This is pretty cool...

[purplefaithful]

For the first time ever, US scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain, a source familiar with the project confirmed to CNN.The US Department of Energy is expected to officially announce the breakthrough Tuesday.
The result of the experiment would be a massive step in a decadeslong quest to unleash an infinite source of clean energy that could help end dependence on fossil fuels. Researchers for decades have attempted to recreate nuclear fusion – replicating the fusion that powers the sun.
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will make an announcement Tuesday on a “major scientific breakthrough,” the department announced Sunday. The breakthrough was first reported by the Financial Times.
Nuclear fusion happens when two or more atoms are fused into one larger one, a process that generates a massive amount of energy as heat. Unlike nuclear fission that powers electricity all over the world, it doesn’t generate long-lived radioactive waste.
Scientists across the globe have been inching toward the breakthrough, using different methods to try to achieve the same goal. 
The National Ignition Facility project creates energy from nuclear fusion by what’s known as “thermonuclear inertial fusion.” In practice, US scientists fire pellets that contain a hydrogen fuel into an array of nearly 200 lasers, essentially creating a series of extremely fast, repeated explosions at the rate of 50 times per second.
The energy collected from the neutrons and alpha particles is extracted as heat, and that heat holds the key to producing energy.
“They contain the fusion reaction by bombarding the outside with lasers,” Tony Roulstone, a fusion expert from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, told CNN. “They heat up the outside; that creates a shockwave.”
Even though getting a net energy gain from nuclear fusion is a big deal, it’s happening on a much smaller scale than what’s needed to power electric grids and heat buildings. 
“It’s about what it takes to boil 10 kettles of water,” said Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College in London. “In order to turn that into a power station, we need to make a larger gain in energy – we need it to be substantially more.”
I
n the UK, scientists are working with a huge donut-shaped machine outfitted with giant magnets called a tokamak to try to generate the same result. The missing mass converts to an enormous amount of energy. The neutrons, which are able to escape the plasma, then hit a “blanket” lining the walls of the tokamak, and their kinetic energy transfers as heat. This heat can then be used to warm water, create steam and power turbines to generate power.
The machine that generates the reaction has to undergo serious heat. The plasma needs to reach at least 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. 
Scientists working near Oxford were last year able to generate a record-breaking amount of sustained energy. Even so, it only lasted 5 seconds.
Whether it’s using magnets or shooting pellets with lasers, the result is ultimately the same: Heat sustained by the process of fusing the atoms together holds the key to helping produce energy. 
The big challenge of harnessing fusion energy is sustaining it long enough so that it can power electric grids and heating systems around the globe. 
Chittenden and Roulstone told CNN that scientists around the globe now must work toward dramatically scaling up their fusion projects, and also bring the cost down. Getting it commercially viable will take years of more research.
“At the moment we’re spending a huge amount of time and money for every experiment we do,” Chittenden said. “We need to bring the cost down by a huge factor."


https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/12/politics/nuclear-fusion-energy-us-scientists-climate/index.html

[Guest]

Good story, interesting. Nuclear fusion has definite huge upside and scientists have been saying this for a long time. Regardless, its still a LONG way off before this becomes something viable commercially....and that's probably an understatement. 

[Guest]

Gotta start somewhere, right?

Yah, its not commercially viable in our life-times, buy maybe our grandkids...

[Guest]

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility have made history by successfully producing a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain, a breakthrough hailed by US officials as a “landmark achievement” and a “milestone for the future of clean energy.”
Here are key things to know about today's announcement — and possible next steps: 
What is nuclear fusion and why does it matter? Nuclear fusion is a man-made process that replicates the same energy that powers the sun. Nuclear fusion happens when two or more atoms are fused into one larger one, a process that generates a massive amount of energy as heat.
Scientists around the world have been studying nuclear fusion for decades, hoping to recreate it with a new source that provides limitless, carbon-free energy – without the nuclear waste created by current nuclear reactors. Fusion projects mainly use the elements deuterium and tritium – both of which are isotopes of hydrogen.
The deuterium from a glass of water, with a little tritium added, could power a house for a year. Tritium is rarer and more challenging to obtain, although it can be synthetically made.
“Unlike coal, you only need a small amount of hydrogen, and it is the most abundant thing found in the universe,” Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct and a former chief energy technologist at Lawrence Livermore, told CNN. “Hydrogen is found in water so the stuff that generates this energy is wildly unlimited and it is clean.”
Why was today's announcement significant? This is the first time scientists have ever successfully produced this, instead of breaking even as past experiments have done.
While there’s many more steps until this can be commercially viable, it’s essential for scientists to show that they can create more energy than they started with. Otherwise, it doesn’t make much sense for it to be developed.
“This is very important because from an energy perspective, it can’t be an energy source if you’re not getting out more energy than you’re putting in,” Friedmann told CNN. “Prior breakthroughs have been important but it’s not the same thing as generating energy that could one day be used on a larger scale.”
What are the next steps? Scientists and experts now need to figure out how to produce much more energy from nuclear fusion on a much larger scale.
At the same time, they need to figure out how to eventually reduce the cost of nuclear fusion so that it can be used commercially.
Scientists will also need harvest the energy produced by fusion and transfer it to the power grid as electricity. It will take years – and possibly decades – before fusion can be able to produce unlimited amounts of clean energy, and scientists are on a race against the clock to fight climate change. 

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/nuclear-fusion-reaction-us-announcement-12-13-22/index.html

[Guest]

Laboratory director says it will take "probably decades" before nuclear fusion energy is commercializedKim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said there are still "significant hurdles" to overcome with the nuclear fusion technology before commercialization will be possible.
She pointed out that today's announcement is marking one fusion ignition event, and that to "realize commercial fusion energy" you will need to "do many, many things" — including producing "many many fusion ignition events per minute" while having a "robust system of drivers to enable that."

On the timeline for commercialization, Budil said, “probably decades; not six decades, not five decades – which is what we used to say." "I think it’s moving into the foreground — and probably with concerted effort and investment, a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant," she added.