A Department of Energy news conference is scheduled for Tuesday morning to announce a 'major scientific breakthrough.'
said the agency will announce that scientists at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have for the first time created a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it took to create. is the opposite of the fission process that powers nuclear plants. Fusion creates power by fusing two atoms together, fission power comes from splitting them apart.
On Earth, the process is enormously difficult, expensive and power-intensive. The atoms, typically deuterium and tritium, must be heated to 150 million degrees Celsius. The resulting plasma is held in place by massive magnets in what is known as a"magnetic bottle." Lawrence Livermore's experiments last year were done by focusing laser light the size of three football fields onto a target the size of a BB. This produced a hot spot the diameter of a human hair and generated more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second.
"There was an inrush of private capital," he said."That has a bootstrapping effect that I think has really changed the game." "Then Ukraine happened," Whyte said."That spurred on even more urgency. It's not just about climate change. It's also energy security.
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