The US Department of Energy took the lead in "spoiler" on the 11th local time: a "major scientific breakthrough" will be announced this week.
US media quoted sources from people familiar with the matter as saying that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California used the "inertial localized fusion" program to make milestone progress in the field of nuclear fusion research.
Spokes of the U.S. Department of Energy and LLNL both said that they "do not comment on the detailed information", but U.S. Secretary of Energy Greenhouse will go to LLNL to issue a relevant statement on the 13th local time.
According to foreign media reports, although this technology may be decades away from the establishment of a "nuclear fusion power station", its important breakthrough lies in the first time that it achieved net energy gain, which is what physicists have been working on since the 1950s.
Clean energy that saves more money than solar energy?
has always been called the "Holy Grail" of zero carbon energy energy "Holy Grail" because of the same principle as the sun's energy production. In March this year, White House announced that it would continue to invest in accelerating the commercial development of nuclear fusion over the next few decades, as nuclear fusion predicts the possibility of "completely changing the energy industry", which will also help deal with the climate crisis while meeting the growing electricity demand in the United States and the world.
Foreign media reported that LLNL's nuclear fusion site is the size of three football fields, and 200 lasers are placed inside. LLNL scientists used the world's largest laser to bombard a tiny hydrogen plasma particle, starting an fusion reaction, , which "produces about 2.5 megajoules of energy, about 120% of the laser's 2.1 megajoules of energy." People familiar with the matter said the relevant data are still being analyzed.
US media quoted energy experts as saying that nuclear fusion uses less resources than other clean energy options such as solar or wind. Its main fuel consists of two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium found in water and tritium that can be extracted from lithium, while 1 gram of deuterium and tritium produces energy equivalent to about 2400 gallons of oil.
Eugenio Schuster, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics at Lehigh University, said: "With the technology we have, the possibility of nuclear accidents in nuclear fusion power plants is almost zero." Foreign media quoted other energy experts as saying that nuclear fusion has always been believed to provide cheap power for poor areas. In theory, a small cup of hydrogen fuel can provide a house with the electricity resources needed for hundreds of years.
"Unlike coal, you only need a small amount of hydrogen, which is the richest thing found in the universe." Julio Friedmann, former chief energy technology expert at LLNL, said, "Hydrogen exists in water, so the matter that produces this energy is infinite and clean." How far is
from commercialization?
Energy experts say that the reactor at the California Laboratory Facility is a fusion device based on laser inertia constraints, rather than the magnetically constrained fusion device used in most fusion studies. Although there is still a "distance to go" from commercialization, experts say scientists have now shown that they can output more energy than they were invested, which is a necessary step in developing a new energy source.
"From an energy perspective, the scientific community has been pursuing output energy exceeding input energy." Friedman said, "The previous breakthroughs are important, but this is not on the same level as the large-scale energy one day can be produced."
Some experts pointed out that scientists and experts now need to find out how to generate more energy from larger-scale nuclear fusion. At the same time, they need to figure out how to ultimately reduce the cost of fusion so that it can be used commercially.
"Currently, we spend a lot of time and money on every experiment we do." Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Center for Inertial Fusion Research at Imperial College London, said, "We need to significantly reduce costs."
In addition, scientists need to transport the energy generated by fusion as electricity to the grid.Experts say it may take years, or even decades, to produce unlimited clean energy.
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