The U.S. Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Is a Huge Milestone —But Unlimited Clean Energy Is Still Decades Off

In some ways, scientists at the Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) have been a bit down and out. The $3.5 billion facility was designed to replicate the atom-smashing reactions that occur inside the sun, a difficult process that requires enormous amounts of heat and pressure, and could theoretically solve humanity’s energy and climate woes. But technical obstacles put NIF a decade behind in its goal of achieving fusion “ignition,” that is, getting more energy out of one of those reactions than it put in. The facility uses the largest lasers in the world to try and do that, focusing energy on a tiny capsule filled with hydrogen isotopes. But those lasers, based on 1980s technology, were in some ways already dated by the time they were installed, taking hours to cool down each time they are fired. And much of the team’s resources aren’t even devoted to achieving the holy grail of nuclear fusion, instead being focused on weapons research. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] On Dec. 5—after decades of effort—scientists at the laboratory finally created a controlled fusion reaction that released more energy than the researchers blasted into it, an important step toward the long sought-after goal of generating almost unlimited power from clean, plentiful fusion energy. (Notably we have uncontrolled fusion reactions down pat—they’re the basis of hydrogen bombs). After bringing in an external ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change energy Explainer healthscienceclimate Source Type: news