"You fire the lasers, they heat up the target, the target explodes and it is gone," said Matthew Hole, a physicist at the Australian National University (ANU) who is working on other fusion experiments. Nuclei from deuterium and tritium in the plasma soup then fuse together, giving off relatively huge amounts of energy. Heat and pressure generated from the lasers compresses the isotopes until they overcome their mutual electrical repulsion by stripping off electrons. The cylinder, which contains the fusion fuel capsule, is just a few millimetres wide, about the size of a pencil eraser. The process releases millions of times more energy than burning coal, oil or gas, and about four times as much as nuclear fission reactions (at equal mass of fuel). The process of fission has been commercially viable for decades and is used in conventional nuclear power plants to generate about 10 per cent of the world's power.Įnergy is created by splitting a big, heavy atom like uranium, which also produces radioactive waste.įusion fuses lighter elements such as hydrogen together to produce a heavier element. There are two types of nuclear energy: fission and fusion. So how did they do it, and are we much closer to fusion energy being a viable source of abundant, clean and reliable power? What is fusion energy? Now, scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco say they've achieved "net energy gain" for the first time. It's being hailed as a "breakthrough", but how significant is the announcement?įor decades, scientists have tried to harness fusion energy, which is the process of making energy using the same phenomenon that powers the Sun.Īmong other issues, they've been unable to do so in a way that generated more energy than was expended.
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