The Department of Energy on Tuesday announced a scientific breakthrough in nuclear fusion at a national lab in California, marking a major step toward developing a new, sustainable form of energy that releases virtually no carbon dioxide or other types of air pollution.
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California successfully generated a fusion reaction between two hydrogen atoms and maintained that reaction in a controlled setting, marking the potential to use such reactions to generate huge amounts of energy without burning fuels.
The announcement could mark a major step in creating a form of energy that would not release the gases that are warming the planet and contributing to climate change, but is still decades away from being ready for large-scale application.
US Energey Secretary Jennifer Granholm announces a major scientific breakthrough from researchers at Nuclear Security and National Nuclear Security Administrations Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Washington, DC, Dec. 13, 2022.
Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images
“This is a great day,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said at a Washington news conference, adding that the achievement “will go down in the history books.”
“Today, we tell the world that America has achieved a tremendous scientific breakthrough. When that happened it was because we invested in our national labs and we invested in fundamental research, and tomorrow will continue for a future that is powered, in part by fusion energy,” she said.
“This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society,” Granholm said. “If we can advance fusion energy, we could use it to produce electricity, transportation, fuels, power, heavy industry so much more. It would be like adding a power drill to our toolbox and building a clean energy economy.”
The reaction itself was done on Dec. 5 at the National Ignition Facility, the world’s largest laser system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The lab’s director, Kim Budil, joked that the lab’s acronym, LLNL, stands for “lasers, lasers, nothing but lasers.”
The experiment pointed 192 lasers at a container holding a small pellet of fuel the size of a peppercorn, specifically made up of deuterium and tritium – both isotopes of hydrogen.
Those lasers generated 2.05 megajoules of energy within that container that hit the fuel pellet and ignited the reaction, briefly heating it to over…
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