☢️ Fusion energy

⚡ Humans are in a forever quest to find the most efficient way to boil water that spins something. On December 5, 2022 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) @Livermore_Lab conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to achieve fusion ignition. What NIF trying to do is for microseconds maybe even less just mimic a small fraction of what's going on in the sun

🔦 192 laser beams from many directions entered from the two ends of the cylinder, struck the inner wall of the cylinder, deposited energy and that happened in less time than it takes light to move 10 feet, very very fast. X-rays from the wall impinged on the spherical capsule, fusion fuel -bit of hydrogen and tritium- in the capsule got squeezed. Fusion reactions started. This had all happened a hundred before, but last week for the first time they designed this experiment so that the fusion fuel stayed hot enough, dense enough and round enough for long enough that it ignited and it produced more energies than the lasers had deposited. About two mega joules in and three mega joules out out a gain of 1.5

🔥Ignition

Imagine you got a pile of wood and you trying to light a fire. What NIF does is pellet, a hydrogen system inside is the wood, that’s the fuel. The two hundreds lasers that focused on the pellet those are the matches that used. For more than a decade what NIF have been doing is keep the lighting matches which is firing lasers onto the wood but it never caught fire and sustain the burn, that’s not work. What they last time they did was finally made the pile of wood catch fire, the woods start to burn, burn release the energy. That’s called the ignition. But if look at the whole system of the lasers, it takes about 300 mega joules worth of electrical energy to produce 2 mega joules of laser beams that ended up to the pellet.

🔌 Still Long journey enough for fusion power station

The engineering challenge is still enormous. The way NIF doing fusion is not the way most other experiment the world whether commercial or publicly funded. Others like ITER which cost $20 billion generally speaking try to create plasma which is electrically charge, high energy gas of hydrogen and other fuel and they rise the temperature of it.

For NIF, that’s the one of all scientist betting on, that’s type of fusion never proves gain. It never got out more energy than put in but NIF has proved. From physics point of view this is very interesting what NIF has done, really encourage fusion researches. At least may be 50 years ahead the fusion power station for nuclear power will happen.

Read more: https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-makes-history-achieving-fusion-ignition