Understanding the fusion energy breakthrough announced by the U.S.
The Hindu
Bengaluru
U.S. government officials announced on December 13 that a federal facility had achieved a significant milestone in nuclear fusion research, to much fanfare. The feat puts us on the path to “zero-carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society”, energy secretary Jennifer Granholm said.
Does it?
Officials said that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), California, had conducted a fusion test on December 5 that produced 153% as much energy as went into triggering it.
NIF uses powerful lasers to heat and compress hydrogen nuclei. When the nuclei fuse, they release heat. When this heat is equal to or greater than the heat delivered to the container, the event is called ignition. The ratio of the output energy to the input delivered to the container is the gain.
In 2021, NIF reported that it had achieved a gain of 0.72, taking a big step closer to 1.
Now, it has reportedly achieved ignition with a gain of 1.53 with a yield of 3 megajoules. “The recent results from the NIF are a major achievement on the road to fusion energy,” Matthew Zepf, professor at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and a director of the Helmholtz Institute Jena, said.
A gain of 1 is called ‘scientific breakeven’ – “an important milestone in the development of fusion energy because it signifies that very significant (but not all) plasma-physics challenges have been retired,” a 2022 paper by U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) scientists wrote. A plasma is a gas of charged particles, ions in this case.
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