“Historical moment”: US researchers apparently achieve breakthrough in nuclear fusion Report on US Capitol storming expected before Christmas

Officially, the US government does not want to announce the results until Tuesday, but the big news has already leaked: recent nuclear fusion experiments at the Lawrence Livermore State Laboratory in California are said to have generated more energy for the first time than used for the fusion, reports the “Financial Times,” citing facility employees. “If this is confirmed, we are experiencing a historic moment,” the paper quoted plasma physicist Arthur Turrell of Imperial College London as saying.

Nuclear fusion is about generating energy from the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium. It is the same process that makes the sun shine and gives hydrogen bombs their destructive power. Like nuclear fission, the technology is based on Albert Einstein’s famous formula E=mc2, according to which mass can be converted into energy and vice versa.

Nuclear fusion energy has been a dream so far

In the hope of unlimited energy without CO2 emissions, research into controlled nuclear fusion has been conducted since the 1950s, but no breakthroughs have been achieved. To date, no team has been able to sustain a stable, controlled fusion that emits more energy than it consumes.

The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory near San Francisco uses one of the most powerful lasers in the world for nuclear fusion. The researchers use this to bombard the hydrogen isotopes tritium and deuterium, which are enclosed in a capsule of only two millimeters in size. At a temperature of almost 60 million degrees Celsius, the hydrogen isotopes fuse to helium and lose a small part of their mass in the form of radiation.

“Only a Matter of Time”

According to the Financial Times, 20 percent more energy has recently been generated than invested. US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm spoke of a “major scientific breakthrough” that should be announced on Tuesday. She did not give further details.

“For most of us, it was only a matter of time,” the Washington Post quoted a senior scientist at the facility as saying. The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory has not yet officially commented on the results. David Edelman of the TAE company, which also researches nuclear fusion, tells the newspaper: “This is an important milestone on the road to fusion energy. We can be proud that this has been achieved in the US.”

The Tokmak reactor should start up in 2028

Iter, the world’s largest fusion reactor, is currently under construction at Cadarache in southern France. According to the latest information, it should be commissioned in 2028 and provide electricity from the mid-1930s. In addition to the EU, Great Britain, Switzerland, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US are also involved in the billion-dollar project.

Iter is a tokmak reactor: with this construction principle, a plasma of hydrogen isotopes is heated in a strong magnetic field until nuclear fusion begins. However, so far it has not been proven that this principle really works. The research facilities Wendelstein 7-X in Greifswald and in Garching near Munich are also tokmak reactors.

(t-online, mk)