LASERS! NUCLEAR! A FUSION!
Y’all some whizbang holy malarkey nuclear fuckery happened and we gotta talk about it.
Today’s Moment of Science… A breakthrough in fusion
There are two ways to extract an itsy bitsy kaboom from the friendly atom; split one apart or cram two together. These are fission and fusion, respectively, the former being infinitely less complicated than the latter.
Energy from fission is the science of hot-rock-boils-water-makes-turbine-go-brrrrr. It’s so simple a cave can do it- not a weird autocorrect. A metric assload of enriched uranium, plenty of our planet’s finest free flowing neutron moderator, i.e. water, and idk like four other things? *slaps side of Earth* This bad boy can do so much fission. Nearly two billion years ago, Earth still had enough fissile uranium to throw down natural sustained nuclear fission in a mine in Oklo, Gabon. Over the course of a few hundred thousand years of braising, the uranium was depleted.
Seventeen of these extinguished natural fission reactors have been identified in that region of Gabon, but nowhere else. Meaning it’s rare, it almost certainly can’t happen now because the half life of the naturally spicier uranium has taken its toll, but something that seems so complex, even mystical, can spontaneously happen here.
On the other hand, in the event that an all-natural fusion reaction occurs anywhere in your vicinity, something has gone horribly afuckingwry.
As I’ve mentioned before in writing about tokamak reactors, there are no conditions on the surface of the Earth where light elements will naturally undergo the magic and mayhem of fusion. Fission soup (my band name) is downright adorable compared to this fuckery that was formerly reserved for the center of the sun. Typically, two isotopes of heavy hydrogen cram into a tiny house together, and in order to form a happy helium atom, a neutron gets Kondo’d out in an energetic fit of atomic rage.
Fusion is the type of nuclear reaction that powers solar energy.
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There are drawbacks to every type of energy. Fossil fuels are killing everything, renewables often run into scalability issues (at least for now), and nuclear has a bit of a PR problem. Well, fission does. Fusion has another problem.
To get a couple of atoms to fuse in the first place, it takes an absurd amount of energy. A byproduct of that fusion reaction is another assload of energy. Until researchers get more energy out of a fusion reaction than they need to get the party started, it’s eternally in the research phase.
I told you all that to tell you… today’s news.
On December 5th at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 192 lasers were fired at a hydrogen fuel capsule the size of a pencil eraser (as always, anything to avoid the metric system). From the 2.05 megajoules of energy that went in from the lasers, along with fancy pants helium, 3.15 megajoules of energy was released.
Representing a first in nuclear energy, a fusion reaction produced 150% of the energy that was used to induce it.
So nuclear fusion energy is ready to go, right? Eh.
This was the sole successful test that produced net positive energy. It was also reported that this didn’t account for the amount of energy it took to power up the lasers. (1/2024 update: it’s been replicated multiple times, producing a net energy gain in recent tests) Even though getting 150% more power out was fricking cool, it’s still a fraction of the energy output needed to be useful. And it all took place in a research facility that’s super amazing but absolutely not designed to hook up to the power grid to charge my hitachi.
A breakthrough, yes. And possibly one that will influence the direction of research. But while we’re still unknown decades away from readily available fusion energy, it’s the tortured atomic blast we’ve long awaited.
This has been your moment of science, bracing for the inevitable seven people planning to yell ‘but Chernobyl’ like it’s news to me.
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