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Many people complain that the news is all bad. That is not true at all, but good news is sometimes harder to quantify or follow than bad tidings—plus human progress tends to be incremental. I bring this up because this week did feature a good news story—and Ferrebeekeeper has been following along (as best we can) for years. The nuclear scientists at the National Ignition Facility (a part of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) have been attempting to use a vast laser array to heat/compress a deuterium and tritium fuel pellet to the extreme conditions necessary for nuclear fusion.
The container for the nuclear fuel
Nuclear fusion involves compressing/heating the elementary particles which make up atoms until the atoms fuse into new atoms. Such a process releases outrageous amounts of energy but it does not start easily–indeed so much energy is required to begin the reaction that “hot” fusion typically requires a star or a nuclear fission detonator. These items are dangerous and alarming to have lying around so scientists have been attempting to find a more controlled method of fusing atoms together.
The NIF Target Chamber
Earlier this week the science journal Nature published a paper which details how NIF scientists finally managed to produce more energy than was initially put into the fuel pellet (albeit not into the overall system). This does not sound overwhelmingly exciting—yet it is farther than nuclear engineers have got in 50 years. To quote the amazingly named head scientist, Omar Hurricane, “We’ve assembled that stick of dynamite and we’ve gotten the fuse to light…If we can get that fuse to burn all the way to the dynamite, it’s going to pack a wallop.”
Just dream what we could accomplish with such energy!
Abundant safe energy from nuclear fusion would be an astonishingly transformative innovation for humankind. Immediately our principle economic and environmental problems would be forever altered. Additionally having such a cosmic wellspring of energy available would allow us to embark on engineering works of a vastly greater scale than any known so far.
Planetary Engineering!
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