Fusion Power a Step Closer After Giant Laser Blast

by Barbara McPherson | January 29, 2010 at 06:40 pm

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Fusion power is the holy grail of energy production and it just got a little bit closer. A bank of lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have heated a fuel pellet to temperatures compared to those found in the sun.

These lasers are pulsed, and for a very short amount of time"—one ten-billionth of a second—"the power they produce is more than all the power generated by the entire electrical grid of the United States" at any given moment, Glenzer said.

The test confirmed that a technique called inertial fusion ignition could be used to trigger nuclear fusion—the merging of the nuclei of two atoms of, say, hydrogen—which can result in a tremendous amount of excess energy. Nuclear fission, by contrast, involves the splitting of atoms.

Nuclear fusion may be the answer to the ever increasing global demand for energy. It is achieved in the depths of stars but has not been reliably done on Earth. The enormous gravity of the sun forces atoms together - fusion - and the process releases great amounts of energy. The fuel used on Earth would be plentiful hydrogen. Fusion energy production releases little radioactive energy.

"Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy."

--- Carl Sagan, Spitzer Lecture, October 1991