American scientists announce a "major scientific breakthrough"
American scientists announced on Tuesday that they had achieved a "major scientific breakthrough" in the field of nuclear fusion, which may one day revolutionize energy production on Earth.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy said in a tweet that an experiment it conducted last week “produced through nuclear fusion a greater amount of energy” used in lasers to start the reaction.
Scientists have been working for decades to develop nuclear fusion - which its proponents describe as a clean, abundant and safe source of energy that could eventually allow humanity to end its dependence on fossil fuels that are causing the global climate crisis.
The Financial Times published a report over the weekend that caused a stir in the scientific community.
The newspaper, based in the United Kingdom, said that researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California succeeded for the first time in producing a “net energy balance” from nuclear fusion, and this means producing more energy in the reaction than was used in its activation.
If confirmed, physicist Jeremy Chittenden of Imperial College London said, "It's a truly hopeful breakthrough ... It proves that the long-cherished goal, the fusion we've been so yearning for, can indeed be achieved."
To produce energy, nuclear power plants around the world currently use fission - the splitting of the nucleus of a heavy atom. Fusion combines two atoms of light hydrogen to form an atom heavier than helium and releases a large amount of energy in the process.
But there is still a long way to go before fusion becomes viable on an industrial scale. “To turn fusion into an energy source, we will need to increase our energy gain even more,” Chittenden said. We will also need to find a way to reproduce the same effect repeatedly and at a much lower cost before we can realistically turn this into a power plant.”
Source: websites