Last December, for the first time, researchers had a controlled nuclear fusion reaction that put out more energy than needed to be started. It has been reported that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) team did it again in a second test on July 30, where they achieved an even higher energy output.
The second experiment has been reported to the Financial Times by three people in the know, and it has been confirmed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the NIF is located. According to the people in the know, this second test produced more energy than the one last year.
“Since demonstrating fusion ignition for the first time at the National Ignition Facility in December 2022, we have continued to perform experiments to study this exciting new scientific regime. In an experiment conducted on July 30, we repeated ignition at NIF,” the Laboratory said as reported by the FT. “As is our standard practice, we plan on reporting those results at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications.”
The NIF has a specific way to create fusion energy, called inertial confinement fusion. They use lasers and pellets of deuterium and tritium, versions of hydrogen that have neutrons in the nucleus. The heavy hydrogen is kept in a tiny capsule, suspended in a cylindrical X-ray “oven”. This is called the hohlraum and it is the target of the lasers. The lasers heat it up to 3 million degrees Celsius (5,400,032 degrees Fahrenheit), compressing it so that the deuterium and tritium fuse together, forming helium and releasing some of those neutrons with high speed.
In the December experiment, for the first time, the energy released was higher than the energy required for the lasers. It had an output of about 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy compared to the 2.05 megajoules needed for the lasers. The experiment of July 30 had an output of 3.5 megajoules, again according to the Financial Times.
The achievement is another step towards a commercial power plant that can deliver unlimited and carbon-free energy with a minimal amount of radioactive waste. Unlike nuclear fusion plants, there is no risk of a meltdown.
The road is still long, though. The facility can deliver just one laser hit a day and the fraction of energy released is still low. A future plant will have to be able to hit the capsule multiple times a second and produce an output many tens of times higher than what it is currently capable of. Plans to achieve these future requirements are already in the works.
[h/t: Financial Times]
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