In a breakthrough experiment, nuclear fusion finally creates more energy than it uses

Doctors finally treated the sun bottle.

Researchers with the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, Calif., conducted a controlled nuclear fusion fire that resulted in net energy production. The long-awaited achievement, to be announced on December 13 by US Department of Energy officials, is the first lab to be able to simulate reactions in the sun in a way that comes to the experiment more energetically than the ingredient. .

“This is a record breaking,” says Gilbert Collins, a scientist at the University of Rochester in New York, who is a former NIF supporter but was not involved with recent research developments. “When I started in this field, fusion was always 50 years away…. By doing this, the landscape changed.

The power grid needs what a clean energy source provides. Nuclear fission reactors are used to generate heavy atoms, such as uranium, that release energy when they split into lighter atoms, including some that are radioactive. While it is comparatively easy to generate energy with fission, it is an environmental nightmare to handle the residual radioactive debris that can remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years.

Controlled nuclear fusion, on the other hand, does not produce as much long-lasting radioactive waste, but is technically much more difficult to achieve in the first place. In nuclear fusion, lighter atoms fuse together to create heavier ones. In the sun, that typically occurs when a proton, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, combines with other protons to form a nucleus.

Getting the atoms to fuse requires a combination of high pressure and heat to force the atoms tightly together. Gravity does a lot of work on the sun.

At the National Ignition Facility, 192 lasers were directed at the fuel ball to produce a small blast of energy that did the trick. The resulting burst of energy, although brief, instigates more movement than laser energy, says scientist Carolyn Kuranz of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not involved with the research. While the total energy released by the experiment has not yet been published, the 1.3 million joules of energy produced by the previous NIF experiment, which was noted for the first time, the team managed to ignite (exceeded) nuclear fusionSN: 8/18/21).

However, this latest fusion burst still does not have enough energy to run the laser power supplies and other experimental systems of the NIF.

“The net energy gain is relative to the energy in the light that shines on the target, not relative to the energy that comes into that light,” says University of Rochester physicist Riccardo Betti, who was also not involved. research “Now it’s up to scientists and engineers to see if we can turn the principles of physics into useful energy.”

Despite this, the potential crisis in technology is comparable to the invention of the first flight transistor or the Wright brothers, says Collins. “We now have a computerized workshop so we can use the environment to make progress faster,” he said.