![]() ![]() In contrast, nuclear fission can be controlled (known as a moderated fission reaction), and this energy can be captured and re-distributed as electrical power. The entire multi-stage explosive reaction happens on the order of microseconds. This Wikipedia page lists various methods currently being developed.Ī thermonuclear weapon does indeed use nuclear fusion - at these very high temperatures - but the fusion reaction (secondary stage) only happens because a fission reaction (primary stage) precedes it to set up the conditions needed for fusion. ![]() This is where the current research & development is happening. To successfully capture the energy of nucluear fusion, we need to control the fusion process and sustain it for a much longer time. The Sun can achieve fusion with "only" $1.5 \times 10^7 K$ because of its sheer bulk and intense pressure at the core. The conditions needed for nuclear fusion here on Earth involve extremely high temperature - on the order of $10^8$ K. “We now have a laboratory system that we can use as a compass for how to make progress very rapidly,” he says.The key difficulty in fusion power is sustaining a controlled nuclear fusion reaction. “Now it’s up to the scientists and engineers to see if we can turn these physics principles into useful energy.”ĭespite that, it’s a potential turning point in the technology comparable to the invention of the transistor or the Wright brothers’ first flight, says Collins. “The net energy gain is with respect to the energy in the light that was shined on the target, not with respect to the energy that went into making that light,” says University of Rochester physicist Riccardo Betti, who was also not involved with the research. She predicted that pilot projects for power plants based on the fusion approach will be built in the “coming decades.”īut this latest fusion burst still didn’t produce enough energy to run the laser power supplies and other systems of the NIF experiment. It took about 300 million joules of energy from the electrical grid to get a hundredth of the energy back in fusion. “These recent results NIF are the first time in a laboratory anywhere on Earth we were able to demonstrate more energy coming out of a fusion reaction than was put in,” NIF physicist Tammy Ma said at the news conference. The new result far surpassed the 1.3 million joules of energy produced by an earlier NIF experiment that marked the first time the team managed to ignite nuclear fusion. About 4 percent of that fuel was fused in the process. Intense gravity does much of the work in the sun.Īt the National Ignition Facility, 192 lasers directed at a small capsule filled with deuterium and tritium, heavy types of hydrogen, provided a blast of energy that did the trick instead. Getting atoms to fuse requires a combination of high pressure and temperature to squeeze the atoms tightly together. In the sun, that typically occurs when a proton, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, combines with other protons to form helium. In nuclear fusion, light atoms fuse together to create heavier ones. ![]() While it’s comparatively easy to generate energy with fission, it’s an environmental nightmare to deal with the leftover radioactive debris that can remain hazardous for hundreds of millenia.Ĭontrolled nuclear fusion, on the other hand, doesn’t produce such long-lived radioactive waste, but it’s technically much harder to achieve in the first place. The fission reactors now used to generate nuclear energy rely on heavy atoms, like uranium, to release energy when they break down into lighter atoms, including some that are radioactive. With this achievement, the landscape has changed.”įusion potentially provides a clean energy source. “Since I started in this field, fusion was always 50 years away…. “This is a monumental breakthrough,” says physicist Gilbert Collins of the University of Rochester in New York, who is a former NIF collaborator but was not involved with the research leading to the latest advance. ![]()
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