In fact, this issue may make D-T fusion permanently uneconomical. If you think this sounds like a complicated and expensive way to boil water, you’re right. This heat is then used to boil water and produce steam, which is used to drive a turbine and produce electricity. It slams into either the reactor itself or into a barrier designed to capture the neutron, producing heat. The free neutron, which can’t be contained in the plasma, veers out of it in a random direction. The reaction yields helium, a free neutron, and a bunch of energy that keeps the reactions going. The easiest kind of fusion to get going is called D-T fusion, which fuses atoms of deuterium and tritium, two heavy isotopes of hydrogen. To a lesser extent, that may also be true of progress that we’re seeing in other fusion projects, even commercial ones.įusion suffers from a sequencing problem. There is no realistic path from the kind of fusion being celebrated this week to any sort of commercial project. Despite the press releases, the National Ignition Facility conducts weapons tests, not clean-energy research. Many of these milestones have little bearing on the commercial viability of nuclear fusion. With continued investment from government and the private sector, we are likely to see many such scientific milestones reached in the next few years. This week, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that it had achieved “ignition,” which occurs when the energy output from plasma in a fusion reactor exceeds the energy put into the plasma. Nuclear fusion has long been hailed as the next great energy source, capable of providing nearly limitless power without the harmful emissions and waste associated with other forms of energy generation.
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