9/12/2023 0 Comments Fusion vs fission for dummies![]() ![]() ![]() Whisperings started, with some physics community observers calling for the facility to finally be shut down. Then, for months afterward, the NIF team failed to replicate the results. It wasn’t as much as the 1.9 MJ that the lasers blasted into it, but it was still eight times more energy output than the facility’s previous record. Today’s news builds on a notable success achieved by the National Ignition Facility in August 2021, when it fired its lasers on a capsule of deuterium and tritium (hydrogen atoms with an extra one or two neutrons, respectively), setting off a reaction that unleashed 1.3 megajoules (MJ) of energy. “They deserve a tremendous amount of credit for slogging through this.” ![]() “We were not sure if it was ever going to work,” says Peter Littlewood, a physics professor at the University of Chicago and former director of Argonne National Lab, a DOE research center. “This milestone will undoubtedly spark even more discovery.” “This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in a press release. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the development on Dec. After bringing in an external team of scientists to confirm the findings, the U.S. (Notably we have uncontrolled fusion reactions down pat-they’re the basis of hydrogen bombs). 5-after decades of effort-scientists at the laboratory finally created a controlled fusion reaction that released more energy than the researchers blasted into it, an important step toward the long sought-after goal of generating almost unlimited power from clean, plentiful fusion energy. ![]()
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