[LINK] "Nuclear fusion hits energy milestone"

[rfmcdonald]

CBC's Emily Chung reports on a milestone in nuclear fusion research. Only a hundredth of the energy used in the reaction was produced, but still, it's something.

It's noteworthy that this came about via inertial confinement fusion, colloquially called "laser fusion", rather than via a tokamak or other magnetically-based technologies.

[R]esearchers at the National Ignition Facility of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S. announce that they managed to use lasers to compress fuel made from two heavier forms of hydrogen enough to kick off a nuclear fusion reaction. And for the first time, the reaction managed to generate more energy than was absorbed by the fuel from the lasers.

"That's a major turning point in our minds," said Omar Hurricane, lead author of a paper describing the results, published in Nature today.

However, he was quick to point out that because the fuel absorbed only a small amount of the energy from the lasers, there is still far more energy put into the entire process than comes out.

That is partly because the fuel did not reach ignition — the point at which the reaction becomes self-sustaining and energy production increases dramatically.

[. . .]

Blair Bromley, chair of the nuclear fusion division of the Canadian Nuclear Society, called the new results "good news" and "significant progress."

However Bromley, who works at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., noted that the energy yield would have to be increased dramatically to make this approach to nuclear fusion feasible, and even then a lot of engineering work would have to be done to build a practical prototype of a fusion reactor.