US scientists confirm ‘major breakthrough’ in nuclear fusion

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Scientists have confirmed a major breakthrough has been made that could pave the way for abundant clean energy in the future after more than half a century of research into nuclear fusion.

Researchers at the US National Ignition Facility in California said fusion experiments had released more energy than was pumped in by the lab’s enormous, high-powered lasers, a landmark achievement known as ignition or energy gain.

The technology is far from ready to turn into viable power plants – and is not about to solve the climate crisis – but scientists hailed the breakthrough as evidence that the power of the stars can be harnessed on Earth.

Dr Arati Prabhakar, the policy director at the White House Office of Science and Technology, said: “Last week … they shot a bunch of lasers at a pellet of fuel and more energy was released from that fusion ignition than the energy of the lasers going in. This is such a tremendous example of what perseverance really can achieve.”

Fusion energy raises the prospect of plentiful clean power: the reactions release no greenhouse gases nor radioactive waste by-products. A single kilogram of fusion fuel, which is made up of heavy forms of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium, provides as much energy as 10m kilograms of fossil fuel. But it has taken 70 years to reach this point.

Speaking at the announcement on Tuesday, Jill Hruby, of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), said the US had “taken the first tentative step towards a clean energy source that could revolutionise the world”.

The National Ignition Facility is a vast complex at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, near San Jose. It was built to perform experiments that recreate, briefly and in miniature, the processes unleashed inside nuclear bombs, enabling the US to maintain its nuclear warheads without the need for nuclear tests.

But the experiments are also stepping stones towards clean fusion power. To achieve the reactions, researchers fire up to 192 giant lasers into a centimetre-long gold cylinder called a hohlraum. The intense energy heats the container to more than 3m degrees celcius – hotter than the surface of the sun – and bathes a peppercorn-sized fuel pellet inside in X-rays.

The X-rays strip the surface off the pellet and trigger a rocket-like implosion, driving temperatures and pressures to extremes only seen inside stars, giant planets and nuclear detonations. The implosion reaches speeds of 400km per second and causes the deuterium and tritium to fuse.

Each fusing pair of hydrogen nuclei produces a lighter helium nucleus, and a burst of energy according to Einstein’s equation E=mc2. Deuterium is easily extracted from seawater, while tritium can be made from lithium which is found in the Earth’s crust.

In the latest experiment, researchers pumped in 2.05 megajoules of laser energy and got about 3.15MJ out – a roughly 50% gain and a sign that fusion reactions in the pellet were driving further fusion reactions. “The energy production took less time than it takes light to travel one inch,” said Dr Marvin Adams, at the NNSA.

Immense hurdles remain, however, in the quest for fusion power plants. While the pellet released more energy than the lasers put in, the calculation does not include the 300 or so megajoules needed to power up the lasers in the first place. The NIF lasers fire about once a day, but a power plant would need to heat targets 10 times per second. Then there is the cost of the targets. The ones used in the US experiment cost tens of thousands of dollars, but for a viable power plant, they would need to cost pence. Another issue is how to get the energy out as heat.

Dr Kim Budil, the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said with enough investment, a “few decades of research could put us in a position to build a power plant”. A power plant based on alternative technology used at the Joint European Torus (JET) in Oxfordshire could be ready sooner, she added.

“In some senses everything changes; in another, nothing changes,” said Justin Wark, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford and the director of the Oxford Centre for High Energy Density Science. “This result proves what most physicists always believed – fusion in the laboratory is possible. However, the obstacles to be overcome to make anything like a commercial reactor are huge, and must not be underestimated.”

He said that asking how long it could take to overcome the challenges was like asking the Wright brothers how long it would take to build a plane to cross the Atlantic just after their maiden flight. “I understand that everyone wants to think of this as being the great solution to the energy crisis. It is not, and whoever says it is with any certainty is misleading.

“It is highly unlikely that fusion will impact on a timescale sufficiently short to impact our current climate change crisis, so there must be no let up on our efforts in that regard.

“The latest results also show that the basic science works – the laws of physics do not prevent us from achieving the goal – the problems are technical and economic. As Niels Bohr, the Nobel prize-winning atomic physicist once said: ‘Prediction is very difficult, especially when it is about the future.’”

Dr Mark Wenman, a reader in nuclear materials at Imperial College London, called the achievement a “fantastic scientific breakthrough – something we have not achieved in 70 years of trying”. But he said: “Challenges remain of how you can get the energy out of the system, how you can sustain the energy for long enough to be useful, how you scale up that energy and whether the energy can be cheap enough to compete with other sources.”

[madd0c0t0r2]

Immense hurdles remain, however, in the quest for fusion power plants. While the pellet released more energy than the lasers put in, the calculation does not include the 300 or so megajoules needed to power up the lasers in the first place. The NIF lasers fire about once a day, but a power plant would need to heat targets 10 times per second. Then there is the cost of the targets. The ones used in the US experiment cost tens of thousands of dollars, but for a viable power plant, they would need to cost pence. Another issue is how to get the energy out as heat.

Dr Kim Budil, the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said with enough investment, a “few decades of research could put us in a position to build a power plant”. A power plant based on alternative technology used at the Joint European Torus (JET) in Oxfordshire could be ready sooner, she added.

“In some senses everything changes; in another, nothing changes,”

Fusion power, two decades away.

[Dominus Atheos]

I always get suspicious of research org press releases. They get paid to do their research mostly though donations, and one of the best ways drum up interest and get more donations is by announcing a breakthrough by press release. I just don't even believe any medical research I hear anymore unless there is a pill in my hand.

On a scale of 1-5, how real is this?

[ray245]

I always get suspicious of research org press releases. They get paid to do their research mostly though donations, and one of the best ways drum up interest and get more donations is by announcing a breakthrough by press release. I just don't even believe any medical research I hear anymore unless there is a pill in my hand.

On a scale of 1-5, how real is this?

It's real but with major caveats. Proving it can work is one thing, making it practical is an entirely different research.

[Broomstick]

I've heard it described as a "Kitty Hawk moment".

It is proven to work, but it's not a viable technology beyond proving something is technically possible.

The original Wright Flyer was a terrible aircraft - indeed, when for the 100th anniversary of the 1903 flight came around the FAA refused to certify any faithful replica of the Wright Flyer as airworthy - and the flight of so short a duration as to be laughable, but it did prove heavier-than-air, controlled, powered flight was possible. Which then required years of work and further development to become a practical technology on any level.

So, yay, we proved that we are able to actually do fusion power in a lab. It's possible. Now we "just" have to do years (decades) of research and development to turn it into a useful and practical technology.

[LadyTevar]

I always get suspicious of research org press releases. They get paid to do their research mostly though donations, and one of the best ways drum up interest and get more donations is by announcing a breakthrough by press release. I just don't even believe any medical research I hear anymore unless there is a pill in my hand.

On a scale of 1-5, how real is this?

It's real but with major caveats. Proving it can work is one thing, making it practical is an entirely different research.

A friend on FB put it like this "It's finally out of Theoretical Science, and has now become an Engineering Problem."

[Jub]

This is still the best fusion-related news since they first managed to achieve it outside of a nuclear device, so even if it's one small step towards having any applications beyond being a research curiosity, it's still significant.

[Batman]

I was rather under the impression that fusions Kitty Hawk moment happened decades ago,making fusion happen under laboratory conditions has been done numerous times before, what was different this time was that they actually got more energy OUT than they put In. The first tentative step towards commercial flight, if you will.

[Batman]

And since fusion power has been 'just around the corner' since before I was born (and that was a darn long time ago) I see why people are sceptical.

[LaCroix]

I am kinda sceptical because of the scale involved - having a gazillion lasers hit a pair of atoms in a lab is one thing - but the energy released was less than 1kWh - to do 'real' energy production, we would have to repeat this process a couple of times per second.

That produces a couple of engineering problems, but those are nothing we don't know how to deal with.
First, can you cycle the lasers that fast(300MJ power banks need time to charge), which is mostly a problem of capacitor banks being large enough, which we most likely already have in the bag - then maybe multiple laser banks to have them fire alternating to reduce heat, cooling the lasers, capacitors and wires going between the two. so more of a "how to design the building layout" engineering problem instead of a "need new technology one.

Next, can the reaction chamber withstand multiple pulses in short timeframe - tungsten (pure or alloys) come to mind - we are dealing with one atom at a millions of degrees - so if the chamber is big enough, we just sqare law that down to a couple million atoms getting heated a few degrees each cycle, and tungsten can shrug off being permanently heated to quite insane temperatures without suffering.

Can you provide fuel against the pressure of the reaction at sufficient speed and precision? Most likely an issue of having alternating injectors and some valve systems.

In the end, fusion power will most likely just be another way to make steam for a turbine - and that part is something we already solved for multiple types of power plans, including fission, we now only need it to adapt it for less radiation and higher peak temperatures. Most likely some multi-circuit thing with liquid salt or metal as primary coolant to deal with the super-heated chamber, and then some stepping down via other cycles to get to a save water steam creation temperature.

I assume good portion of the steam will be made tapping into the cooling system needed to keep the lasers from melting

[Broomstick]

I was rather under the impression that fusions Kitty Hawk moment happened decades ago,making fusion happen under laboratory conditions has been done numerous times before, what was different this time was that they actually got more energy OUT than they put In. The first tentative step towards commercial flight, if you will.

This of prior experiments as Otto Lillienthal moments - proving that you could do fusion outside a star/proving you could glide and not just plummet to the ground. The results were desirable but not something that could be sustained or ramped up.

This is (I am told) the next level - not just achieving fusion, but getting more energy out of the "target" than put into it (even if overall the experiment ate up more energy), thus making the idea of generating energy out of the reactions no longer theoretical but, as already noted, an engineering problem.

Although the analogy, like any analogy, should not be taken too far.

[Marko Dash]

I'm sure it's just 20 years away now...