Abstract
Although not yet developed at the commercial stage, nuclear fusion technology is still being considered as a very promising solution for the coverage of the future global energy needs. This is mainly due to its environmental acceptability, and to the fact that, contrary to nuclear fission, its by-products cannot be used in nuclear warfare. Since research in nuclear fusion for the production of energy started about 60 years ago, the most studied reaction has been the fusion of tritium with deuterium, which produces very energetic neutrons (17.5 MeV). For this reaction to occur, the reactants have to be at extremely high temperatures (several hundred million degrees), constituting a plasma that has to be simultaneously maintained and confined. In this chapter, we study the steps that are needed for the construction of nuclear fusion reactors able to maintain these self-sustained plasmas. The most developed reactors are the magnetically confined Tokamak at the ITER (Cadarache, France) and the inertially confined system located at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the USA. It is important to remark that in spite of all the research efforts devoted to nuclear fusion, it is estimated that it will still take a few decades for this technology to be available at the utility scale.
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Guerrero-Lemus, R., Martínez-Duart, J.M. (2013). Nuclear Fusion. In: Renewable Energies and CO2 . Lecture Notes in Energy, vol 3. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4385-7_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4385-7_12
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