US scientists announce fusion energy breakthrough in ‘landmark achievement.’ Here’s what it means
WASHINGTON (AP) — Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a “major scientific breakthrough” Tuesday in the decades-long quest to harness fusion, the energy that powers the sun and stars.
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it, something called net energy gain, the Energy Department said.
The achievement will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power, Granholm and other officials said.
“This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility who have dedicated their careers to seeing fusion ignition become a reality, and this milestone will undoubtedly spark even more discovery,” Granholm said at a news conference in Washington. The fusion breakthrough “will go down in the history books,” she said.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announces a major scientific breakthrough in fusion research that was made at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, during a news conference at the Department of Energy in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2022.
White House science adviser Arati Prabhakar, appearing with Granholm, called the fusion ignition “a tremendous example of what perseverance really can achieve” and “an engineering marvel beyond belief.”
Proponents of fusion hope that it could one day produce nearly limitless, carbon-free energy, displacing fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. Producing energy that powers homes and businesses from fusion is still decades away. But researchers said it was a significant step nonetheless.
“It’s almost like it’s a starting gun going off,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leader in fusion research. “We should be pushing towards making fusion energy systems available to tackle climate change and energy security.”
Net energy gain has been an elusive goal because fusion happens at such high temperatures and pressures that it is incredibly difficult to control.
Fusion works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat. Unlike other nuclear reactions, it doesn’t create radioactive waste.
Billions of dollars and decades of work have gone into fusion research that has produced exhilarating results — for fractions of a second. Previously, researchers at the National Ignition Facility, the division of Lawrence Livermore where the success took place, used 192 lasers and temperatures multiple times hotter than the center of the sun to create an extremely brief fusion reaction.
The lasers focus an enormous amount of heat on a small metal can. The result is a superheated plasma environment where fusion may occur.
Riccardo Betti, a professor at the University of Rochester and expert in laser fusion, said an announcement that net energy had been gained in a fusion reaction would be significant. But he said there’s a long road ahead before the result generates sustainable electricity.
He likened the breakthrough to when humans first learned that refining oil into gasoline and igniting it could produce an explosion.
“You still don’t have the engine and you still don’t have the tires,” Betti said. “You can’t say that you have a car.”
The net energy gain achievement applied to the fusion reaction itself, not the total amount of power it took to operate the lasers and run the project. For fusion to be viable, it will need to produce significantly more power and for longer.
It is incredibly difficult to control the physics of stars. Whyte said it has been challenging to reach this point because the fuel has to be hotter than the center of the sun. The fuel does not want to stay hot — it wants to leak out and get cold. Containing it is an incredible challenge, he said.
Net energy gain isn’t a huge surprise from the California lab because of progress it had already made, according to Jeremy Chittenden, a professor at Imperial College in London specializing in plasma physics.
“That doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a significant milestone,” he said.
It takes enormous resources and effort to advance fusion research. One approach turns hydrogen into plasma, an electrically charged gas, which is then controlled by humongous magnets. This method is being explored in France in a collaboration among 35 countries called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor as well as by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a private company.
Last year the teams working on those projects in two continents announced significant advancements in the vital magnets needed for their work.
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The use of renewable energy sources is on the rise in the U.S., which may be a welcome relief to both Earth and its inhabitants. Sourcing energy from renewables such as solar power, hydropower, and wind offers a plethora of health and sustainability benefits, especially compared to energy sources that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Considering the volume of U.S. energy use, national over-reliance on GHG-emitting energy sources has been a cause for concern in most scientific circles for decades.
Currently, the residential and commercial sectors of the U.S. each consume between 4-7 quadrillion Btu, or British thermal units, of energy annually, while the industrial and transportation sectors use between 22-27 quadrillion Btu. By far the largest energy consumer in the U.S. is the electric power sector, which gobbled up more than 36 quadrillion Btu in 2021.
Unfortunately, renewable energy source use pales against sources like natural gas. The Energy Information Administration found that since 2000, natural gas use in the residential sector alone has been more than three times that of renewables, despite an uptick in renewable sourcing since 2010. In the commercial sector, the difference is even more extreme, at nearly four times that of renewables. So, it is of little surprise that hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), which is the method by which natural gas is extracted, dominated U.S. energy production in 2021—a year that also marked the third in a row that annual energy production exceeded energy consumption in the U.S.
Fracking is a process fraught with controversy. While it has been a major industry in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Colorado, and the Dakotas for several years, it came to widespread public attention during the 2020 presidential campaign, when both then-President Trump and President Biden used it as a hot-button issue to make their respective energy stances known. The process is currently having a moment in the U.K. as a plinth from which the political right is attempting to address the nation's energy crisis.
Both renewables and natural gas energy production reached record highs in 2021; however, even though incentives such as tax credits encourage increasing the use of renewables, fracking remains popular, as it offers what its supporters describe as a much-needed clean energy alternative to petroleum.
Using annual report information from the Energy Information Administration, OhmConnect looked into how the U.S. generates its power, and how the rise of renewable energy fits into the future landscape.
