Inside the Nuclear Fusion Facility That Changed the World

Shortly after 1 a.m. on the morning of Dec. 5, 2022, Dave Schlossberg, an experimental physicist at National Ignition Facility (NIF), was woken by a phone call. A fusion experiment using NIF’s massive lasers was scheduled to go off that night. Going to bed a few hours earlier, he had told Alex Zylstra, one of the physicists on his team, to call him “if anything interesting happens.” Now Zylstra was seeing data unlike anything the facility had registered before. They seemed to show that the scientists had achieved a monumental step in a decades-long quest to replicate the energy source that powers the sun. Schlossberg picked up. “I think something interesting happened,” Zylstra said. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Researchers at this Livermore, Calif., facility had spent more than 13 years trying and failing to attain fusion ignition, meaning that the reaction outputs more energy than scientists put into it. Some expert observers thought it would never work. Yet, there, in the facility’s experimental database was the evidence. At 1:03:50 a.m., NIF’s 192 powerful laser beams had plowed 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy onto a small gold cylinder, which converted that ultraviolet radiation into powerful X-rays that enveloped a peppercorn-sized diamond capsule containing two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium. For the briefest of instants, the interior of that capsule collapsed to 100 times the density of lead, forci...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change Climate Is Everything healthscienceclimate Source Type: news