Today oil price and the hike is the major, which triggering a series of direct and indirect impact on our day to day life. However, a Japanese company engaged in a project to “create a sun on the Earth.” If successful, this venture will intensely affect the lives of most people in this universe. Once this is achieved, it will be the end of humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum and natural gas and begin an new era of cheap and limitless energy.The National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) near the town of Toki. It houses the Large Helical Device (LHD), which cost ¥50 billion to make and is the only one of its kind in the world. The machine is designed to replicate fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun.
Nuclear fission splits nuclei to create energy and nuclear fusion joins them to do the same thing. Now, we have to built the nuclear fusion receators. Japan, the European Union and the United States have made great efforts to modify and improve the machine. The Tokamak is still widely regarded as the most promising fusion device. The Tokamak has reached temperatures of 500 million degrees Celsius in experiments, more than 30 times hotter than the sun. The sun works as it is confined by gravitation but in a Tokamak use magnetic fields. The basic theory behind to create the sun on Earth.
"Replicating the fusion of helium and hydrogen that powers the sun, in earthly conditions, means generating temperatures beyond 100 million degrees Celsius," explains Yamada. "This creates plasma, the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids and gases."
Fusion power plants of the future, producing a million kilowatts, would need about a tenth of a ton of deuterium and 10 tons of lithium a year as fuel. Seawater covers over 70 percent of our planet and rates of extraction for hundreds of fusion reactors around the globe would never exhaust supplies.
Hydrogen gas is heated and injected into the machine. After reaching 10,000 C, the hydrogen molecules disintegrate into atoms. Then the parts of the atoms, the positive nucleus and the tiny negative electrons spinning around it, are unbound and create plasma.
"Once new materials have been invented, the way will be open to constructing fusion reactors able to generate electricity, using easily obtained resources that will never run out. The raw materials needed for creating plasma in fusion reactions, are lithium and deuterium, which can be extracted from seawater."
A demonstration reactor is expected to start producing electrical power from fusion energy in the 2030s. Then the next phase will be construction a new generation of fusion reactors. They are expected to start generating electric power, in place of current technologies, around the middle of this century.
In that distant future, when the world is again covered in ice, fusion plants, creating 'suns' all over the globe, would allow life on Earth to flourish for another 5 billion years, until the sun in the sky finally burns out."
Source: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nc20100929a1.html
