Nuclear fusion breakthrhough: A big leap towards ‘near-limitless energy

US Researchers working on nuclear fusion have reported a recent breakthrough in their quest to unlock "near-limitless, safe, clean" source of energy.

Nuclear fusion occurs when light elements such as hydrogen are smashed together to form heavier elements which result in a huge burst of energy in the process, explains The Guardian.

This method has shown impressive potential as a sustainable, low-carbon energy source. However, little progress had been made since the 1950s, when nuclear fusion research first made its promising debut.

Until now, researchers have been unable to demonstrate a positive energy gain, a condition known as ignition. 

US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to make the announcement on Tuesday on a "major scientific breakthrough," the department announced Sunday. The breakthrough was first reported by the Financial Times.

According to a report in the Financial Times, which has yet to be confirmed by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that is behind the work, researchers have managed to release 2.5 MJ of energy after using just 2.1 MJ to heat the fuel with lasers, reports The Guardian. 

This new discovery has been labelled as a "momentous achievement" by Dr Robbie Scott, of the Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Central Laser Facility (CLF) Plasma Physics Group, who contributed to this research.

"Fusion has the potential to provide a near-limitless, safe, clean, source of carbon-free baseload energy," he said. "This seminal result from the National Ignition Facility is the first laboratory demonstration of fusion 'energy-gain' – where more fusion energy is output than input by the laser beams. The scale of the breakthrough for laser fusion research cannot be overstated.

"The experiment demonstrates unambiguously that the physics of Laser Fusion works," he added. "In order to transform NIF's result into power production a lot of work remains, but this is a key step along the path."

Prof Jeremy Chittenden, professor of plasma physics at Imperial College London, also commented saying, "if what has been reported is true and more energy has been released than was used to produce the plasma, that is a true breakthrough moment which is tremendously exciting," he said.

"It proves that the long sought-after goal, the 'holy grail' of fusion, can indeed be achieved."

Experts on the matter have also stated that while these results are truly groundbreaking, the technology is a long way from being a mainstay of the energy landscape.

To put it into perspective, 0.4MJ is about 0.1kWh – just about enough energy to boil a kettle.

"To turn fusion into a power source we'll need to boost the energy gain still further," said Chittenden. "We'll also need to find a way to reproduce the same effect much more frequently and much more cheaply before we can realistically turn this into a power plant."

Prof Justin Wark, professor of physics at the University of Oxford explained that while the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory could produce such a result about once a day, a fusion power plant would need to do it 10 times a second.

Another important note that needs to be taken into consideration is that the report overlooks the 500MJ of energy that was put into the lasers themselves.

However, Chittenden stressed the NIF was designed for a scientific demonstration, not as a power plant. "The efficiency of converting electrical energy to laser energy was not a factor in its design," he said.

"Anyone working in fusion would be quick to point out that there is still a long way to go from demonstrating energy gain to getting to wall-plug efficiency where the energy coming from a fusion reactor exceeds its electrical energy input required to run the reactor," he added.

"The experiments on NIF demonstrate the scientific process of ignition and how this leads to high fusion energy gain, but to turn this into a power station we need to develop simpler methods to reach these conditions, which will need to be more efficient and above all cheaper in order for inertial fusion to be realised as a fusion power source."

Even though the results produced were only enough to boil a kettle, it is a big leap in the right direction for the researchers working tirelessly with the potential of nuclear fusion.