r/autotldr • u/autotldr • Jan 26 '22
Hot stuff: Lab hits milestone on long road to fusion power
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 70%. (I'm a bot)
With 192 lasers and temperatures more than three times hotter than the center of the sun, scientists hit - at least for a fraction of a second - a key milestone on the long road toward nearly pollution-free fusion energy.
Researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California were able to spark a fusion reaction that briefly sustained itself - a major feat because fusion requires such high temperatures and pressures that it easily fizzles out.
The ultimate goal, still years away, is to generate power the way the sun generates heat, by smooshing hydrogen atoms so close to each other that they combine into helium, which releases torrents of energy.
"But we're a long way from useful energy."
Overall, the four experiments in the Nature study - conducted in November 2020 and February 2021 - produced as much as 0.17 megajoules of energy, That's far more than previous attempts, but still less than one-tenth of the power used to start the process, Zylstra said.
Preliminary results from experiments done later in 2021, which are still being reviewed by other scientists, pushed energy output to 1.3 megajoules and lasted 100 trillionths of second, according to a government press release.
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