The Future Of Fusion? Meet The Stellarator

The parts of a stellarator, from inside to the outside, broken down. There’s a lot that goes into a single device.

Power and energy are essential parts of our everyday life. Every time you turn on a light, you’re using power. If you’re reading this online, you’re using energy. If you’re watching a video — you guessed it — you need energy. So that means that with so many people needing power and energy, we’re brought into a world that’s demanding more and more power. What’s more, getting this power is the hard part.

So humans came up with this idea of using one of the processes most commonly seen in the stars: nuclear fusion. Stars typically do this to gain their fuel, and the process is pretty simple and quick (at least, for a big gaseous body like a star). Here’s a quick rundown on how power transfer works when concerning nuclear fusion.

1. Two elements have their respective makeup fused together, and reform. In a deuterium and tritium fusion, the two elements reforms into a helium atom and a neutron.
2. The “extra” mass left over is reconverted into the kinetic energy of the neutron. This is what you get from Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc². Here, the energy equals the mass times the speed of light squared.

Deuterium is found pretty commonly, about on part per every 6,500 of seawater. Tritium is less common, but is still available. Because these two elements are the most easily accessible, they’re what we use…