Have you ever stopped to think that one day we will be close to controlling the sun? Because it is about to happen. How did we get to this point? Well, in our race for a clean, abundant, and safe source of energy, scientists in the United States have created an artificial sun that can provide us with infinite, trapped, and very hot energy.
Where did this idea of an artificial sun come from?
It all started with nuclear fusion energy, which is the same as the sun, and has the potential to be our main energy solution for the future. However, as everything in life is not so easy, turning this idea into reality will require overcoming some complicated technical challenges, one of the main ones being the structural integrity of the reactors themselves.
How so? Inside these reactors, the plasma is trapped in vacuum chambers, also known as tokamaks. From there, this plasma generates very high-energy neutrons that, when they interact with the walls of the reactor, create helium atoms. But what’s the problem? These atoms never stay still; on the contrary, they look for places with low structural resistance to lodge themselves and then create bubbles, cracks, and, eventually, ruptures, meaning that nothing is contained inside. Until, that is, researchers in the USA recently found a way to get around this challenge.
What made the artificial sun possible
In late 2024, scientists at MIT discovered a way to redirect these tricky atoms to safer locations. The solution was to add a tiny fraction, really tiny, just 1%, of a ceramic material called iron silicate to the metal alloy in the reactor walls.
What this material does is make it more attractive to helium atoms, which means that instead of accumulating at the edges, the atoms disperse evenly throughout the ceramic, preventing the material from weakening (making nuclear fusion energy possible, as in this recent experiment). According to Professor Ju Li, one of the people responsible for the project:
“We want to disperse the ceramic phase evenly in the bulk metal to ensure that all grain boundary regions are close to the dispersed ceramic phase so that we can protect them. The two phases need to coexist so that the ceramic does not agglomerate or completely dissolve in the iron”.
What does this mean for our clean energy future?
If we can one day master and scale nuclear fusion, we could truly have an artificial sun in our hands, in addition to, of course, innovating several concepts in clean energy. This is because a fusion reactor can run on fuel extracted from seawater and generate clean energy on a large scale, without all the risks associated with nuclear fission.
However, for this to happen, each material must be strong. MIT researchers themselves have already created a metallic powder with these characteristics that is compatible with industrial 3D printers. Not stopping there, they have even founded a startup to produce these materials on a large scale.
“We have made powders that are compatible with existing commercial 3D printers and are pre-loaded with helium-absorbing ceramics”, Li explained.
We know that this idea of an artificial sun has always seemed distant, almost mythological, but as we can see, science is slowly revealing that this future is getting closer. All of this progress at MIT shows that the answer to one of the biggest energy questions we currently have seems to be hidden in some specific points of certain materials. And it seems that it was not only the US that came out ahead when it comes to nuclear energy; China, through nuclear fusion, is planning a large laser project to dominate global energy.
