So we went on a field trip to Cambridge visiting MIT. They have a nuclear fusion center there, which made me a little nervous until I learned more about it and I guess it doesn’t really bother me anymore. We had a lecture with one of the grad students. He explained the process of nuclear fission and nuclear fusion to us, even though professor Shatz has explained this process to us several times, science is not a strong suite of mine and I’v been having a hard time grasping it. His power point actually made it a lot easier for me to understand what and how their trying to create self-sustained plasma, I’m still having a hard time explaining the process though. We then took a tour of C-mod, a large tokamak dedicated to studying plasma and the proecss of nuclear fusion.
The place was cool, wish we could have actually gone in and seen the tokamak but we couldn’t. We did see another cool machine that had been shut down for lack of funding. Have no idea what its purpose was, he tried explaining it but all his words seemed like pig latin to be.
This nuclear fusion center is funded by the government, and they are considering shutting down the plant to place their funding into the largest tokamak being created in France called ITER. This to me is a catch 22 because we don’t want to have to shut down C-Mod at MIT, but a larger more international tokamak reactor could be the device we need to achieve self sustaining plasma. The government can’t fund both so they may have to make a sacrifice.