The question facing policymakers is whether the problems of fission are really so great compared to the engineering challenges of fusion
in the plodding, hype-fraught history of fusion experiments. According to Wilson, the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has achieved the first energy-positive “shot” in the history of artificial fusion.Article content
If you believe that the future of humanity involves ubiquitous nuclear-fusion power plants producing energy too cheap to meter, then today’s expected announcement will be a great moment — the equivalent, arguably, of the first artificial fission reaction, which was completed under a football stadium at the University of Chicago 80 years ago this month.Article content
To be useful for commercial power production, those lasers would have to be capable of firing repeatedly without destroying the equipment used to measure the reaction — as the NIF shot is reported by Wilson to have done.
It is hard to imagine anyone building a second NIF; the one that exists was really built to study nuclear explosions for military purposes, still the chief raison d’être of the Livermore lab. It has gone to a lot of trouble, one has to say, to “prove” that nuclear fusion is possible and produces net energy; both the sun and the original American fusion weapons can be used to demonstrate that much.
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