US officials announced Tuesday that researchers have produced a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain. Follow here for live news updates.
WASHINGTON, Dec 12 (Reuters) — The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday will announce that scientists at a national lab have made a breakthrough on fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars that one day could provide a cheap source of electricity, three sources with knowledge of the matter said.
The scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have achieved a net energy gain for the first time, in a fusion experiment using lasers, one of the people said.
While the results are a milestone in a scientific quest that has been developing since at least the 1930s, the ratio of energy going into the reaction at Livermore to getting energy out of it needs to be about 100 times bigger to create a process producing commercial amounts of electricity, one of the sources said.
Government scientists have reportedly made a major breakthrough in fusion energy, producing more energy from the reaction than it…
Overnight, news broke that the National Ignition Facility, a U.S. government research lab, was the first to achieve net-positive nuclear fusion. When lasers hit the tiny fuel pellet, it created an explosion that released more energy than the lasers delivered.
For decades, fusion power has been just around the corner. Is this the moment we’ve all been waiting for?
Maybe.
Fusion Energy For All Humanity — Prof Dr. Tony Donné Ph.D. — Program Manager (CEO), EUROfusion
Prof. Dr. Tony Donne, Ph.D. is Program Manager (CEO) of the EUROfusion (https://www.euro-fusion.org/) research consortium, a European consortium of 30 national fusion research institutes, in 26 EU countries, plus Switzerland and Ukraine, where he coordinates the work of over 4,000 scientists and engineers.
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.
The US government may have made a major scientific breakthrough in fusion energy, paving the way for creating a limitless supply of energy with zero carbon emissions or radioactive waste, The Financial Times reported, citing people with knowledge of a recent experiment’s results.
The fusion process is a landmark step of progress in the quest to achieve a limitless supply of environmentally-friendly energy.
According to The Financial Times, the US Energy Department will have US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Undersecretary for Nuclear Security Jill Hruby announce a “major scientific breakthrough” sometime on Tuesday.
Americium-241 emits power for more than 400 years.
The world’s first space battery fueled by Americium-241, a nuclear-based fuel, will be developed in cooperation between the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) and the U.K. Space Agency.
This project will be carried out in a brand-new laboratory in Cumbria costing £19 million ($23 million) and outfitted with cutting-edge machinery and technology, according to a joint press release by NNL and the Space Agency on Friday.
Year 2019 😁 nanoscale fusion.
A research team of fusion scientists has succeeded in developing “the nano-scale sculpture technique” to fabricate an ultra-thin film by sharpening a tungsten sample with a focused ion beam. This enables the nano-scale observation of a cross-section very near the top surface of the tungsten sample using the transmission electron microscope. The sculpture technique developed by this research can be applied not only to tungsten but also to other hard materials.
Hardened materials such as metals, carbons and ceramics are used in automobiles, aircraft and buildings. In a fusion reactor study, “tungsten,” which is one of the hardest metal materials, is the most likely candidate for the armour material of the device that receives the plasma heat/particle load. This device is called divertor. In any hardened materials, nanometer scale damages or defects can be formed very near the top surface of the materials. For predicting a material lifetime, it is necessary to know the types of the damages and their depth profiles in the material. To do this, we must observe a cross-section of the region very near the top surface of the material with nano-scale level.
Continue reading “Fusion scientists have developed ‘the nano-scale sculpture technique’” »
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In the future humanity may build enormous structures, feats of mega-engineering that may rival planets or even be of greater scope. This episode catalogs roughly 100 major types of Megastructure, from those that are cities in space to those that rival galaxies.
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