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Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers [1]
['Kenneth Chang']
Date: 2022-12-13
In an interview, Mark Herrmann, program director for weapons physics and design at the Livermore, said the researchers then performed a series of experiments to better understand the surprising August success, and they worked to bump up the energy of lasers by almost 10 percent and improve the design of the hydrogen targets.
The first laser shot at 2.05 megajoules was performed in September, and that first try produced 1.2 megajoules of fusion energy. Moreover, analysis showed that the spherical pellet of hydrogen was not squeezed evenly, and some of the hydrogen essentially squirted out the side and did not reach fusion temperatures.
The scientists made some adjustments that they believed would work better.
“The prediction ahead of the shot was that it could go up a factor of two,” Dr. Herrmann said. “In fact, it went up a little more than that.”
The main purpose of the National Ignition Facility is to conduct experiments to help the United States maintain its nuclear weapons. That makes the immediate implications for producing energy tentative.
Fusion would be essentially an emissions-free source of power, and it would help reduce the need for power plants burning coal and natural gas, which pump billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.
But it will take quite a while before fusion becomes available on a widespread, practical scale, if ever.
“Probably decades,” Kimberly S. Budil, the director of Lawrence Livermore, said during the Tuesday news conference. “Not six decades, I don’t think. I think not five decades, which is what we used to say. I think it’s moving into the foreground and probably, with concerted effort and investment, a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/science/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html
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