Nuclear Fusion: Scientists Announce Major ‘Limitless Clean Energy’ Breakthrough

•This is game-changing, world-improving, lives-saving history unfolding in real-time, says US energy secretary

The United States has announced a nuclear fusion breakthrough, a historic step towards the promise of “near-limitless” clean energy.

“It will go down in the history books,” UK-based Independent quoted Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, to have said in Washington DC yesterday, alongside scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

For 70 years, hundreds of scientists and engineers have attempted to replicate the energy process of atoms fusing together that powers the sun and other stars.

It is an enormously complex – and expensive – process which is highly unstable due to the high temperatures and pressures involved.

Now, for the first time, the California lab team used lasers to achieve a “net energy gain”, producing more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it.

Scientists heralded the breakthrough but said there were still decades of work to be done before fusion would be powering our everyday lives.

Nevertheless, the fusion breakthrough has the potential to significantly impact the trajectory of the climate crisis – driven by the planet-heating emissions created by burning fossil fuels.

According to CNN, the breakthrough was made by a team of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in California on December 5 – a facility the size of a sports stadium and equipped with 192 lasers.

Granholm was further quoted to have said: “Ignition allows us to replicate, for the first time, certain conditions that are only found in the stars and sun.”

Granholm added: “This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon, abundant fusion energy powering our society.”

Granholm said scientists at Livermore and other national labs do work that would help the US move quickly toward clean energy and maintain a nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing.

“This is what it looks like for America to lead, and we’re just getting started,” Granholm said.

“If we can advance fusion energy, we could use it to produce clean electricity, transportation fuels, power, heavy industry and so much more.”

NIF’s target chamber is where the magic happens — temperatures of 100 million degrees and pressures extreme enough to compress the target to densities up to 100 times the density of lead are created there.

Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Arati Prabhakar, spoke about how, as a young scientist early in her career, she spent three months at Lawrence Livermore working on its nuclear fusion project.

Prabhakar reflected on the generations of scientists who got to today’s achievement with nuclear fusion.

“It took not just one generation but generations of people pursuing this goal,” she said.

“It’s a century since we figured out it was fusion that was going on in our sun and all the other stars. In that century it took so many different kinds of advances that ultimately came together to the point that we could replicate that fusion activity in a laboratory.”

The director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Kim Budil, said to “realise commercial fusion energy … many, many things” need to be done, such as creating “many, many fusion ignition events per minute”.

She added that a “robust system of drivers” was needed “to enable that.”