“Nobody likes us, we don’t care!” UK football fans will recognise the chant as the calling card of the fans of Millwall FC, who rejoice in their reputation as the hardest of hard nuts, feared by the followers of all other clubs. Which is a funny way to start a blog on nuclear fusion, most of whose exponents tend to be, to put it politely- in a very different place on the intellectual spectrum. But read on, gentle reader, read on.
LSS has always had a thing about nuclear fusion, that process whereby clashing hydrogen atoms should mimic the processes in the heart of the Sun, and thereby afford limitless supplies of clean, cheap energy. And recently, our early suspicions of all the money and effort thrown in over the last 70 years have been tempered by genuine reports of progress in the shape of short ignitions (LSS passim) OK, you’ve got the plasma nice and hot. But how do you hold there long enough to be any use. According to Darren Orf of Popular Mechanics, the answer is to use Tungsten. The South Korean KSTAR team have thrown away the carbon in their containment vessels and replaced it with this toughest, hardest of metals, normally used in things like light bulb filaments and the best knives. Now it will take its place at the cutting edge (another joke like that and you’re fired-ed) of what could be the most important research and development project on our planet this century.
Alright, Tungsten is an atom, not a molecule. Technically. But it’s hard, mate, as they say in South London. And thanks to it, we are ready to cast aside our earlier reservations and for the first time since about 1973, embrace hope.
thanks to P Seymour for this story
[1]https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a46278296/south-korea-artificial-sun-fusion/
#tungsten #wolfram #nuclear fusion #plasma
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