Nuclear fusion, the first historical outcome in California - The Republic

NEW YORK – A very important step forward in nuclear energy research has been done last fall at the Livermore National Laboratory in California, a research laboratory of the Department Energy of the United States. For the first time scientists have been able to get more energy from a nuclear fusion than burned to trigger it, creating a sort of small artificial star. This was revealed in an article published in the scientific journal Nature.

Fusion is the process that powers the Sun and other stars and involves shaping the nuclei of atoms to release energy instead of splitting them, as in the case of fission, the basic principle the atomic bomb. The dream of producing clean energy thanks to the first process is chased by scientists for years, and now it seems a little ‘closer. The researchers fired 192 laser beams on a tiny sphere, creating a fusion reaction that sparked an enormous amount of energy for a small fraction of a second. Although in a shortened version, created in this way conditions similar to what happens continuously skyrocketing. “For the first time ever we got more energy from the combustion compared to what was used for the burning” when you use this technique, said Omar Hurricane, lead author of the study.

Although according to the team of scientists, among which there is also the Italian Riccardo Tommasini, the result is still “modest” is, however, higher than estimated and closer than “any other result before” for the realization of fusion energy has concluded Hurricane. The yield of the experiment was in fact 10 times greater than had been previously obtained.

The research, however, is still far from reaching that stage which is technically called “ignition”, where it generates more energy of how much is consumption in the general context of the experiment: What would happen only with chain reactions self-sufficient, without which the energy produced by the merger would not be cost-effective. The experiment, however, marks a decisive step forward, after years of modest results, on the way to a source of cheap energy and potentially unlimited for use on Earth.