December 2022 Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the National Ignition Facility (NIF) have achieved a laser fusion breakthrough. Recently, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, USA (Lawrence...
December 2022 Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the National Ignition Facility (NIF) have achieved a laser fusion breakthrough. Recently, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced that they have once again completed a fusion ignition experiment, releasing more energy than was fed in, setting a new record for last December's experiment .
The U.S. scientists responsible for the fusion breakthrough say they have repeated the feat, and this time with more energy.
Last December, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) shocked the world by announcing the completion of a nuclear reaction experiment that produced more energy than it put in. This is the holy grail of science in the quest for unlimited clean energy to end the age of fossil fuels.
In last December's experiment, the lab used 192 super-intense lasers to deliver 2.05 megajoules of energy into a capsule smaller than a pea containing frozen particles of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, and tritium. It produced a fusion energy output of 3.15 megajoules, about 150 percent of the 2.05 megajoules consumed by the laser, with the output energy greater than the input.
Public information officer Paul Lane said in an e-mailed statement this past Monday, "We can confirm that the yield of this experiment is higher than the December 2022 experiment." But he did not disclose specific numbers.
He added that the lab plans to report the resulting data at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications.
Nuclear fusion has been touted as a clean, abundant and safe source of energy that could eventually free humanity from its dependence on coal, crude oil, natural gas and other hydrocarbons that are contributing to the global climate crisis, and would pave the way for a clean energy future.
However, there is still a long way to go before nuclear fusion becomes viable on an industrial scale to power homes and businesses.
Currently, nuclear power plants around the world use nuclear fission-the splitting of heavy nuclei-to generate electricity.
Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, combines two light hydrogen atoms into a heavier helium atom, releasing a lot of energy in the process. This is what happens inside stars, including our sun.
On Earth, fusion reactions can be triggered by heating hydrogen to extreme temperatures in specialized equipment. Like fission, fusion contains no carbon in its operation and has other key advantages:it poses no risk of nuclear disaster and produces far less radioactive waste.
While the result is a net energy gain, it also requires access to 300 megajoules of energy to power the laser. In contrast to the data from last December's experiment - which produced 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy output - 300 megajoules of energy is almost 100 times more than the energy released. That's clearly a long way from green energy fusion.
