IIHE invited seminar: Fusion: an important energy option for the future. Principles, Recent Progress and Outlook

abstract: Fusion, the process that provides the energy to all stars in the universe requires temperatures of several hundred millions degrees - an impossibility at first sight. Nevertheless, fusion reactions between hydrogen isotopes are realized several times a day in specialized laboratories all over the world. The principles of confinement and heating of the plasma and of extracting energy will be presented together with recent important progress and an outlook for the future. Fusion has the potential to play an important role in the planned transition to a decarbonized energy system. Reaching this goal only with renewables is not so simple, mainly due their intermittency, and a sustainable and clean energy source is needed as a backup. As fossil energy is absent in such a system per definition, and while nuclear fission is not well accepted, this role could be fulfilled by fusion that has the promise to be a safe, dispatchable, nearly inexhaustible and environmentally friendly source of energy.