Feild Trip!

Ahh, always so good to escape the classroom. On this occasion we were going to the MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center. Though we seem to have miscalculated on the T stop that would best land us in the right neighborhood. It was a weird walk…

http://pixelcurse.com/photography/18-gorgeous-footprints-photographs

Albeit, not anywhere as dramatic as I just made it. Good times.

Okay, so after our jaunt to MIT, a very nice grad student walked us through the basics of the Alcator Project. Alcator C-Mod is a tokamak which is a toroidal (doughnut) shape that contains plasma. It looks like this:

http://www.generalfusion.com/magnetic_fusion.html

Plasma is the fourth state of matter. Fusion is the combining of two “light” elements (in this case, deuterium and tritium) to create a heavier element which creates nuclear energy. For Alcator C-Mod, the grad student told us that they only add deuterium to the tokamak  because they are examining the behavior of the plasma, instead of actually producing nuclear energy.

And why you ask?

Because nuclear fusion has the potential to produce large amounts of clean energy, though scientists have been working on this technology for a long time.

To push forward, a new project called ITER which stands for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor has been created. ITER will hopefully produce a huge amount of clean power. The structure is similar to Alcator but larger:

http://www.odec.ca/projects/2004/yeun4d0/public_html/ITER.htm

Here’s the website where you can read about ITER:

ITER: the world’s largest Tokamak.

Here is more information from Wikipedia, if you’re super-interested:

ITER – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

One more important note: the budget for this type of research has been drastically cut which affects all of the tokamaks, but especially our local one at MIT. The research they do is vital to learning how plasma performs during fusion. Here is the link to the petition website, please sign it to protest the funding cut!

The letter « Stand With Science.