The new result far surpassed the 1.3 million joules of energy produced by an earlier NIF experiment that marked the first time the team managed to ignite nuclear fusion. About 4 percent of that fuel was fused in the process. Intense gravity does much of the work in the sun.Īt the National Ignition Facility, 192 lasers directed at a small capsule filled with deuterium and tritium, heavy types of hydrogen, provided a blast of energy that did the trick instead. Getting atoms to fuse requires a combination of high pressure and temperature to squeeze the atoms tightly together. In the sun, that typically occurs when a proton, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, combines with other protons to form helium. In nuclear fusion, light atoms fuse together to create heavier ones. While it’s comparatively easy to generate energy with fission, it’s an environmental nightmare to deal with the leftover radioactive debris that can remain hazardous for hundreds of millenia.Ĭontrolled nuclear fusion, on the other hand, doesn’t produce such long-lived radioactive waste, but it’s technically much harder to achieve in the first place. The fission reactors now used to generate nuclear energy rely on heavy atoms, like uranium, to release energy when they break down into lighter atoms, including some that are radioactive. With this achievement, the landscape has changed.”įusion potentially provides a clean energy source. “Since I started in this field, fusion was always 50 years away…. “This is a monumental breakthrough,” says physicist Gilbert Collins of the University of Rochester in New York, who is a former NIF collaborator but was not involved with the research leading to the latest advance.
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