“These nuclear reactions are of a different nature from the ones we know and use in fission reactors,” Bécoulet said in an interview with Mariella Frostrup on Times Radio. He clarifies that fusion differs greatly from the fission reactions that most people imagine when they think of nuclear energy. “What we have seen today is a further confirmation that the technologies we are now embarking on with ITER are good ones,” Bécoulet said in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s PM news show.ĭespite the promising developments, the public is still often wary of the term “nuclear.” In Star Power, Bécoulet offers a concise and accessible primer on fusion energy, explaining the science and technology of nuclear fusion and describing the massive international scientific effort to achieve commercially viable fusion energy. This week’s announcement from JET paves the way for Bécoulet’s team to further their work with ITER and provides crucial knowledge for the design of the project, where researchers aim to replicate the fusion processes of the Sun to create energy on Earth. As the Head of Engineering for ITER-the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a nuclear fusion research and engineering demonstration project currently being constructed in France-Bécoulet is working on the very frontier of a field that could, in relatively short time, change the way the world consumes energy. Their most recent experiments have produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds, doubling the energy produced by the lab’s similar tests back in the late 1990s.Īlain Bécoulet, author of Star Power, is an expert on this science. Oxford’s JET (Joint European Torus) nuclear lab, currently the largest magnetic fusion device operating on Earth, released findings demonstrating that they have far surpassed the world record for the amount of energy they can extract in a sustained nuclear fusion reaction. This week, nuclear fusion researchers in the UK took global efforts one step closer to that ultimate goal.
If nuclear fusion-the process that makes the stars shine-could be domesticated for commercial energy production, the world would gain an inexhaustible source of energy that neither depletes natural resources nor produces greenhouse gasses. Nuclear fusion research tells us that the Sun uses one gram of hydrogen to make as much energy as can be obtained by burning eight tons of petroleum. Recent developments offer a path toward harnessing nuclear fusion energy for the grid, as explained in Alain Bécoulet’s Star Power If you can’t find the resource you need here, visit our contact page to get in touch.Įstablished in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.Ĭollaborating with authors, instructors, booksellers, librarians, and the media is at the heart of what we do as a scholarly publisher. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. International Affairs, History, & Political Science.MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide.
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