When you gaze up at the stars at night, the distant lights you see are nuclear fusion reactions taking place throughout the universe as atoms fuse together under immense heat and pressure deep in the hearts of stars.
Patrick Burr, the UNSW nuclear engineer who is leading the project, says fusion is an incredible source of energy."We could really solve a lot of the problems that we're currently facing … with energy security, climate change, universal access to energy, and democratisation of energy."Nuclear power plants around the world use fission energy rather than fusion.
In the process of fusing atoms, you produce immense amounts of energy — four million times as much energy as burning coal. For decades, scientists have failed to come up with a commercially useful device, but that's changing — fast. They're trying to build what's known as a tokamak reactor — a donut-shaped device about the size of a small car that uses electromagnets to contain a kind of superheated gas called plasma.
The project is in its early stages and right now the students are working on designing the reactor and producing early prototypes of its components.