The 2 million joules it produces today is 50 times more energetic than the next most powerful laser on Earth. government completed construction of the National Ignition Facility in 2009, it was the most powerful laser facility in the world, able to deliver 1 million joules of energy to a target. There are a number of pieces of the fusion puzzle that scientists have been steadily improving for decades to produce this result, and further work can make this process more efficient.įirst, lasers were only invented in 1960. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CC BY-SA What needs to be improved? Machinery used to create the powerful lasers, like these pre-amplifiers, currently requires a lot more energy than the lasers themselves produce. This result has shown that fusion ignition is possible, but it will take a lot of work to improve the efficiency to the point where fusion can provide a net positive energy return when taking into consideration the entire end-to-end system, not just a single interaction between the lasers and the fuel. While the laser energy of 2 million joules was less than the fusion yield of 3 million joules, it took the facility nearly 300 million joules to produce the lasers used in this experiment. While a gain of 1.5 is, I believe, a truly historic scientific breakthrough, there is still a long way to go before fusion is a viable energy source. How big a deal is this result?įusion energy has been the “holy grail” of energy production for nearly half a century. That is a gain of about 1.5, smashing the previous record of a gain of 0.7 achieved by the facility in August 2021. This triggered a fusion reaction that released 3 million joules. 5, 2022, the National Ignition Facility shot a pellet of fuel with 2 million joules of laser energy – about the amount of power it takes to run a hair dryer for 15 minutes – all contained within a few billionths of a second. This ratio is called gain.Īnything above a gain of 1 means that the fusion process released more energy than the lasers delivered. To assess the success of a fusion experiment, physicists look at the ratio between the energy released from the process of fusion and the amount of energy within the lasers. Researchers then hope their equipment survived the heat and accurately measured the energy released by the fusion reaction. The fuel and canister get vaporized within a few billionths of a second during the experiment. If you can maintain these conditions for a long enough time, the fuel will fuse and release energy. When the lasers hit the canister, they produce X-rays that heat and compress the fuel pellet to about 20 times the density of lead and to more than 5 million degrees Fahrenheit (3 million Celsius) – about 100 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. The technique used at the National Ignition Facility involved shooting 192 lasers at a 0.04 inch (1 mm) pellet of fuel made of deuterium and tritium – two versions of the element hydrogen with extra neutrons – placed in a gold canister. Department of Energy/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The fuel is held in a tiny canister designed to keep the reaction as free from contaminants as possible. Government’s National Ignition Facility in California have demonstrated, for the first time, what is known as “fusion ignition.” Ignition is when a fusion reaction produces more energy than is being put into the reaction from an outside source and becomes self-sustaining. Since the speed of light is enormous, converting just a tiny amount of mass into energy – like what happens in fusion – produces a similarly enormous amount of energy. The difference in mass is released as energy, as described by Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc 2, where energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. What happened in the fusion chamber?įusion is a nuclear reaction that combines two atoms to create one or more new atoms with slightly less total mass. WATCH: Scientists announce fusion energy breakthrough, possible game-changer for climateīut just how significant is the development? And how far off is the long-sought dream of fusion providing abundant, clean energy? Carolyn Kuranz, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan who has worked at the facility that just broke the fusion record, helps explain this new result. 13, 2022, that for the first time – and after several decades of trying – scientists have managed to get more energy out of the process than they had to put in. American scientists have announced what they have called a major breakthrough in a long-elusive goal of creating energy from nuclear fusion.
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