The United States Department of Energy is set to announce Tuesday that researchers have produced a nuclear fusion reaction that creates a net energy gain, an important breakthrough in the search for a clean, affordable and potentially unlimited source of energy.
, which first reported the news on Sunday, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a federal research facility in Livermore, Calif., achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the last two weeks. The lab uses a process called inertial confinement fusion, in which a pellet of hydrogen plasma is bombarded with the world's biggest laser. The process is very energy-intensive, but in recent attempts, it produced 120% as much energy as it consumed.
Scientists expressed excitement about the development, which several countries have pursued since the 1950s and poured billions into researching. "There is going to be great pride that this is something that happened in the United States," David Edelman, who leads policy and global affairs at TAE, a large private fusion energy company,"Scientifically, this is the first time that they showed that this is possible," Gianluca Sarri, a physicist at Queen's University Belfast,."From theory, they knew that it should happen, but it was never seen in real life experimentally.
The theoretical benefits to fusion reactions are enormous, as they create no conventional air pollution or planet-warming carbon dioxide. And unlike traditional nuclear reactors, which split atoms — a much-less powerful process known as fission — fusion does not create long-lasting radioactive waste.
"The importance of this news cannot be overstated," Leah Stokes, an environmental policy expert at the University of California Santa Barbara,It seems US scientists have finally done it. The importance of this news cannot be overstated.
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