Scientists On The Verge Of Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough... And Unlimited Power | Unveiled

Scientists on the Verge of Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough… and Unlimited Power

For most of modern human history, whether we’ve inwardly known we’re doing it or not, our species has been on a quest for more and more energy. And, over the years, centuries, and millennia, we’ve learned to harness it in many forms… including the first fires in prehistoric times, all-powerful steam across the industrial revolution, more fossil fuels in the time since, and renewables heading into the modern age. With all that in mind, however, we could now be closing in on a new plan for enough energy to sustain humankind indefinitely… and, this time, it involves harnessing the power of the sun.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re exploring the extraordinary breakthroughs science has made toward nuclear fusion technology.

In general, thanks largely to their high energy output and easy availability, it’s been fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas that have been powering our planet’s energy expenses… since the dawn of the industrial age. But unfortunately, we now know that the use of fossil fuels in the past (and today) has led (and is leading) to various and severe detrimental effects on the environment. Alternative, renewable energy solutions like solar and wind do of course offer hope, but scientists are testing other options, too... including one possibility which, if it works, could provide us with power on a level with the sun direct.

Our sun has been valiantly anchoring the solar system for a long time now. It arrived around 4.6 billion years ago and is comfortably the largest object in the solar system - accounting for 99.8 percent of its mass. More than one million Earths could fit inside it. Energy-wise, NASA says that to match the power from the sun, we’d need to explode 100 billion tons of dynamite… every single second. That’s a lot of energy, but the sun achieves this through the crucial occurrence of nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fusion is a reaction process where typically light atomic nuclei are brought (or fused) together to make a heavier nucleus… which, in turn, generates energy. It’s what powers the sun, as well as many other stars in the galaxy. Here, in the burning depths of the sun, hydrogen atoms come together to endlessly form helium nuclei. It’s happening all over our star, all of the time, creating effectively endless energy. The sun is essentially a giant, thermonuclear reactor in space. The challenge for today’s scientists, then, is to take all we know about it… and to recreate the star-like conditions, to initiate the same reactions here on Earth, instead. ­

Fusion science was first demonstrated (to a point) in November 1952, in the United States… but with the hydrogen bomb. Unlike the atomic bombs before it, which are powered by the atom-splitting process of nuclear fission only, the hydrogen bomb involved a mixture of fission and fusion. Ultimately, it brings hydrogen atoms together, to trigger a high-pressure chain reaction, and to release a tremendous and devastating explosion. The H-bomb is truly terrifying to think about… but channel all that power into something that isn’t a bomb, and there is still potential to solve all our energy needs.

We’ve known for a long time, however, that it’s no easy task, with researchers generally identifying three major problem areas with nuclear fusion: the incredible temperatures involved, the immense pressure required, and then the building of a structure that can contain it all safely. Inside the sun, the core temperature is around twenty-seven million degrees Fahrenheit, and the gravitational force is far greater than anything else for lightyears around… but recreating that on the ground is, naturally, tricky. At one time it had seemed impossible.

The earliest attempts toward man made fusion reactors came in around the 1950s. They were known then (and still today) as tokamaks… inside of which hydrogen atoms (or, more specifically, hydrogen isotopes) are heated to extremely high temperatures. Over the years we’ve seen how these isotopes can actually be brought to temperatures much higher than even those at the centre of the sun, with some reactors reaching tenfold the target - a staggering 270 million degrees - and more. In theory, this should compensate for the much lower gravitational pressure here on Earth, compared to the fusion conditions inside a star.

Hydrogen placed under such extreme conditions converts into a plasma, a soup of ions and electrons… and fusion should follow. But, until now, getting to this stage has always (and counterproductively) required far too much energy input. In fact, man made fusion reactors have always needed more energy to run than they end up producing. Which kind of defeats the point of them, no matter how impressive the tech they carry is. But, in the year 2021, it appears that we could be about to finally turn the tide. In August, a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States made headlines… after taking a giant step closer to the world’s first fusion reaction experiment to successfully reach ignition. That is, to achieve a reaction that does make more energy than it needs to run.

Working out of the university’s National Ignition Facility (or NIF), the experiment took place inside what’s called an inertial confinement fusion reactor. This is different to most traditional tokamak designs because, instead of the powerful magnetic fields that are required to power those, inertial confinement fusion uses high-powered lasers to heat up its hydrogen isotopes, instead. These lasers get beamed around a series of mirrors inside the reactor, and are then focused onto a gold cylinder housing thermonuclear fuel - pellets of deuterium and tritium, both of which are hydrogen isotopes. Once those heat up, they fuse, and generate helium nuclei, neutrons, and light… before those nuclei interact and trigger a self-sustaining chain reaction, thereby generating more helium and more energy... and this is ignition.

In a landmark result, the team at NIF confirmed that their experiment, held on August 8th 2021, had generated around seventy percent of the power required to start the reaction in the first place. It was brought to the brink of ignition before it was ended, and closer than ever before to what’s often called the “break-even” mark - where energy out beats energy in. In other terms, early study of the results suggests that the experiment also produced a total energy output at least six times greater than the previous record. There’s no doubt that the NIF team, and all others working in the field, will hope for even greater efficiency in the future… but, in the meantime, the importance of this accomplishment hasn’t been lost, and those behind it have found themselves the toast of the scientific community.

Now, following the NIF success, we’re heading into what looks set to be a critical moment in the technology’s history. As well as breaching that all-important break-even point, and finally producing a fusion reactor that genuinely makes more energy than it consumes… scientists hope to one day be able to sustain that reaction for several months (rather than just for a few moments, as seen during this most recent experiment at the NIF). If or when we get to that stage, then commercialising nuclear energy for power all around the world becomes a real possibility.

The future looks genuinely promising, too, now that the field is working in earnest with laser fusion… because most researchers and engineers agree that even the tiniest changes to this setup can potentially bring about hugely different results. This means a tweak here, a recalculation there, and perhaps we can up that conversion percentage from seventy to eighty… to one hundred… one ten, and more. And, suddenly, nuclear fusion on Earth will have moved from the realms of seeming impossibility, to become a much more manageable prospect… and maybe even an inevitable one. In mere decades’ time, we could well be seeing fusion reactors and plants all over the world map… if progress continues.

According to one Doctor Brian Appelbe, of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, and reacting to the NIF results, “we have entered a regime we’ve previously never been in – this is uncharted territory in our understanding of plasma”. And uncharted territory is perhaps the best phrase for it, in general. We are now recreating, with ever-improving accuracy, the environment as seen in the core of the sun… but we’re doing it down here on our planet, Earth.

We’re beginning to understand even the innermost secrets of the stars, then… and we’re working out how to control them for our own needs. And that’s why we’re on the verge of a truly spectacular breakthrough, with the potential to solve all our energy concerns forever.