Herrmann says that the August 2021 shot gave the team a starting point. More out than inĮven after last-year's achievement, there was still one more goal to reach – producing more power from the tiny capsule than the lasers put in. Such tests will make sure that new and refurbished parts of nuclear weapons behave as expected. In addition, he says the radiation from the explosions can be used to test components. "We use these experiments to get experimental data to compare to our simulations," says Herrmann, who also oversees nuclear weapons research at the lab. The data from these tiny explosions are fed into complex computer simulations that help physicists understand whether the nation's nuclear weapons remain reliable, despite decades on the shelf. The United States has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1992, and the primary purpose of the NIF facility is to conduct very small-scale bangs that closely mimic nukes. This self-burning ignition actually resembles a process similar to that of a modern thermonuclear warhead, albeit on a much smaller scale. "You start with a little spark, and then the spark gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and then the burn propagates through." Bang in a box The process is analogous to lighting gasoline, says Riccardo Betti, the chief scientist of the laboratory for laser energetics at the University of Rochester. Then in August 2021, after years of slow but steady progress, physicists were able to ignite the hydrogen inside the capsule, creating a self-sustaining burn. The result is nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun and the world's largest nuclear weapons. The facility uses powerful lasers to compress fuel pellets. It's a major milestone, one that the field of fusion science has struggled to reach for more than half a century. The lasers put out 2.05 megajoules of energy, and the pellet released roughly 3.15 megajoules. At 1 AM local time, researchers used the lasers to zap a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. For more than a decade, NIF has struggled to meet its stated goal of producing a fusion reaction that generates more energy than it consumes.īut that changed in the dead of night on Dec. The achievement came at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a $3.5 billion laser complex at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. "America has achieved a tremendous scientific breakthrough," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said at a press conference. The total power out was around 150% of the power that was put in by 192 laser beams. Department of Energy have reached a breakthrough in nuclear fusion.įor the first time ever in a laboratory, researchers were able to generate more energy from fusion reactions than they used to start the process. The multi-billion dollar National Ignition Facility has used 192 laser beams to create net energy from a tiny pellet of nuclear fuel.
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