Major nuclear fusion breakthrough
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has recorded the biggest temperature and energy increase ever with a magnetised fusion experiment.
The NIF recently published its finding in the Physical Review journal, revealing its unique experimental setup increased the temperature of a so-called “hotspot” by 40%. It produced over three times the amount of energy of previous experiments.
Fusion power is the energy that fuels the universe’s stars, including our own Sun.
It is generated within the cores of these celestial bodies, where soaring temperatures and pressures result in explosions that produce more energy than necessary to sustain the process.
Energy scientists have long hypothesised that it might be possible to replicate this and gain a boundless source of clean energy. However, the community agrees that such an achievement could still be decades away — if it’s even possible.
The NIF’s fusion experiments initiate fusion reactions by shooting around 200 lasers at a tiny pellet of fuel made of heavier isotopes of hydrogen — like deuterium and tritium — to form “hotspots”.
The laser blasts create X-rays that implode the small capsule to produce extreme pressures and temperatures for the isotopes to fuse and release large stores of energy.
NIF senior scientist John Moody told Vice’s Motherboard that the magnetic field acted like a type of insulator.
“You have what we call the hot spot. It’s millions of degrees, and around it is just room temperature. All that heat wants to flow out because heat always goes from the hot to the cold and the magnetic field prevents that from happening,” Moody explained.
“When we go in, and we put the magnetic field on this hotspot, and we insulate it, now that heat stays in there, and so we’re able to get the hot spot to a higher temperature,” he continued.
“You get more [fusion] reactions as you go up in temperature, and that’s why we see this improvement in the reactivity.”
Through its experiments, the NIF has neared the brink of ignition — the point at which fusion reactions become self-sustaining in plasmas.
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