While you still insist that “the oil is ours”…
A nuclear fusion experiment at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has achieved a “net energy gain” for the first time in history a massive scientific breakthrough that has the potential to reshape global geopolitics and change the game in the fight against climate change.
The news was first reported by the Financial Times on Sunday. The US Department of Energy is expected to make the official announcement tomorrow.
Nuclear fusion consists of colliding hydrogen atoms at high speeds — the same reaction that powers the sun — and then using the energy created by that process to create electricity.
It is a different technology than today’s nuclear power plants, which work on the basis of nuclear fission (the separation of atoms). The energy produced in fusion does not produce longlived radioactive waste because the result of the process is helium, which is nonradioactive and nonexplosive.
For this reason, many experts call the technology the “Holy Grail” of energy generation.
The technique also enables the generation of large amounts of energy using a small amount of hydrogen as a fuel, making it an almost inexhaustible source of energy.
Until recently, however, scientists had not achieved net energy production in laboratory tests more energy produced from nuclear fusion than was used to carry out the process.
According to the Financial Times, this happened for the first time in recent weeks, when Lawrence Livermore’s lab was able to produce 1.2 times more energy than it used or 2.5 megajoules of energy. (As of August 2021, Livermore had managed 1.3 megajoules, a record so far but no net gain.)
Yesterday, the lab said in a statement that initial data indicated a “success” of the experiment, but the exact amount of energy generated is still being confirmed.
“If this fusion breakthrough is true, it could be a ‘game changer’ for the world,” US Representative Ted Lieu tweeted over the weekend following the FT jump.
Earlier this year, another US Congressman, Democrat Don Beyer, said at a White House conference that nuclear fusion was the “Holy Grail of climate change and a decarbonized future.”
“Perhaps more importantly, nuclear fusion has the potential to lift more people out of poverty around the world than any other idea since the discovery of fire.”
While the potential breakthrough is a glimmer of hope, Euronews says nuclear fusion technology is at least 10 years away from being a commercially available power source.
The Lawrence Livermore had to use one of the largest lasers in the world for its experiments, and the process requires materials that are difficult to manufacture.
In addition, the necessary equipment to convert the energy generated from fusion into electricity that can be fed into the grid has yet to be developed.
Peter Arbex