It is a safe and abundant source of energy.. America may announce today "A great find" in the field of nuclear fusion

Today, Tuesday, the US Department of Energy is expected to announce a “major scientific breakthrough” achieved by its researchers in the field of nuclear fusion, a technology seen as a revolutionary alternative energy source.

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 reliance on fossil fuels that are causing the global climate crisis.

The Department of Energy declined to give any specifics about what it will announce on Tuesday, but 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 the “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.

Physicist Jeremy Chittenden of Imperial College London said that if the achievement is confirmed, “it’s a really hopeful breakthrough moment… It proves that the long-cherished goal, the fusion we’ve longed for, can indeed be achieved.”

fission and merger

To produce energy, nuclear power plants around the world currently use fission, which is based on splitting 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.

This is the process that takes place inside stars, including the Sun.

The Financial Times said that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists recently produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy in a nuclear fusion reaction, or about 120 percent of the 2.1 megajoules used by the laser to start the reaction.

The result will finally provide evidence of the physical principles that fusion researchers identified decades ago, and will represent what Tony Rolston, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, says is “a success for science”.

A long way

Like fission, fusion is carbon-free in operation, but its advantages don’t stop there; It poses no risk of nuclear catastrophe and produces far less radioactive waste than fusion.

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.”

It could take another 20 or 30 years, Eric Lefevre, project manager at the French Atomic Energy Commission, told AFP.

But climate experts warn that the world cannot wait that long to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit their dangerous impacts.