It’s being called a “game-changer” in the development of green energy to address climate change.
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California are trumpeting what’s being called a major breakthrough in harnessing the power created by nuclear fusion.
It’s been a decades-long process to come up with a way to harness the energy that fuels stars like the sun.
Physics PhD and Associate Professor and Deputy Head at Memorial University’s department of Physics and Physical Oceanography, Dr. James LeBlanc, says fusion is very different from the fission process used in nuclear power plants.
Fission involves a heavy element like uranium which is broken up to release energy which is harnessed to power a turbine in a power plant. “Fusion is the complete opposite,” says LeBlanc; “it’s the process that occurs in the sun.” That is primarily the diffusion of hydrogen into heavier elements, like helium, and in that process he says, you get helium and “some high energy neutrons and quite a bit of energy.”
LeBlanc says the breakthrough is actually a first step, and it will take decades to find a way to apply it to energy needs and fuel a nuclear reactor.
“Ignition is the key word,” says LeBlanc. “In order for something to burn and continue to burn, you have to make sure that it doesn’t dissipate energy very quickly.” What the research team has done is isolate for a period of time, a fusion reaction that is actually ignited “in principle, if you could feed it more fuel, it would continue to burn,” says LeBlanc. In essence they have the match or the starting point of fueling a nuclear reactor according to LeBlanc.
