Historic scientific achievement: The United States has announced a “major breakthrough” in energy fusion

US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced on Tuesday that a group of researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of California has reached a “important scientific discovery” in the decades-long quest for energy fusion, the energy that powers the sun and stars.

Scientists managed to produce for the first time more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to start itan operation that is called net energy gain, as reported by the Department of Energy.

According to Granholm and other officials, the result will pave the way for advances in national defense and the future of clean energy. Granholm appeared with Livermore investigators at a press conference in Washington.

“This is a landmark achievement for National Ignition Agency researchers and staff who have dedicated their careers to investigating how fusion ignition could become a reality, and this milestone will no doubt spur even more breakthroughsGranholm said, adding that the trailer will “go down in the history books.”

Appearing alongside Granholm, White House Science Advisor Arati Prabhakar called the fusion ignition “a terrific example of what persistence can achieve” and “a unimaginable marvel of engineering“.

What is Fusion?

Fusion is the thermonuclear reaction that powers the Sun and other stars: the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium. The mass of helium is slightly less than that of the original hydrogen atoms.

Therefore, according to Einstein’s emblematic equation E=mc2, this mass difference it becomes a rush of energy.

A fusion that could take place in a controlled way on Earth could mean such an energy source did not produce greenhouse gasessuch as coal and oil, nor dangerous long-lived radioactive waste, such as current nuclear power plants.

How does merging happen without a star?

To date, most fusion projects have used donut-shaped reactors, known as tokamak.

In these reactors, the hydrogen gas becomes hot enough for the electrons are released from hydrogen nuclei creating what is known as plasma: clouds of positively charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons.

Magnetic fields trap the plasma inside the donut shape and the nuclei fuse, releasing each other energy in the form of neutrons flying outward.

This Tuesday’s announcement, however, implies a different approach.

The National Ignition Agency (NIF) is made up of 192 giant lasers which fire simultaneously at a metal cylinder the size of a pencil eraser.

The cylinder, heated to approximately 5.4 million degrees Fahrenheit, vaporizes, generating an implosion of X-rays, which in turn heats and compresses a ball-sized pellet of frozen deuterium and tritium pellets, two heavier forms of hydrogen.

The implosion dissolves hydrogen into heliumcreating the fusion.

What progress has been made in laser melting so far?

The main goal of the NIF, built at a cost of $3.5 billionis to conduct experiments that help the United States maintain its nuclear weapons without testing nuclear explosions.

Its backers also say it could advance merger research that could lead to viable commercial power plants.

However, NIF was hardly a merger at first.

In 2014, scientists from Livermore finally reported their successbut the energy produced then was tiny: the equivalent of what a 60-watt light bulb consumes in five minutes.

Last year, Livermore scientists reported a huge leap, a burst of energy — 10 quadrillion watts of power — equal to 70 percent of the energy of laser light incident on the hydrogen target.

But the explosion — essentially a miniature hydrogen bomb — it only lasted 100 trillionths of a second.

A report from Financial Times since last Sunday he has suggested that Livermore would announce that in the most recent experiment the fusion energy produced exceeded the amount of laser energy that hit the hydrogen target.

Why does this happen, the fusion reaction had to be self-sustainingthat is, the stream of particles flowing outward from the hot spot in the center of the pellet heated the surrounding hydrogen atoms and caused them to fuse together.

What are the barriers to fusion energy?

An important caveat is that the claim focuses on the laser energy hitting the hydrogen target.

NIF lasers are extremely ineffectivewhich means that only a small fraction of the energy used to power the lasers actually reaches the beams themselves.

Newer technology, such as solid-state lasers, would be more effective, but still a long way from 100% fusion; to be practical, the fusion energy output must be at least several times that of the input lasers.

Does this announcement mean that we will soon have cheap fusion energy?

No.

Even if scientists figured out how to generate bigger fusion explosions, there would still be huge engineering hurdles.

The NIF experiments studied one explosion at a time.

A practical fusion power plant using this concept would require a machine gun rhythm of laser bursts with new hydrogen targets snapping into position for each burst.

Then the torrents of neutrons ejected from fusion reactions they should be converted into electricity.

The laser complex occupies a building the size of three football fields – too big, too expensive, and too inefficient for a commercial power plant.

should have develop a manufacturing process for mass production precise hydrogen targets.

Source: AP and The New York Times