US scientists manage to repeat their success of generating energy through nuclear fusion

US scientists have again achieved a net energy gain in a fusion reaction, for the second time since December, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory confirmed on Sunday. Scientists at the California-based lab repeated the fusion ignition milestone in an experiment at the National Ignition Facility on July 30, producing higher energy yield than in December, a spokesman for the California-based Ignition Facility told Reuters. the scientific facility. The final results are still being analyzed and are pending publication.

“Since we first demonstrated fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility in December 2022, we have continued to conduct experiments to study this exciting new scientific mechanism. In an experiment carried out on July 30, we repeated the ignition,” a spokesperson explained to the Financial Times. “As is our standard practice, we plan to report these results at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications,” he added.

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Lawrence Livermore first achieved a net energy gain in a laser fusion experiment on December 5, 2022. That experiment briefly achieved what is known as fusion ignition by generating 3.15 megajoules of energy after the laser to invest 2.05 megajoules in its objective, according to the US Department of Energy, on which this project depends. In other words, it produced more energy from the fusion than the laser energy used to drive it: in that case, the gain was 50%.

The Department of Energy called it “a major scientific breakthrough in development that will pave the way for advances in national defense and the future of clean energy.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm called it a “historic breakthrough” amid enormous anticipation, as the merger is seen by many as the Holy Grail of unlimited clean energy. Scientists have known for about a century that fusion is the physical process that powers the Sun and have pursued the development of fusion as a power generation system for decades.

This success has been achieved at the National Ignition Facility, a facility inaugurated in 2009, which uses the world’s largest laser aimed at a tiny ball of hydrogen plasma through 192 beams that are concentrated into a point the size of a peppercorn.

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