Nuclear fusion has overcome a historic obstacle, here are the details from the US
For the first time, a nuclear fusion experiment has produced more energy than is used to operate machinery. Facts and insights
Several newspapers, including the Financial Times and the Washington Post , wrote between Sunday and Monday that the US Department of Energy will make an announcement tomorrow about "an important scientific discovery" related to nuclear fusion.
WHAT IS NUCLEAR FUSION
Fusion is a process for the production of electricity from nuclear energy that is different from fission, the reaction that takes place in traditional reactors, and opposite in operation: in fact, it does not involve the division of the nuclei of heavy atoms, but the union of the light ones .
Like fission, nuclear fusion makes it possible to obtain energy continuously and with zero greenhouse gas emissions; unlike the first, however, it generates waste with low radioactivity and rapid decay.
THE SUCCESS OF THE USA LABORATORY
Scientists have been trying to develop technologies for nuclear fusion since the 1950s, but without great success. One of the main difficulties lies in guaranteeing the production of a quantity of energy higher than that which is consumed during the process, a concept known in jargon as net energy gain , or "net energy gain".
For the first time in history, however, the US scientists of the National Ignition Facility – a structure of the federal laboratory Lawrence Livermore, in California – have succeeded: their fusion has produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, against 2.1 megajoules consumed by the lasers that power the reaction (120 percent more). The data are not definitive.
According to Financial Times sources, the amount of energy produced by the fusion was so much higher than expected that it damaged some diagnostic machines.
THE ROLE OF THE NATIONAL IGNITION FACILITY
The National Ignition Facility is a $3.5 billion facility initially designed to test nuclear weapons by simulating their explosions. She then moved on to conduct research on nuclear fusion using lasers. It came close to the net energy gain mark last year, when a fusion produced about 70 percent of the energy used by lasers.
COMMERCIAL USE IS STILL AWAY
Despite the success of the US laboratory, nuclear fusion technologies still remain far from commercial use. For example, there is a lack of devices capable of powering the large-scale reaction and machinery to convert the energy generated into electricity ready to be fed into the grid.
Investor attention, however, is very strong. The Fusion Industry Association, a trade association, has announced that from June 2021 to June 2022 companies involved in nuclear fusion have received investments of 2.83 billion dollars; in total, private investment raised by the sector amounts to almost 5 billion.
– Read also: All the latest moves by ENI with Bill Gates in the MIT startup for nuclear fusion
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/fusione-nucleare-esperimento-guadagno-netto-energia/ on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 12:02:10 +0000.