Eni has announced that the CFS company, held by the Italian group as the largest shareholder and by MIT of Boston, has successfully conducted the first test of a supermagnete that should contain and manage the nuclear fusion of deuterium and tritium.
CFS plans to build the first experimental reactor by 2025 and to produce energy for the grid as early as the next decade.
"Magnetic confinement fusion, a technology never tested and applied at an industrial level until now, is a safe, sustainable and inexhaustible energy source, which reproduces the principles through which the Sun generates its own energy, guaranteeing an enormous quantity of zero emissions and representing a turning point in the path of decarbonization ". Thus Eni in a press release announces the success of the first test of a supermagnete to contain and manage nuclear fusion. CFS, the note adds, plans to "inject fusion energy into the electricity grid in the next decade".
The test involved the use of new generation electromagnets to manage and confine the plasma, that is the mixture of deuterium and tritium brought to very high temperatures by electromagnetic wave beams, and demonstrated the possibility of ensuring the initiation and control of the casting process, demonstrating the high stability of all key parameters. Based on the test results, CFS confirms its "roadmap", which envisages the construction by 2025 of the first experimental plant with net energy production, called SPARC, and subsequently that of the first demonstration plant, ARC: the first plant capable of to feed fusion energy into the electricity grid which, according to the roadmap, will be available in the next decade.SPARC will be realized by assembling in a toroidal configuration (a donut called "tokamak") a total of 18 magnets of the same type as the one being tested. In this way it will be possible to generate a magnetic field of intensity and stability necessary to contain a plasma of hydrogen isotopes at temperatures of the order of 100 million degrees, conditions necessary to obtain the fusion of atomic nuclei, with the consequent release of a very high amount of energy. In practice, the same phenomenon that occurs in stars such as the Sun. Eni has been involved for some time in this area of research and in 2018 acquired a share of the capital of CFS to develop the first plant that will produce energy thanks to fusion. At the same time, theThe company has signed an agreement with the Plasma Science and Fusion Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to jointly carry out research programs on plasma physics, fusion reactor technologies, and next-generation electromagnet technologies.
Descalzi, for Eni the merger is central to decarbonising
. "For Eni, magnetic confinement fusion plays a central role in technological research aimed at the decarbonization process, as it will allow humanity to have large quantities of energy produced in a safe, clean and virtually inexhaustible way and without any emission of greenhouse gases, forever changing the paradigm of energy generation and contributing to an epochal turning point in the direction of human progress and quality of life ". Eni's CEO Claudio Descalzi writes in a press release, "The development of innovative technologies - added descalzi - is one of the pillars on which Eni's strategy is based, aimed at completely reducing emissions from industrial processes and products, as well as the key to a successful and just energy transition.The extraordinary result obtained during the test demonstrates once again the strategic importance of our research partnerships in the energy sector and consolidates our contribution to the development of game changer technologies ".
