New finding may explain heat loss in fusion reactors

Computer models have not been able to predict how the hot, electrically charged gas inside a fusion reactor behaves under the intense heat and pressure required to make atoms stick together, which has been one of the biggest obstacles to making fusion power practical and realizing its promise of virtually limitless and relatively clean energy.

Maintaining a sufficiently high temperature and pressure to enable the atoms to overcome their resistance to one another is the key to making fusion work, or getting deuterium atoms to stick together to form helium and release a significant amount of energy in the process.

However, there are a variety of kinds of turbulence that have the potential to stir up this boiling soup of particles and dissipate some of the intense heat. A major challenge has been figuring out exactly how this turbulence works and how to overcome it.