million degrees. At such a huge temperature, we are no longer talking about a gas, but about a plasma. Plasma is such a state of matter when, at high gas temperatures, neutral atoms lose their electrons and turn into positive ions. In other words, plasma is a mixture of freely moving positive ions and electrons. The second condition is the need to maintain a plasma density in the reaction zone of at least 100 billion particles per cubic centimeter. And, finally, the main and most difficult thing is to keep the course of the thermonuclear reaction for at least one second. The working chamber of a thermonuclear installation is toroidal, similar to a huge hollow bagel. It is filled with a mixture of deuterium and tritium. Inside the chamber itself, a plasma coil is created - a conductor through which an electric current of about 20 million amperes is passed. Electric current performs three important functions. First, it creates plasma. Secondly, it heats it up to one hundred million degrees. And, finally, the current creates a magnetic field around itself, that is, it surrounds the plasma with magnetic lines of force. In principle, the lines of force around the plasma should keep it suspended and prevent the plasma from touching the walls of the chamber. However, keeping the plasma suspended is not so simple. Electric forces deform the plasma conductor, which does not have the strength of a metal conductor. It bends, hits the wall of the chamber and gives it its thermal energy. To prevent this, more coils are put on top of the toroidal chamber, which create a longitudinal magnetic field in the chamber, which pushes the plasma conductor away from the walls. Only this is not enough, since the current-carrying plasma conductor tends to stretch, to increase its diameter. The magnetic field, which is created automatically, without extraneous external forces, is also called upon to keep the plasma conductor from expanding. The plasma conductor is placed along with the toroidal chamber into another larger chamber made of a non-magnetic material, usually copper. As soon as the plasma conductor makes an attempt to deviate from the equilibrium position, in the copper sheath, according to the law of electromagnetic induction, an induction current arises, which is opposite to the current in the plasma. As a result, an opposing force appears, which repels the plasma from the walls of the chamber. To keep the plasma from contact with the walls of the chamber by a magnetic field was proposed in 1949 by A.D. Sakharov, and a little later the American J. Spitzer. In physics, it is customary to give names to each new type of experimental setup. A structure with such a winding system is called a tokamak - short for "toroidal chamber and magnetic coil". In the 1970s, a thermonuclear facility called "Tokamak-10" was built in the USSR. It was developed at the Institute of Atomic Energy. I.V. Kurchatov. On this installation, the temperature of the plasma conductor was 10 million degrees, the plasma density was not lower than 100 thousand billion particles per cubic centimeter, and the plasma retention time was close to 0,5 seconds. Today's largest installation in our country, Tokamak-15, was also built at the Moscow Research Center Kurchatov Institute.
All created thermonuclear installations so far only consume energy for plasma heating and creation of magnetic fields. A thermonuclear plant of the future, on the contrary, should release so much energy that a small part of it could be used to maintain a thermonuclear reaction, that is, to heat the plasma, create magnetic fields and power many auxiliary devices and devices, and give the main part for consumption in the electrical network In 1997, in the UK, on the JET tokamak, the input and received energy coincided. Although this, of course, is not enough for the self-sustaining of the process: up to 80 percent of the energy received is lost. In order for the reactor to work, it is necessary to produce five times more energy than is spent on heating the plasma and creating magnetic fields. In 1986, the countries of the European Union, together with the USSR, the USA and Japan, decided to jointly develop and build by 2010 a sufficiently large tokamak capable of producing energy not only to maintain thermonuclear fusion in plasma, but also to obtain useful electrical power. This reactor was named ITER, short for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. By 1998, they managed to complete the design calculations, but due to the failure of the Americans, changes had to be made to the design of the reactor in order to reduce its cost. You can let the particles move naturally, and give the camera a shape that follows their path. The camera then has a rather bizarre appearance. It repeats the shape of a plasma filament that appears in the magnetic field of external coils of a complex configuration. The magnetic field is created by external coils of a much more complex configuration than in a tokamak. Devices of this kind are called stellarators. Torsatron "Hurricane-3M" has been built in our country. This experimental stellarator is designed to contain plasma heated to ten million degrees.
Currently, tokamaks have other serious competitors using inertial thermonuclear fusion. In this case, several milligrams of the deuterium-tritium mixture are enclosed in a capsule 1-2 mm in diameter. Pulsed radiation of several tens of powerful lasers is focused on the capsule. As a result, the capsule instantly evaporates. It is necessary to put 2 MJ of energy into radiation in 5-10 nanoseconds. Then the light pressure will compress the mixture to such an extent that a thermonuclear fusion reaction can take place. The energy released during the explosion, equivalent in power to an explosion of one hundred kilograms of TNT, will be converted into a more convenient form for use - for example, into an electric one. An experimental facility of this type (NIF) is being built in the US and should start operating in 2010. However, the construction of stellarators and inertial fusion facilities also encounters serious technical difficulties. Probably, the practical use of thermonuclear energy is not a question of the near future. Author: Musskiy S.A.
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