In the
hunt for fusion energy, a key milestone has been attained.
A fusion
reaction has produced a record 1.3 megajoule energy output, surpassing the
energy absorbed by the fuel that triggered it for the first time.
Despite
the fact that there's still a long way to go, the result is a considerable
improvement over past yields: eight times higher than trials conducted just a
few months ago and 25 times higher than experiments completed in 2018. It's a
tremendous accomplishment.
Physicists
at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility will
submit a paper for peer review.
This
achievement marks a watershed moment in inertial confinement fusion research,
ushering in a completely new era of discovery and advancement for our essential
national security tasks. It's also a testament to this team's brilliance,
dedication, and grit, as well as the many other researchers in this field who
have doggedly pursued this aim over the years, according to Kim Budil, director
of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
For me, it
exemplifies one of the national labs' most essential roles: our unwavering
dedication to confronting the world’s biggest and most critical scientific
grand issues and finding solutions where others might be deterred by the
barriers.
Inertial
confinement fusion entails the creation of a miniature star. It all starts with
a fuel capsule made up of deuterium and tritium, two heavier hydrogen isotopes.
This fuel capsule is housed in a hohlraum, a hollow gold chamber roughly the
size of a pencil eraser.
The
hohlraum is then bombarded with 192 high-powered laser beams, which are
transformed into X-rays. These X-rays implode the fuel capsule, heating and
compressing it to temperatures and pressures comparable to those found in the
heart of a star – temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees Celsius (180
million degrees Fahrenheit) and pressures greater than 100 billion Earth
atmospheres – reducing it to a tiny blob of plasma.
Deuterium
and tritium in the fuel capsule fusion into heavier elements in the same way as
hydrogen fuses into heavier elements in the heart of a main-sequence star. The
entire procedure takes only a few billionths of a second. The goal is to
achieve ignition, which occurs when the fusion process generates more energy
than the entire energy input.
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