Engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California may have brought us to the threshold of using a star’s internal process to power our world by extracting a record breaking 10 quadrillion watts of electricity from a core of hydrogen Size of a BB.
Nuclear fusion is the process by which two hydrogen atoms fuse to form one helium atom, releasing an enormous amount of pent-up energy. It’s the same process that powers our sun and every other main sequence star in the universe, and it’s something of a holy grail for energy research.
It has a greater energy potential than nuclear fission – which powers modern nuclear reactors – and since the only byproduct of nuclear fusion is helium, it is the ultimate source of clean energy.
And since hydrogen is only used in small amounts as fuel – hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe – it is essentially a more powerful source of energy than modern nuclear power with unlimited fuel supplies and no toxic by-products. Best of all, nuclear fusion reactions can be self-sustaining and it only takes a spark to start before the reaction continues unabated until the fuel runs out.
It is this final critical element of fusion reactors that the LLNL engineers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) say is now within reach. According to a statement announcing the results, “The experiment was made possible by focusing laser light from NIF – the size of three soccer fields – on a target the size of a BB that creates a hotspot the diameter of a human hair and generates more than 10 trillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second. “
That might not sound like long, but it doesn’t have to be. All you need to do is reach a threshold for fusion ignition for the self-sustaining fusion process to start and run on its own, providing an unprecedented source of artificial energy.
This isn’t the first time LLNL scientists have produced a fusion reaction, but this experiment produced eight times as much energy released as the previous record experiment earlier this year, and a 25-fold increase over the 2018 record.
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Scientists have dreamed of fusion for so long and without much success that it is natural to be skeptical of the LLNL’s report, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. Their results would need to be duplicated and confirmed before we can really get overly excited, but as LiveScience notes, even critics of LLNL research are surprised and even encouraged by the results.
In those 100 trillionths of a second, the LLNL team produced an energy equivalent of 10% of the energy of all sunlight that hits the earth at any given time. The amount of energy it took to start the reaction in the hydrogen pellet was immense, but the pellet absorbed about 70% of it.
This puts the researchers within striking distance of fusion ignition, where the same pellet releases more than 100% of the energy it has absorbed and hydrogen continues to fuse and release its energy even when the energy-providing laser is removed.
Given the speed at which this approach is advancing, it’s not inconceivable that this 100 percent fusion ignition threshold can be exceeded before the decade is up. If that happens, some might consider it the most monumental discovery in human history.
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