Nuclear fusion is a fact – Americans achieved a self-sustaining reaction
What does this mean for the future of energy?
In a huge announcement in the scientific field of energy, American scientists of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made, revealing how they carried out the first nuclear fusion reaction with a positive sign of energy. This means that the reaction produced more energy than it consumed during ignition, making it self-sustaining.
More specifically, in the December 5 experiment, the researchers used 192 lasers to ignite a cylinder containing frozen hydrogen, which was surrounded by diamond. The reaction produced X-rays, which hit the fuel (deuterium and tritium) with 2.05 megajoules of energy. Then the resulting reaction resulted in a neutron wave with a yield of 3.15 megajoules. The energy difference is equivalent to only 68 grams of TNT, but it was enough to meet the criteria of fusion ignition.
Simply put, for the first time a fusion reaction produced more energy than it consumed, a key point for a self-sustaining reaction with a positive sign.
The US Department of Energy is quick to point out that many improvements are needed before nuclear fusion reactors can finally be practical enough to power humanity. Scientists need to improve the number of reactions per minute, simplify the process and make it easily repeatable. Of course scale must also be considered, since a reactor would need to power enough households to justify its existence.
No timeline has been announced before nuclear fusion can be used for humanity’s needs, but the scientists’ success has accelerated that timeline by 50-60 years from what was previously predicted. In other words, we may see the first commercial use of a nuclear fusion reactor in our lifetime.
