10 Things You Should Know About Nuclear Fusion

Scientists have made breakthroughs in nuclear energy. But what is nuclear fusion and how does it work? Here are 10 things to know about it.

By Avery Hurt
Dec 14, 2023 8:00 PM
The target chamber of LLNL’s National Ignition Facility, where 192 laser beams delivered more than 2 million joules of ultraviolet energy to a tiny fuel pellet to create fusion ignition
(Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) The target chamber of LLNL’s National Ignition Facility, where 192 laser beams delivered more than 2 million joules of ultraviolet energy to a tiny fuel pellet to create fusion ignition on Dec. 5, 2022.

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On Dec. 13, 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) had made a major breakthrough in the pursuit of fusion energy. A team at NIF conducted the first controlled fusion experiment that produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it, a condition known as ignition. 

The team focused 2.05 megajoules of laser light onto a piece of fuel the size of a peppercorn. This resulted in an explosion producing 3.15 megajoules. That’s a small energy gain but a massive step in the field. 

(Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) The hohlraum that houses the type of cryogenic target used to achieve ignition on Dec. 5, 2022, at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility.

“This demonstrates it can be done,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said at a press conference announcing the achievement. Granholm added that, with this threshold crossed, scientists can now start working on more efficient lasers, better containment and other details needed to take this to a commercial scale.

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