WASHINGTON (AP) – Scientists announced Tuesday that for the first time a nuclear fusion reaction has produced more energy than was used to ignite it. This is a major advance in the decades-long quest to harness the process to power the sun.
Watch the announcement in the player above.
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved what they call a net energy gain, according to the Department of Energy. Increased net energy has been a difficult goal to achieve because fusion occurs at very high temperatures and pressures, making it incredibly difficult to control.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and other officials said this breakthrough will pave the way for advances in national defense and a future of clean power.
“By igniting, for the first time we are able to recreate certain conditions that are only seen in stars and the sun,” Granholm told a news conference in Washington. “This milestone brings us a big step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon, abundant fusion energy powering our society.”
Fusion ignition is “one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century,” Granholm said, adding that this milestone “will go down in the history books.”
White House science adviser Arati Prabhakar, who appeared with Granholm, called fusion ignition “a great example of what perseverance can really accomplish” and “an incredible engineering marvel.” .
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Proponents of nuclear fusion hope that it will one day provide nearly unlimited carbon-free energy, replacing fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. We are still decades away from being able to produce the energy from fusion to power our homes and businesses. But researchers said the announcement still represented a major advance.
“It’s like the starting gun going off,” said Professor Dennis White, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and a leader in fusion research. “We should promote the use of fusion energy systems to tackle climate change and energy security.”
Kim Budil, director of the Livermore Institute, said there are “huge hurdles” to commercially using fusion technology, but recent advances mean the technology could be developed within “decades” rather than 50 or 60 years. It is likely that it will be widely used. As expected in advance.
Nuclear fusion forces hydrogen atoms together with great force, combining to form helium and releasing huge amounts of energy and heat. Unlike other nuclear reactions, no radioactive waste is produced.
President Joe Biden said this milestone is a great example of the need for continued investment in research and development. “I want the Department of Energy to pay attention to what’s going on with the nuclear issue. There’s a lot of good news on the horizon,” he said at the White House.
Nuclear fusion research has cost billions of dollars and decades of research, yielding impressive results in a fraction of a second. Previously, researchers at the National Ignition Facility, a division of Lawrence Livermore, had successfully used 192 lasers and temperatures several times higher than the center of the sun to create an extremely short-lived fusion reaction. .
The laser concentrates a huge amount of heat into a small metal can. The result is a superheated plasma environment in which fusion can occur.
Ricardo Betti, a professor at the University of Rochester and an expert on laser fusion, said there is a long way to go before net energy increases lead to sustainable electricity.
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He likened this milestone to when humans first learned that refining oil and igniting gasoline could cause an explosion.
“We don’t have an engine or tires yet,” Betty said. “I can’t say I have a car.”
Achieving net energy gain applies to the fusion reaction itself, rather than the total amount of power required to operate the laser and run the project. For fusion to be viable, it must produce much more power for a longer period of time.
Controlling the physics of stars is incredibly difficult. White said the fuel would have to be hotter than the center of the sun. The fuel doesn’t stay hot, it leaks and gets cold. It’s difficult to contain, he says.
Jeremy Chittenden, a professor of plasma physics at Imperial College, London, said achieving the net energy gain was not a big surprise for the California lab because it had already made progress. .
But “that doesn’t take away the fact that this is an important milestone,” he says.
One approach to nuclear fusion is to turn hydrogen into plasma, an electrically charged gas, which is then controlled by giant magnets. The method is being studied in France by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and private companies in collaboration with 35 countries called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
Last year, teams working on these projects on two continents announced significant advances in the critical magnets needed for their work.
Matthew Daly reported from Washington. Madi Burakoff reported from New York, Michael Fillis from St. Louis and Jennifer McDermott from Providence, Rhode Island.
