Most people in Cambridge don’t even know that one of the leading fusion experiments in the world is running a few yards away from their daily commute down Mass Ave.  Even fewer will ever have the unique opportunity to tour such a rare facility.  I and my classmates got our own very special tour of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center where they study plasma for energy research.  My favorite was the Alcator C-Mod tokamak experiment to observe the latest progress in an international effort to make controlled nuclear fusion possible. Fusion is so puzzling, intriguing, and valuable to our present and future that MIT has devoted an entire laboratory to exploring it.

Following the tour we had a discussion of the current state of nuclear energy and innovations shaping its future.  What are the ramifications of the recent incident at Japan’s Fukushima reactor? How will this affect the discussions on fission and fusion energy by forcing the nuclear discussion back in to the spotlight. We entered the Control room and this is where it gets more exciting. You could see all the techinical things going on and they even ran a test so we can see for ourselves.

Even what could be called mainstream fusion techniques still draw skepticism, but it’s easy to see why people find it so compelling. The magnetic nuclear fusion studied at MIT uses an abundant energy source (a form of hydrogen found in seawater), power plants would pack a lot of energy in a much smaller footprint than solar or wind, and any radioactive material could be handled relatively easily. The waste from today’s nuclear power plants, which split atoms (nuclear fission) to get usable energy, should have storage designed for tens of thousands of years while fusion would need 50-year repositories.

Devoted to nuclear fusion, the science of fusing atoms together to create energy. Although it’s largely outside the daily discussions on energy, fusion is still being actively pursued. There are other types of fusion being studied, but a tour of the facility introduced me to the fundamentals of magnetic fusion and some of the technical challenges.

Pictured here is the blue cylinder-shaped test reactor. Inside is a doughnut-shaped vessel measuring about 1 meter across in the middle. Researchers are able to fuse two hydrogen atoms to make helium but only for a few seconds. An interesting side note is that only a few blocks away is MIT’s nuclear research reactor built at the dawn of the atomic age to study nuclear fission, or splitting atoms to produce energy.

I had a great time during the tour, plus it’s always great wgen you get to learn something new for a change.