With that much energy, we won’t just reduce our emissions footprint – we could reverse it. And since it runs on hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, it’s virtually limitless in its production potential. Unlike coal and fossil fuels, fusion reactions generate no CO2 emissions or other byproducts. Today, it’s a reality.Īnd the long-term potential of a fusion-heavy future is simply staggering. Though there are many steps between today and commercial viability, without this step, fusion as an energy source was little more than a science fiction gimmick. But it’s not the size of the reaction that matters – it’s that it happened at all.ĭecember 5’s nuclear fusion breakthrough was the culmination of a century of research, funding dollars and failures. A gain of 1.5.” The importance of this breakthroughĪ gain of 1.5 sounds small, and in energy terms, it is. About 2 megajoules in, about 3 megajoules out.

And it produced more energies than the lasers had deposited. 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. This had all happened before, 100 times before. Fusion fuel in the capsule got squeezed, fusion reactions started.

X-rays from the wall impinged on the spherical capsule. “192 laser beams entered from the two ends of the cylinder,” he said, “and struck the inner wall…. He noted that the process began with a spherical cylinder containing a small capsule, “about half the diameter of a BB.” Marvin Adams, NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs, described the process at Tuesday’s press conference. This simple – and incredibly replicable – change allowed something incredible to happen.ĭr. The shell around the capsule they used was thicker than in past experiments, meaning that small flaws effect the experiment less. But on December 5, researchers tried something new. In the past, the energy input from the lasers far exceeded the energy output from the fusion reaction. The fusion process releases enormous amounts of energy.

The capsule contains two hydrogen isotopes that, when bombarded with energy, vaporize almost immediately. The nuclear energy breakthrough in a nutshellĭecember’s nuclear energy breakthrough occurred at the National Ignition Facility, which uses a process called “thermonuclear inertial fusion.”Įssentially, the $3.5 billion laser complex shoots 192 lasers at a tiny capsule. But running a fusion reaction that requires less energy in than it puts out, a process called ignition, has eluded scientists… Since fusion was discovered a century ago, scientists have raced to unlock and replicate the mechanics in a lab. That makes it the ideal candidate for powering everything from houses to manufacturing plants…if it could be scaled. Fission splits atoms, rather than combines them, generating dangerous radioactive waste in the process.īy contrast, nuclear fusion is far more efficient, generates almost no waste, and runs off hydrogen atoms readily available in seawater, rather than radioactive materials buried in the ground. Nuclear fusion differs from nuclear fission, the process used in nuclear power plants. The process generates enormous amounts of energy, and is the core reaction that drives our sun. Nuclear fusion involves combining atoms into a single, larger atom.

Nuclear energy fission process