- Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have made a net gain of energy for the first time.
- Fusion is the process that powers the sun and stars and could one day be used to make cheap electricity.
- The US Department of Energy will announce the results of the experiment on Tuesday.
Three sources with knowledge of the situation say that the US Department of Energy will announce on Tuesday that scientists at a national lab have made a breakthrough in fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars and could one day be used to make cheap electricity.
In a fusion experiment using lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, scientists have made a net gain of energy for the first time.
Scientists in the U.S. have for the first time achieved a net energy gain in a fusion experiment, sources said. Fusion energy could one day provide a cheap source of electricity which could help in the fight against climate change https://t.co/GvFnOcLu9x pic.twitter.com/342Cv6gQCA
— Reuters (@Reuters) December 13, 2022
Even though the results are a big step forward in a scientific quest that has been going on since at least the 1930s, one of the sources said that the ratio of how much energy goes into the reaction at Livermore to how much energy comes out needs to be about 100 times bigger before it can be used to make a process that can make commercial amounts of electricity.
The experiment was first written about in the FT.
Fusion happens when the nuclei of two atoms are heated to 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) or higher, which causes them to fuse into a new, bigger atom that gives off a lot of energy.
But the process uses a lot of energy, and the trick has been to make it self-sustaining, so that it gives off more energy than it takes in, and to do this all the time, not just for short periods.
“Inertial confinement fusion, which involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks.” https://t.co/TNBhC5VAcJ pic.twitter.com/c2EueqknCp
— Tren Griffin (@trengriffin) December 11, 2022
If fusion becomes commercialised, which proponents say could happen in a decade or more, it would have other benefits, such as making almost carbon-free electricity that could help fight climate change without making as much radioactive nuclear waste as fission reactors do now.
Running an electric power plant on fusion is hard, though. For example, you have to figure out how to keep the heat in a cost-effective way and keep the lasers firing all the time. Instead of lasers, magnets are used in other ways to make fusion happen.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will talk to the press about a “major scientific breakthrough” on Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. EST (15:00 GMT).
A department spokesperson said that the department doesn’t know anything before the briefing.
Lawrence Livermore is mostly interested in how nuclear weapons affect national security. The fusion experiment could lead to safer ways to test the nation’s arsenal of nuclear bombs.
But progress at the labs could also help companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Focused Energy, and General Fusion, which want to use fusion to power power plants.
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and John Doerr are among the people who have put money into companies building fusion. The Fusion Industry Association says that private industry got more than $2.8 billion last year, for a total of about $5 billion over the past few years.
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