Nuclear fusion

An elusive goal in the global race to create clean, green nuclear energy has been achieved by US scientists. So how significant is the "breakthrough" ...

Finally, the size of the net energy gain needs to be much larger. Meanwhile, China is working on its own fusion project known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). This is known as the "wall-plug efficiency" — or the amount of energy drawn from the grid that is deposited on the fusion fuel, versus the amount generated. "ITER has a goal of demonstrating break-even in the early 2030s," Professor Baldwin said. That's because although the reaction itself generated an excess of energy, significantly more energy was required to power the lasers that delivered energy to the reaction, said Ken Baldwin, a professor of physics at ANU. Professor Hole says it may be difficult to generate large-scale continuous power from the inertial confinement method used in the experiment, as it relies on pulses of energy, or creating a series of explosions. "There are a lot of steps needed to translate that from a lab experiment to a power plant." The other technique confines deuterium and tritium under extreme heat – hundreds of millions of degrees – in a magnetic field in a [52 megajoules of energy](/news/2022-02-10/nuclear-fusion-record-step-towards-low-carbon-energy/100818972) for five seconds – a record for the amount of energy extracted from nuclear fusion, although the result fell short of net energy gain. The latest experiments ramped up the energy output to 3.15 megajoules, which is more than the 2.05 megajoules of energy delivered by the lasers. The process of fission has been commercially viable for decades and is used in conventional nuclear power plants to generate about 10 per cent of the world's power. For decades, scientists have tried to harness fusion energy, which is the process of making energy using the same phenomenon that powers the Sun.

Scientists have ignited a fusion reaction that – for the first time in a laboratory – generated more energy than it consumed. What does that mean for us?

Hole is referring to the hydrogen bomb, which essentially uses the explosion from a standard nuclear bomb to cause a fusion reaction. You need to generate and deal with the enormous temperatures and energies required to start the fusion reaction. As for safety, fusion power plants do not come with the meltdown risk of standard nuclear plants, says the International Atomic Energy Agency. This does not leave much time for commercial fusion reactors to be perfected and installed. However, there are inherent safety concerns about a power plant dealing with plasma hotter than the core of the sun. The sun uses its enormous gravity to jam them together, igniting its fusion furnace. Pound for pound, fusing a kilogram of hydrogen could generate nearly 4 million times the energy as burning a kilogram of coal. Go back to Einstein’s equation: energy (e) = mass (m) multiplied by the speed of light squared (c2). At Lawrence Livermore, scientists encased a small chunk of hydrogen – the same fuel the sun burns – in a pellet before hitting it with 192 giant lasers. Fusion combines two atomic nucleuses (the hard centre of atoms) into one. What today really represents is a proof of concept – to demonstrate this is possible. “We haven’t really got close to this before – the previous best mark was getting 70 per cent out of what they put in.

Proponents say lasers can be used to generate energy but others say fusion power unlikely to 'save us from climate change'

HB11 is still “four orders of magnitude” away from achieving net energy gain. “Fusion produces neutrons and neutrons can be used to transmute elements – so you can get nuclear explosives such as plutonium-239 and uranium-233 and uranium-235,” Diesendorf said. But beyond that, fusion might provide limitless energy for centuries to come,” Baldwin said in a statement. “You can also produce lots of tritium … “To generate electricity, what you’ve got to do is to have thousands and thousands … “Lasers both heat the fuel …

Harvard scientist Adam Cohen breaks down breakthrough that might prove major turning point in clean energy efforts — but not any time soon.

But if you look at the electrical energy that was used to drive the lasers to produce that light, that was vastly more than the energy that was released in the reaction, and if you imagine trying to build an actual power plant, then you would have to take the heat and the neutrons that were released from this reaction and use them to make steam and use that steam to power turbines. In this case, there was more energy released from the reaction than in the photons in the light that went into compressing and heating this capsule. Three megajoules of energy is about the energy you would get from eating a jelly doughnut, about 500 It’s the basis of the sun, and it’s the basis of thermonuclear weapons — hydrogen bombs. So just to give you a sense of the scale — the energy released in this shot was about three megajoules. So, 500 kilocalories is a lot, but this is a multi-billion-dollar facility and it can fire one of these shots every eight hours. COHEN: Mass comes in discrete chunks, and if you add up the mass of a helium and the neutron that comes flying out too in this process, there’s a little bit of a difference. So the primary purpose of the facility is really for simulating the conditions in those bombs and understanding the physics there. So a little bit of the mass of the hydrogen isotopes that are getting fused together goes into energy, which comes out of this reaction. The primary purpose of the National Ignition Facility is not actually renewable energy; it’s around stockpile stewardship. And when the hydrogen isotopes fuse to make that helium nucleus in the process of them sticking to each other, that releases a lot of energy. [fusion](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/science/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html) with a net energy gain, the U.S.

In today's newsletter: US scientists this week announced progress on a potentially revolutionary source of renewable energy. But there's still a way to go.

[thanks to a first-half penalty from Lionel Messi](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/dec/13/argentina-croatia-world-cup-semi-final-match-report) and two further goals from Julián Álvarez set up by Messi. Nimo [In this week’s TechScape](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/techscape-twitter-files-elon-musk), Alex Hern read “the Twitter Files” so you don’t have to. [spent 33 hours in an NHS hospital](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/13/like-a-horrific-board-game-33-hours-inside-an-nhs-in-crisis), and their findings unveiled just how deep the crisis in the health service has gotten. [Sign up for TechScape here](https://www.theguardian.com/info/2022/sep/20/sign-up-for-the-techscape-newsletter-our-free-technology-email). And so long as it doesn’t become an excuse for ignoring the urgency of the only realistic solution to the climate crisis, a rapid transition to renewables, it’s not like it presents much competition for funding: the total investment in private companies working on fusion ever is about $4.8bn, the [Fusion Industry Association says](https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/copy-of-about-the-fusion-industry). “You’re not a billionaire worthy of the name unless you’re investing in ambitious devices. There are huge hurdles to overcome.” Kim Budil of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said yesterday that “a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant”. It is cumulative emissions that matter to avoiding the worst impact of the climate crisis, and so even if fusion plants are online at scale by 2050, that is too late. “So, OK, the energy put in has resulted in a larger amount of energy coming out – but the big caveat is that it depends where you draw your perimeter: powering the lasers themselves required way more energy. [the power source for Iron Man’s suit](https://www.iter.org/mag/6/47), or the basis of the [Mr Fusion Home Energy Reactor](https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Fusion) that powers the, er, flux capacitor in Back to the Future. Beyond the obvious virtue of a net energy yield, “It’s low carbon, it offers baseload [that is, consistent] energy unlike renewables at the moment, and you don’t have to worry about it melting down or producing nuclear waste to the same extent,” Bluck said. Today’s Grinch-like (but also very interesting!) newsletter, with Dr Michael Bluck, director of the Centre for Nuclear Engineering at Imperial College London, is about the long distance from a remarkable breakthrough to an energy utopia – and why fusion won’t help us get to net zero.

Researchers at the US National Ignition Facility created a reaction that made more energy than they put in.

“A result like this will bring increased interest in the progress of all types of fusion, so it should have a positive impact on fusion research in general,” says Luce. “I don’t want to give you a sense that we’re going to plug the NIF into the grid: that is definitely not how this works,” she said during a press conference in Washington DC. NIF was not designed with commercial fusion energy in mind — and many researchers doubt that laser-driven fusion will be the approach that ultimately yields fusion energy. Once the reactor starts working towards fusion, currently planned for 2035, it will aim to reach ‘burning’ stage, “where the self-heating power is the dominant source of heating”, Luce explains. Nevertheless, Campbell thinks that its latest success could boost confidence in the promise of laser fusion power and spur a programme focused on energy applications. In addition to boosting the laser’s power by around 8%, scientists reduced the number of imperfections in the target and adjusted how they delivered the laser energy to create a more spherical implosion. It took more than a decade, “but they can be commended for reaching their goal”, says Stephen Bodner, a physicist who formerly headed the laser plasma branch of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. On one level, it’s about proving what is possible, and many scientists have hailed the result as a milestone in fusion science. The facility used its set of 192 lasers to deliver 2.05 megajoules of energy onto a pea-sized gold cylinder containing a frozen pellet of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The laser’s pulse of energy caused the capsule to collapse, reaching temperatures only seen in stars and thermonuclear weapons, and the hydrogen isotopes fused into helium, releasing additional energy and creating a cascade of fusion reactions. Ultimately, scientists scrapped efforts to replicate that shot, and rethought the experimental design — a choice that paid off last week. “It’s an incredible accomplishment,” says Mark Herrmann, the deputy programme director for fundamental weapons physics at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which houses the fusion laboratory.

Nuclear fusion reactions power the sun and other stars. In a fusion reaction, 2 light nuclei of atoms merge to form a single heavier nucleus. The leftover mass ...

Here’s how nuclear fusion works to make stars shine. Makes a great gift!](https://earthskystore.org/products/earthsky-lunar-calendar) [Human World](https://earthsky.org/human-world/) Fusion can involve many different elements in the periodic table. The leftover mass becomes energy. Here’s how nuclear fusion works to power the sun and stars. [a milestone for climate and clean energy](https://apnews.com/article/science-business-california-climate-and-environment-d6cb7b048ce916e04be809482fd9cbe6).

The promise of abundant, clean energy powered by nuclear fusion is one big step closer thanks to a new experiment. The results are a historic scientific ...

[pursuing different techniques](https://theconversation.com/nuclear-fusion-hit-a-milestone-thanks-to-better-reactor-walls-this-engineering-advance-is-building-toward-reactors-of-the-future-178870). government [completed construction of the National Ignition Facility in 2009](https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/nif-construction), it was the most powerful laser facility in the world, able to deliver [1 million joules of energy to a target](https://www.llnl.gov/news/national-ignition-facility-achieves-unprecedented-1-megajoule-laser-shot). [The Conversation](https://theconversation.com) under a Creative Commons license. [very challenging to sustain](https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4865400), and any [small imperfection in the capsule or fuel](https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6587/ab49f4) can increase the energy requirement and decrease efficiency. [abundant in sea water, tritium is much rarer](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fusengdes.2010.11.040). In the meantime, there are [other methods available to produce the needed fuel](https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/nnsa-achieves-record-number-tritium-extraction-operations). [invented in 1960](https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/284158_townes.html). [released 3 million joules](https://www.llnl.gov/news/national-ignition-facility-achieves-fusion-ignition). The 2 million joules it produces today is 50 times more energetic than the [next most powerful laser on Earth](https://www.lle.rochester.edu/index.php/omega-laser-facility-2/). If you can maintain these conditions for a long enough time, the [fuel will fuse and release energy](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-021-01485-9). 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. 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.

Key takeaways · On December 5, U.S. scientists at the National Ignition Facility in California generated more energy from a nuclear fusion reaction than they put ...

And in that century, it took so many different advances that ultimately came together to the point that we could replicate that fusion activity in this controllable way in a laboratory.” The LLNL relied largely on public grants and funding to make the nuclear energy breakthrough a reality. You have to be able to produce many, many fusion ignition events per minute, and you have to have a robust system of drivers to enable that.” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm believes that both private and public research is required to make fusion happen. With a few decades of research and investment…could put us in a position to build power plants.” But then again, the prospect of fusion energy was idealistic 50 years ago. A gain of 1.5 sounds small, and in energy terms, it is. The net energy gain from the fusion reaction is the first in human history. But last week for the first time, they designed this experiment so that the fusion fuel stayed hot enough, dense enough and round enough for long enough that it ignited. “192 laser beams entered from the two ends of the cylinder,” he said, “and struck the inner wall…. He noted that the process began with a spherical cylinder containing a small capsule, “about half the diameter of a BB.” But running a fusion reaction that requires less energy in than it puts out, a process called ignition, has eluded scientists…

Tuesday's announcement of net power gain from a nuclear fusion reaction is a major scientific breakthrough. At the same time, it will be more than a decade ...

That funding is a critical step for fusion to be commercial by the late 2030s, where most fusion industry watchers are aiming, Patel told CNBC, but it is not enough. "To put it another way, it is this moment when >1x is achieved that will make it into the history books." Also, the targets must have an efficient energy absorption rate and be mass producible," Linden told CNBC in a statement. Those concepts require new facilities to be built, so a breakthrough there will take until later this decade," Patel said. 5 experiment was the first time an energy gain over 1.0 was achieved — specifically, an energy gain of 1.5. But to make commercial fusion with lasers will require an energy gain of approximately 100x, Patel said. A little more than a year ago, in August 2021, the same laboratory had another breakthrough that Hurricane billed as "a Wright Brothers moment." Previously this had only been achieved in the detonation of nuclear weapons," explained [Tammy Ma](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tammy-ma-8050832/), a laser-plasma physicist at the lab, was waiting in an airport when her boss called her. The industry will need a whole lot more firsts The laser was designed to give us as much juice as possible to make this incredible conditions possible," Herrmann said. To get there, there will have to be many more technical breakthroughs beyond what was celebrated on Tuesday — and the money to fund them.

Let's take a look at the details of exactly has been achieved. The researchers used a high-power laser to fire 2.05 million Joules of energy into a tiny target ...

[leads the way](https://theconversation.com/nuclear-fusion-how-excited-should-we-be-177161) in many areas related to constructing a power reactor. It has had to tackle many of the same problems in order to design and build [the ITER facility](https://www.iter.org/), which also aims to produce gain and is nearing completion in the south of France. Another major limitation is that the NIF laser requires 300 million Joules of electrical input to provide two million Joules of laser light output – less than 1% efficiency. Another challenge for laser-driven fusion is bringing down the cost of the targets. Magnetic confinement involves levitating fusion fuel in the form of a plasma (charged gas) using a large magnetic field. The physics of laser-driven fusion is so complex and multifaceted that computer simulations of it often take more time than actual experiments. The targets used on NIF also rely on a technique known as Also the burst of energy was not in the form of electricity, but a pulse of energetic particles. While the fusion reactions released more energy that was put in to the target, this doesn’t take into account the far greater quantities of energy needed to fire the laser that was used to drive the experiment. Energy is released in intense bursts lasting much less than a billionth of a second, which must be repeated a few times every second to produce an average power output comparable to modern fossil-fuel based power stations. The NIF building comprises not one but 192 individual laser beams, which bounce back-and-forth over a distance of more than a kilometre before they reach the target. This corresponds to a gain of around 1.5 (2.05 x 1.5 = 3.1).