US Nuclear Fusion Experiment Leads to Breakthrough

The development of nuclear fusion technology in the US has resulted in new breakthroughs. The experiment obtained a higher energy than the energy of the laser beam fired at the ignition process.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) of the United States (US) has just announced advances in its nuclear fusion technology. At a nuclear fusion facility in California the researchers used ignition from a laser the size of three football fields to generate energy.
The experts focused their giant arrangement of nearly 200 laser beams onto a small point to create a large energy explosion. This scale is eight times more than they have ever done in the past.
In research, ignition only lasts a very short time or only 100 trillion seconds, but this has created advances in the ignition of fusion reactions. “This result is a historic advance for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research,” said Kimberly Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, which oversees the National Ignition Facility’s experimental site. Live Science Wednesday (18/8) edition.
This ignition experiment is claimed to be successful because the energy released by the fusion exceeds that fired by the laser. In the ICF process, as much as 192 laser light energy is directed at a small capsule the size of a peppercorn.
Inside the capsule are deuterium and tritium, which are different forms of the compressed element hydrogen, up to 100 times the density of lead. The result of the reaction with the laser beam reaches a heat of 100 million degrees Celsius much hotter than the core of the Sun which is only 15 million degrees Celsius.
The results of the experiments conducted on August 8, 2021 produced an energy of 1.35 megajoules (MJ) or the equivalent of 70 percent of the laser energy fired into the fuel capsule of 1.9 MJ, and became the highest result of experiments conducted by several countries in fusion research. nuclear.
“This is a major advance for fusion and for the entire fusion community,” Debbie Callahan, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory involved in the research, told the BBC. BBC News.
The latest research progress is eight times that of the previous NIF record, set in the spring of 2021, and 25 times that of an experiment conducted in 2018.
“The rate of increase in energy output is very fast, indicating that we may soon reach more energy milestones,” said Professor Jeremy Chittenden of the Co-Director of the Center for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London.

Self Burning
The NIF scientists believe they have now achieved something called combustion plasma in which the fusion reaction itself provides more heat of fusion than the energy fired. This method is important for the subsequent self-combustion process.
Callahan said, self -burning is very important to get high results. Combustion waves have to propagate to high -density fuels to release a lot of fusion energy.
“We’re still doing analysis and simulations to make sure we understand the results,” Callahan said.
As further experiments will be repeated to understand how reproducible the applied method is and how sensitive the results are to small changes that occur.
“After that, we have an idea to improve this design and we will start working on it next year,” he said.
Chittenden explains that the energy for the megajoule-scale fusion reaction released in the experiment is impressive. But in practice the energy is only equivalent to the energy required to heat the boiler.
“Much higher fusion energies can be achieved through ignition if we can figure out how to hold the fuel together longer, to allow for more combustion reactions. This will be the next horizon for inertial confinement fusion,” he explained.
Furthermore, Chittenden explained, there are two types of reactions in nuclear energy, namely fission and fusion. In fission heavy chemical elements are broken down to produce a lighter one, while fusion works by combining two lighter elements to make a heavier one. there is / I-1