Good day readers! I'm back from a long time of inactivity due to various factors. Now that I'm back though, let's get rolling again with a good piece of content.
Our post today is about some very exciting science that has been worked on (the theory that is) for almost a hundred years now, and has been practically worked on for only a few years at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). We're talking about fusion power. The article can be found here.
Researchers at the NIF a few days ago hit a crucial step towards harnessing fusion power. In late September, the amount of energy output exceeded the energy input. At the NIF, 192 of the world's most powerful lasers are fired simultaneously into a small pellet of hydrogen fuel. Now, let's go a bit into the topic of energy and fusion to see how important this is.
The Law of Conservation of Energy states that the total energy of an isolated system cannot change, but rather it is conserved over time. Now, if you think of fusion, it would seem that it circumvents this law. You're getting more energy out then what you put in. So how is that happening exactly? Well, the law also states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but can change form.
This is where fusion's magic takes place. At the heart of our own sun, 4 hydrogen atoms are fused together to form a Helium-4 atom and the resulting release of energy is more that what it took to make those hydrogen atoms to fuse together. In short, this is essentially what happened a few days ago at the NIF.
Now, the final step that remains is the plateau called "ignition". This is the final step in which a fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining, at which point the lasers of the fusion plant can be shut down and the reaction will continue so long as it has fuel available. We'll see as time goes on how the NIF progresses and hope to see this breakthrough occur in the near future.
I personally think that they'll reach the point of ignition within 5 years from now.
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