A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy.
For the first time, a fusion reaction has achieved a record 1.3 megajoule energy output – and for the first time, exceeding energy absorbed by the fuel used to trigger it.
Although there’s still some way to go, the result represents a significant improvement on previous yields: eight times greater than experiments conducted just a few months prior, and 25 times greater than experiments conducted in 2018. It’s a huge achievement.
Physicists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [in California] will be submitting a paper for peer review.
Inertial confinement fusion involves creating something like a tiny star. It starts with a capsule of fuel, consisting of deuterium and tritium – heavier isotopes of hydrogen. This fuel capsule is placed in a hollow gold chamber about the size of a pencil eraser called a hohlraum.
Then, 192 high-powered laser beams are blasted at the hohlraum, where they are converted into X-rays. These X-rays implode the fuel capsule, heating and compressing it to conditions comparable to those in the center of a star – temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million Fahrenheit) and pressures greater than 100 billion Earth atmospheres – turning the fuel capsule into a tiny blob of plasma.
And, just as hydrogen fuses into heavier elements in the heart of a main-sequence star, so too does the deuterium and tritium in the fuel capsule. The whole process takes place in just a few billionths of a second. The goal is to achieve ignition – a point at which the energy generated by the fusion process exceeds the total energy input.
The experiment, conducted on 8 August, fell just short of that mark; the input from the lasers was 1.9 megajoules. But it’s still tremendously exciting, because according to the team’s measurements, the fuel capsule absorbed over five times less energy than it generated in the fusion process.
This, the team said, is the result of painstaking work refining the experiment, including the design of the hohlraum and capsule, improved laser precision, new diagnostic tools, and design changes to increase the speed of the implosion of the capsule, which transfers more energy to the plasma hotspot in which fusion takes place.
“Gaining experimental access to thermonuclear burn in the laboratory is the culmination of decades of scientific and technological work stretching across nearly 50 years,” said Thomas Mason, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This enables experiments that will check theory and simulation in the high energy density regime more rigorously than ever possible before and will enable fundamental achievements in applied science and engineering.”
Well, that was all totally beyond my comprehension level, but it sounds great! And, yes, it’s astounding that anything good is actually happening in California! So I’m guessing that they’ll figure out some way to decide that it’s bad for the environment and demand that it be stopped, so they can keep putting up windmills and solar panels and killing birds all over the place…
It’s all totally beyond my comprehension level too, Liz. But I love to know that real science goes on discovering.
This research will not be reported by the major media or the fact that 4th stage nuclear is almost ready to go. Not at all dangerous and it consumes its own waste product.
Cheap and plentiful energy for all is not wanted by the global elitists. Wait till even America’s poor start dying from the cold and heat, maybe then they’ll do something positive with these new technologies.
No, when the poor start dying they’ll just blame it on covid or climate change. And they’ll give themselves a pat on the back for reducing the population!