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Major breakthrough in nuclear fusion energy development
14/12/2022
News
US scientists have announced a major breakthrough in the race to create nuclear fusion as a source of ‘near limitless’ energy.
Physicists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence International Laboratory (LLNL) in California say they have overcome a major barrier in terms of recreating nuclear fusion – producing more energy from a fusion experiment than was put in.
‘This is a historic achievement’, said LLNL Director Dr Kim Budil, which has taken over 60 years and international cooperation to achieve.
Nuclear fusion is commonly described as the ‘holy grail’ of energy production, as it is the process that powers the sun and other stars. Basically, it works by forcing pairs of light atoms (typically hydrogen) together, releasing lots of energy.
Whereas nuclear fission, used currently in nuclear power stations, is the opposite where heavy atoms are split apart. This process produces considerable waste and continues to generate a lot of radioactivity for a very long time.
Nuclear fusion is recognised to produce far more energy and only short-lived radioactive waste . Importantly, the process produces no greenhouse gases. The big challenge is that getting hydrogen ions to fuse into helium and release energy requires temperatures of millions of oC – conditions that are extremely hard to achieve and sustain.
The NIF finally achieved this elusive goal on 1 December 2022, focusing 2.5 MJ of laser light onto a tiny capsule of fusion fuel, sparking an explosion that produced 3.15 MJ of energy – ‘the equivalent of three sticks of dynamite’, explained Science magazine.
The result is a welcome shot in the arm for fusion researchers, who have long been criticised for ‘overpromising and underdelivering’. The NIF breakthrough shows it is possible, at least for a fraction of a second.
However, fusion power stations are still considered to be a distant dream – always decades away! Many fusion researchers favour the furnace-like tokamaks as a better design for commercial power because they can sustain longer fusion burns, using microwaves and particle beams to heat the fuel and magnetic fields to trap it. The leading tokamak device is the ITER reactor under construction in France – which is vastly over-budget and long overdue.
The NIF research is primarily targeted to create miniature thermonuclear explosions to ensure the US arsenal of nuclear weapons is reliable.
