The brightest source of X-rays in the world is now at Lawrence Livermore; scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California have achieved a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research. The development, declared yesterday, was the first time achieved by scientists a promise of nuclear reactors, or, “net energy gain.”
That was performed using the world’s largest laser system and implied firing 192 powerful lasers at a capsule containing deuterium and tritium – two isotopes of hydrogen. Fusion occurs when two hydrogen atoms are again compelled by the heat and pressure the lasers generated, and during the infatuation, light and heat are produced. Most importantly, the generated power from the fusion reaction was higher than the power delivered by the lasers which is the most important accomplishment to achieve.
Dr. Kim Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which controls the NIF, described the result as “one of the biggest science breakthroughs of the twenty-first century.” She said, “This is a landmark moment that will be in the history books and perhaps mark a turning point in the scale of clean energy deployment.”
That is the reason this achievement will have profound meaning. Nuclear fusion, the energy-generating process in stars and the sun most exciting and most promising energy source for years. In contrast to nuclear fission on which most of today’s nuclear power stations are based, nuclear fusion does not produce long-lived radioactive waste and can yield practically infinite power from quite extensive fuel.
However, as it has been revealed by string of comments by experts, there is a long way to go before fusion power is tangible. Dr. Mark Herrmann, deputy director for fundamental weapons physics at Lawrence Livermore, said: “This is great science but it is also important to remember that the only thing that counts is when some power company starts delivering commercial electricity many decades from now.”
Therefore the problems that we are facing are still immense. This current experiment although was a pioneering approach yielded only a few microseconds of surplus energy. The process of scaling up the process to create cyclic, commerical quantities of energy are massive problems of engineering.
Still, these difficulties have had a shot in the arm with the breakthrough happen in the fusion and governments and private investors have shown a lot of interest again. The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced a $600 million plan to fast-track the progress of fusion technology and contribute to the development of this kind of energy, and several fusion companies said that they have had increased funding since the announcement by the DoE.
The accomplishment has also urged centre global competition to allusion commerialisation of fusion energy. China, which has been a keen investor in fusion research, said it will step up its own fusion programme in response to the NIF success. The bad news is that some EU officials are now publicly demanding the EU should spend more money on ITER and accelerate the program’s schedule — meaning more vast sums thrown down a darker future technology eddy.
The decision has been received with cautious optimism by the greens, because fusion may well be the answer to the climate problem. However, some activists have expressed concern that depending so much on fusion as the possible solution could be misleading, in essence they have called for more funding on existing power solutions such as solar and wind power solutions.
While the world needs to urgently find a solution to shift from the use of fossil fuel, discovery of fusion provides a silver lining to the cloud ahead. Although there are still many challenges left, what has been done at NIF shows that the underlying ideas of fusion energy are viable and can be used to propel the research and experiments in this potentially future-oriented branch of technology further.
