In 2022, researchers at the US National Ignition Facility made a breakthrough in laser-powered fusion reactions, with their process producing more energy than it consumed.
The Indirect Drive ICF Collaboration team members who led the research say that this achievement is the result of over 50 years of research and demonstrates that laboratory fusion, based on fundamental physics principles, is possible. Fusion is the merging of two or more atoms to form a larger atom, releasing energy in the process. If harnessed and scaled up, nuclear fusion could provide an abundant and inexhaustible source of clean energy, without the greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels or the radioactive waste of nuclear fission.
The laboratory-based reactions are still small-scale, unlike the fusion reactions that power the Sun and stars. Heat is required to fuse atoms on Earth, and in this particular fusion technology, a powerful burst of light is used to deliver the heat. The experiments involve bombarding a capsule containing a tiny 220 micrograms of deuterium and tritium fuel with 192 high-powered lasers, which raises the pressure to 600 billion atmospheres and the temperature to 151 million °C (272 million °F). These conditions cause the fuel to implode, with the deuterium and tritium atoms fusing into helium and releasing energy.
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In the December 2022 experiment, 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy were fired into the fuel, resulting in 3.15 MJ being released, meaning that the reaction produced roughly 1.5 times more energy than was delivered into the fuel. The new papers describe how the researchers managed to achieve this, including by adjusting the fuel mix, eliminating defects in the capsule walls, increasing the mass of the capsule, raising laser energies, and using more fuel.
Passing the ignition threshold represented a big breakthrough for fusion research, and since then, researchers have fired more energetic lasers and produced even more energy in several experiments. The team reports the results of one of these experiments from mid-2023, which generated 3.88 MJ of energy from the same 2.05 MJ input, producing about 1.9 times the energy injected, the highest yield to date.
It should be noted, however, that the lasers require a significant amount of energy, much more than the US national energy grid produces at any time, with 500 trillion watts being used in these experiments. There is still a long way to go before these fusion reactions can generate more energy than is used to start them.
Martin Freer, a nuclear physicist at the University of Birmingham, acknowledges that there is a chance that fusion will become a reality, but stresses that the scientific challenges are steep. While nuclear fusion offers clean energy, it is not an immediate solution to the climate crisis, and commercial nuclear fusion facilities are still decades away. “We need to halve global carbon emissions by 2030 to combat the climate crisis, and fortunately, we already have renewable energy technologies that can help us achieve this.”
However, the results needed to be thoroughly checked and it takes time.
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Reference:
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