The fusion age is upon us. This week, a major breakthrough was achieved in a key technology for commercial fusion power, and very likely sets up the first ever net-energy-out fusion plant being commissioned four years from today.
Fusion took a key step forward in its movement from the lab to commercial viability with the successful test of a key technology — a very powerful magnet that uses very little energy.
In 2015, a group of physicists at MIT did some calculations to rethink how we’re approaching the problem of fusion power. High-temperature, nonmetallic superconductors were finally commercially available and could allow the generation of stronger magnetic fields, enabling a simpler, more compact fusion reactor. But the physicists behind the work didn’t stop when the calculating was done;…
During the summer of 1985, I was a part of an engineering team at Los Alamos National Lab working on the first design of a fusion reactor based on the then very advanced spherical-tokamak (ST) concept. At a group lunch toward the end of the effort, our team leader, Robert Krakowski, reflected philosophically.
On 8 August 2021, a laser-initiated experiment at the United States National Ignition Facility (NIF), based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, made a significant breakthrough in reproducing the power source of the stars, smashing its own 2018 record for energy released from nuclear fusion reactions 23 times over.
It sounds thoroughly implausible: a technology that could replicate the chemistry of the stars, unleash nearly unlimited clean energy and safely power the world for centuries.
Change takes energy. This is the basic problem at the root of civilization. It’s the reason we have become so dependent on fossil fuels and the reason we continue to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — despite knowing full well that it rapidly deteriorates our climate, with disastrous consequences.
On Aug. 8, 2021, an experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) National Ignition Facility (NIF) made a significant step toward ignition, achieving a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ). This advancement puts researchers at the threshold of fusion ignition, an important goal of the NIF, and opens access to a new experimental regime.
The sun’s energy comes from tiny particles smashing into each other, fusing, and releasing heat in the process. Physicists tried to control that same power in labs since the dawn of the nuclear age. It’s called fusion, and it’s been the next big thing in energy for the better part of a century.
The half-century pursuit of commercial fusion power has reached a milestone with the shipment of supermagnets — the most powerful ever built — from a factory outside of San Diego to a behemoth fusion test reactor in France.