Nuclear fusion

The National Lab and Department of Energy announced a nuclear reaction that generated more energy than was required to power it -- a first for humankind.

"Now, the privately funded fusion industry will take the next steps, turning experimental results like this into a viable source of clean, safe energy," Holland told CNBC. "That is, you must show that a fusion experiment can produce more energy than it uses. The researchers at Lawrence Livermore have done this for the first time ever." [19 percent of its utility-scale electricity generation](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3) from those nuclear power plants in 2021, according to the U.S. "For the first time on Earth, scientists have confirmed a fusion energy experiment released more power than it takes to initiate, proving the physical basis for fusion energy. But it's proven extremely challenging to sustain a fusion reaction here on earth, and scientists have been trying for decades. This will lead fusion to be a safe and sustainable energy source in the near future." I think it's moving into the foreground and probably, with concerted effort and investment, a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant." "You have to have a robust system of drivers to enable that. "Reaching ignition in a controlled fusion experiment is an achievement that has come after more than 60 years of global research, development, engineering and experimentation." [National Ignition Facility](https://lasers.llnl.gov/) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Fusion is the way that the sun makes power, but recreating a useful fusion reaction here on earth has eluded scientists for decades.

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.

SCIENTISTS studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday (Dec 13) that they had crossed a major ...

Scientists in California managed for the first time to generate more electricity from a fusion reactor than they needed to trigger it. PHOTO: AFP. Updated.

However, the Lawrence Livermore test uses some of the most powerful lasers ever built: They are big, costly and not readily available for mass deployment, making it difficult to convert this technical accomplishment into a successful business. With fusion, there is no long-lived radioactive waste – that is a stark contrast to the fission technology currently used at nuclear reactors to generate electricity. “Yes, we have fusion, but at what cost?” “We have to take a positive but sceptical approach,” said Mr Andrew Sowder, a senior technical executive at the independent, non-profit EPRI, formerly known as Electric Power Research Institute. The reaction produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, compared with the 2.1 megajoules used to power the lasers, a net energy gain the scientists have been trying for decades to achieve. It is a stunning moment for a technology that has failed for nearly half a century, and it comes as leaders of the world’s 10 biggest economies and dozens of smaller countries have

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.

The fusion record was achieved at the National Ignition Facility at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which ignites fusion fuel with an array ...

The inner part of this capsule rapidly compresses to nearly a hundred times denser than lead—which forces the deuterium and tritium inside to reach the temperatures and pressures needed for fusion. [ Culham, England, set a record](https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/science-and-technology/2022/10/many-scientists-see-fusion-as-the-future-of-energy-and-theyre-betting-big) for the most fusion energy ever released during a single experimental run. In August 2021, NIF reported its best-ever experimental run up to that point: 1.32 megajoules of released fusion energy for 1.92 megajoules of inputted laser energy. If that tiny fraction ignites, the energy it releases is enough to ignite the rest of the fuel. NIF’s method of sparking the nuclear fuel starts with a peppercorn-size pellet that contains a frozen mix of deuterium and tritium, two heavier isotopes of hydrogen. In terms of energy released, nuclear reactions pack roughly a million times more punch than chemical reactions do—and are vastly harder to get going. In a tiny blaze lasting less than a billionth of a second, the fusing atomic nuclei released 3.15 megajoules of energy—about 50 percent more than had been used to heat the pellet. The spark isn’t massive, but it doesn’t have to be: All it has to do is ignite a small fraction of the gasoline-air mixture. While NIF’s reaction produced more energy than the reactor used to heat up the atomic nuclei, it didn’t generate more than the reactor’s total energy use. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, fusion reactors have had the same basic goal: create as hot and dense a plasma as possible, and then confine that material for long enough that the nuclei within it reach ignition. Being able to study the conditions of ignition in detail will be “a game-changer for the entire field of thermonuclear fusion,” says Johan Frenje, an MIT plasma physicist whose laboratory contributed to NIF’s record-breaking run. [nuclear fusion, the power source of the stars](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/nuclear-fusion-powers-stars-could-it-one-day-electrify-earth), to generate abundant clean energy here on Earth.

On Tuesday, December 13, the United States Department of Energy announced a breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology. For the first time, ...

So, they have a formula now, but who is to say that it is the winning formula? I want to emphasize this is a milestone—but in the quite literal sense that a milestone is just a thing that you pass when you’re on a path. When you have a pellet, you’re only using a stick of dynamite worth of energy at any time. It’s important to remember that NIF is a physics experiment, not a power plant. So how this works is that they take a pellet the size of a grain of rice or a peppercorn, and in very coarse terms, you shoot 100 superpowered lasers at it. That is the very future-forward-looking goal that people have had since the 1950s. There is not a massive storage problem of spent fuel. But if you have a net energy gain, which is what they’re reporting, that would be the first big milestone toward commercial power. It takes a train car of coal to power a block of houses for a year. Your spent fuel is just harmless nuclei and are not radioactive nuclei themselves. On Tuesday, December 13, the United States Department of Energy announced a breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology. This reaction liberates an enormous amount of energy, factors of a million times more energy per particle than any chemical reaction or combustion reaction.

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.

The breakthrough in nuclear fusion is likely to spark investment in the technology that could transform the global energy landscape with nearly limitless ...

Investors are on track to pour more than $1 billion into the technology this year. [breakthrough in nuclear fusion](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/nuclear-fusion-energy-will-likely-take-decades-to-reach-commercial-viability) is likely to spark investment in the technology that could transform the global energy landscape with nearly limitless clean energy. While that’s down from 2021, a boom year when spending exceeded $2.6 billion, it’s almost triple the amount from 2020 and the trend is clearly increasing, according to Chris Gadomski, chief nuclear analyst for BloombergNEF.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., where the milestone known as fusion ignition was achieved, have been studying ...

[appeal of nuclear fusion to researchers](https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-scientists-set-nuclear-fusion-energy-world-record-11644440648?mod=article_inline), as well as investors and companies, stems from its [potential as a clean-energy alternative](https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-fusion-startup-lands-1-8-billion-as-investors-chase-star-power-11638334801?mod=article_inline) to sources that involve the burning of fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gases. The broad [a breakthrough in research on nuclear fusion](https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough-reported-by-scientists-at-u-s-lab-11670944595?mod=article_inline), bringing them one step closer to possibly changing the future of clean energy.

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…

Fusion researchers received an early holiday present with the confirmed measurement of a laser-induced fusion reaction that produced more energy than it ...

One of the main obstacles to commercialization is the overall efficiency of the process. “This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon, abundant fusion energy powering our society,” Granholm said. Instead, she thinks “a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant.” She also remarked that another fusion technique, called magnetically confined fusion, is in some ways closer to commercialization (see After a thorough analysis, the team demonstrated that the burn was self-sustaining, a situation that is called “ignition.” This achievement was roundly applauded, but the gain was only 0.72—putting it below the fabled gain-of-one threshold that much of the fusion community was waiting for. “From the previous result my judgement was that reaching the gain-of-one threshold was simply a matter of time—although this has come somewhat faster than I expected,” Zepf said. The excitement stems in part from the potential that the new result could have for clean energy. [Viewpoint: Fusion Turns Up the Heat](https://physics.aps.org/articles/v15/67)). The beams heat the cylinder to a few million degrees Celsius, causing it to release a torrent of x rays that heat and crush the capsule. Researchers outside of NIF have expressed admiration for the breakthrough. As a result, the fuel—a mixture of two forms of heavy hydrogen, deuterium and tritium—can briefly become hotter and denser than the Sun. The team reported yesterday at a press briefing that one of its laser-powered fusion reaction trials produced 1.5 times more energy than it consumed. PST on December 5, 2022, when NIF researchers fired 2 MJ of energy at a fuel target and recorded a fusion energy release of just over 3 MJ.

A new advancement in nuclear fusion was announced on Tuesday that has left scientists hopeful for the future of clean energy and climate change—here's why.

[According](https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs) to the International Atomic Energy Agency, fusion is one of the “most environmentally friendly sources of energy” because it doesn't produce any carbon dioxide or other harmful emissions. The lab produced 59 megajoules of energy in five seconds—the most amount of energy created in that amount of time. Companies like Focused Energy in the private sector have been committed to advancing nuclear fusion. According to Callahan, the startup has plans to conduct experiments that blast lasers directly on the fuel source. The experiment put in 2.05 megajoules and and generated 3.15 megajoules. [Focused Energy](https://www.focused-energy.world/), told [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2022/12/13/national-lab-unlocks-nuclear-fusion---true-breakthrough-novelty-act-or-both/?sh=282d9ea968c7). [National Lab Unlocks Nuclear Fusion — True Breakthrough, Novelty Act, Or Both?](https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2022/12/13/national-lab-unlocks-nuclear-fusion---true-breakthrough-novelty-act-or-both/?sh=740010e868c7) (Forbes) [Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough: Can The Quest For Clean Energy Finally Help Tackle The Climate Crisis?](https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2022/12/13/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-can-the-quest-for-clean-energy-finally-help-tackle-the-climate-crisis/?sh=610146c07d7e) (Forbes) [Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/science/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html) (The New York Times) For example, Vancouver, Canada-based General Fusion [announced](https://generalfusion.com/post/general-fusion-exceeds-core-technology-performance-targets-with-plasma-and-compression-prototypes/) Monday that they’re receiving great results in their progress of building a machine to produce nuclear energy in the UK. [1930s](https://www.euro-fusion.org/fusion/history-of-fusion/). However, it wasn’t until the scientists in California completed their fusion experiment that more energy was generated than put in. This development could also help with nuclear weapon research, according to Granholm. [NASA](https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/).