The US Department of Energy announced yesterday a milestone that had been pursued for seven decades: the controlled nuclear fusion, which can open the door to the supply of clean, cheap and unlimited energy. It is a race in which the United States, Russia and Europe have invested trillions of dollars.
The achievement was achieved at 1 AM on December 5th in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratoryof California, and had been anticipated this Sunday by the financial times. The scientists used laser beams to generate fusion, the same process that powers the sun and stars.
It is a reaction that occurs when the nuclei of two atoms are subjected to a temperature of at least 100 million degrees, which causes them to fuse into a larger atom, releasing enormous amounts of Energy. Since it also consumes it in large quantities, the challenge was to make it self-sustaining -that is, with more profit than loss- continuously and not for short periods.
The United States modified a “major scientific breakthrough” in nuclear fusion power
Physicists at the Livermore Laboratory, a facility that focuses on US security and the testing of nuclear weapons, they fired 192 lasers at very high speed on a small sphere that contained hydrogen atoms (the most abundant element in the universe) whose fusion produces helium atoms. If these shocks were to be produced en masse, the energy released could be transformed into electricity, without releasing greenhouse gases or radioactive waste.
Climate change, a near target
The forecasts indicate that at least a decade away for this technology to spread. It still remains to find a way to generate a reaction 100 times more powerful than the one created in the laboratory, contain it properly (there are no materials that resist these temperatures) and transform it into electricity for mass consumption at an affordable cost. One of the big questions is whether it can be perfected in time to change the course of the climate change.
AO JL
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