{"id":135585,"date":"2022-02-14T00:23:05","date_gmt":"2022-02-14T08:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/the-morning-after-european-fusion-reactor-shatters-energy-production-record"},"modified":"2022-02-14T00:23:05","modified_gmt":"2022-02-14T08:23:05","slug":"the-morning-after-european-fusion-reactor-shatters-energy-production-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/the-morning-after-european-fusion-reactor-shatters-energy-production-record","title":{"rendered":"The Morning After: European fusion reactor shatters energy production record"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-morning-after-european-fusion-reactor-shatters-energy-production-record2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor in the UK has generated the highest level of sustained energy ever <a href=\"https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/nuclear-fusion-reactor-crushes-previous-record-for-energy-produced-105940012.html\">from atom fusion<\/a>. On December 21st, 2021, the \u201ctokamak\u201d reactor produced 59 megajoules of energy during a five-second fusion pulse. That\u2019s double what it created back in 1997. (Yes, I know energy is not created or destroyed, but you get what I mean!) <\/p>\n<p>The JET reactor is the flagship experimental device of the European Fusion Program, funded by the EU. It\u2019s mainly designed to prove scientists\u2019 modeling efforts, with an eye on future, bigger experiments with a much larger ITER reactor in France, set to start fusion testing in 2025.<\/p>\n<p>JET hit a Q value of 0.33, meaning it produced about a third of the energy put in. The highest Q value achieved so far is 0.7 by the US Department of Energy\u2019s National Ignition Facility, but it only hit that figure for 4 billionths of a second. The goal with ITER is to reach a Q factor of 10 or greater. Fun fact: ITER isn\u2019t an acronym but means \u201cthe path\u201d in Latin. And now you know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor in the UK has generated the highest level of sustained energy ever from atom fusion. On December 21st, 2021, the \u201ctokamak\u201d reactor produced 59 megajoules of energy during a five-second fusion pulse. That\u2019s double what it created back in 1997. (Yes, I know energy is not created or [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[873,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nuclear-energy","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}