Fusion Future

Nuclear fusion is something scientists have been trying to recreate in a controlled manner for decades. If successful, such technology holds the promise of near-limitless clean energy, something we badly need.

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Nuclear fusion is what's happening in the Sun and all other stars at this very moment; all known life is based on the energy that powers our Sun. Stars like our Sun burn for about 9 to 10 billion years, which means ours has about 5 billion years worth of fuel left. In the core of stars lighter atoms are smashed together under high pressure and high temperatures to form heavier atoms. The Sun burns hydrogen, the lightest atom in the periodic table of elements, by fusing it into Helium. In that process some of the fused mass (0.7%) is converted into energy according to Einstein's most famous equation E=MC².

It's this exact same process that we want to reproduce here, forcing pairs of light atoms together to create heavier atoms and a lot of energy. Our current nuclear energy plants use the exact opposite process, called nuclear fission; they both produce massive amounts of energy from atoms. Fission occurs when a neutron is smashed into a heavy atom, usually Uranium or Plutonium, forcing it to split into two lighter atoms. The reasons why fusion would be so much better than fission are many, but most important are 1) hydrogen is everywhere, whereas the heavy metals used in fission are scarce, and 2) fission leaves radioactive waste that will remain hazardous for thousands of years, whereas fusion leaves us with Helium and only small amounts of short-lived radioactive waste. Oh, and let's not forget that fusion produces far more energy as well. That's why nuclear fusion is described as the "holy grail" of energy production.

The challenge for scientists is that it takes ridiculous amounts of energy to make fusion happen; the core of every atom is positively charged, so they will repel each other. That force has to be overcome before the protons are close enough for another force to take over, the strong nuclear force, so that they to stick together and form a heavier atom. The strong nuclear force is one of the four basic forces in nature, the others being gravity, electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force. In every atom with a core containing more than one proton, that's every atom except hydrogen, the protons are held together by that strong nuclear force.

In order for the strong nuclear force to take over, the two positively charged Hydrogen nucleons must be very close together, but the closer they come, the stronger the repelling electromagnetic force becomes. Fusion needs the nucleons to move extremely fast (which means the temperature must be extremely high) and/or they must be under immense pressure, both of which take a lot of energy to accomplish. Until now, no experiment has managed to produce more energy than the amount put in to make it work. A week ago researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California confirmed they have overcome a major barrier on the road towards usable fusion; they produced 50 percent more energy from a fusion experiment than was put in. They used lasers strong enough to heat the hydrogen fuel to 100 million degrees Celsius, using 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy, which produced 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output.

Even though the amount of energy they've generated in this experiment is tiny - just enough to boil a few kettles, what it represents is huge; this experiment shows that the science works. There's still a long way to go though; the experiment has to be repeated, perfected and the amount of energy generated has to be boosted significantly, After that, the engineers can come with solutions on how to put the theory into practice and how to control the fusion process; much like how the fission process is controlled by control rods that absorb excess neutrons that are emitted to prevent the chain-reaction from escalating and causing a nuclear explosion. Anyhow, this exciting news wasn't in the news much, so I thought I'd share it here; watch the below linked video to see Neil deGrasse Tyson discussing this milestone.

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