Star Power: What the stunning nuclear-fusion breakthrough really means
It was a hopeful-yet-confident expectation for moments like this one that sparked me to begin Faster, Please! A brief news roundup:
- “Fusion energy breakthrough by US scientists boosts clean power hopes” – FT
- “US Says Scientists Make Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion Energy” – Bloomberg
- “US scientists expected to announce long-awaited nuclear fusion breakthrough” – CNN
- “S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’” – The Washington Post
- “Nuclear fusion ‘breakthrough’ reportedly arrives” – Axios
What seems to have happened is this: By bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, scientists at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California were able to generate more energy from the reaction than it consumed. “The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 percent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed,” according to the Financial Times, which broke the story.
That piece included this quote from Arthur Turrell, a plasma physicist whose book The Star Builders documents the effort to achieve an energy dream that goes back a century: “If this is confirmed, we are witnessing a moment of history. Scientists have struggled to show that fusion can release more energy than is put in since the 1950s, and the researchers at Lawrence Livermore seem to have finally and absolutely smashed this decades-old goal.”
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Πηγή: fasterplease.substack.com
