On Sunday, August 8, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California scientists hit a milestone in nuclear fusion. The most commonly used source of energy currently is fossil fuels, about 40% of the energy generated in the U.S. is from natural gasses. Fossil fuels are a limited resource to the planet and as humans overuse this resource, scientists continuously search for other sources and try to improve on them. Nuclear energy and other renewable energy, such as hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass cover the next 40% of energy generation in the US. Nuclear energy, in which electricity is generated by nuclear fission, is half of the sustainable energy being currently produced in the US.
The source of the Sun’s energy is nuclear fusion, which means that the world could run solely on this type of energy. A fusion reaction is based on Einstein’s equation E=mc2, which states that mass can become energy and vice versa. Nuclear fusion occurs when the nuclei of two atoms with a small mass merge to become one nucleus with a heavier mass. In this process, not all of the mass is transferred. The leftover mass then becomes energy. Although many different elements can be used for this process, deuterium-tritium (DT), varieties of hydrogen, is the most common as it releases the most energy and occurs at the lowest temperature compared to other elements.
The reason why this is not already the most used source of energy in the U.S is that nuclear energy is very difficult to control. A high amount of energy can be created with the process of fusion, but that same energy or even a good fraction cannot be absorbed. In the year 2018, NIF scientists were able to reach 55,000 joules of fusion energy, then in spring of 2021, they were able to reach 170,000 joules, which is three times the amount from 2018. However, the experiment from August 8 reached an unexpected 1.3 million joules of energy which is eight times the amount from just a couple of months ago.
In this experiment, a total of 192 laser beams were pointed at a small cylinder that contained a fuel capsule with DT. The laser beams hitting the cylinder caused the fuel capsule to vaporize and the fuel to implode to the extreme temperature, density, and pressure needed for the hydrogen atoms to become helium. After that, a process called alpha heating occurs, in which the helium can heat the rest of the fuel inside the cylinder and start the fusion reaction. Compared to previous experiments, scientists claim that this system has had the highest alpha heating rate, which has caused the energy release to be more than 10 quadrillion watts in over 100 trillionths of a second. The technology still needs to be perfected before nuclear energy is used as the main source of electricity generation in the US, but this is a milestone in the world of clean energy.
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