Humanity tries since a few decades already, to harness the power of the Sun through nuclear fusion because this resource is clean, safe and unlimited.
Scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab announced that for the first time they made a significant breakthrough in this matter.
They actually achieved diffusion reaction which is able to give us more energy out than we put in.
This is the goal of any successful energy generating system and they managed to do this now.
This energy system is not yet ready to power a major city, but for sure that this breakthrough is something comparable with the Wright brothers’ achievement when they built an aircraft which even being heavier-than-air was able to fly.
Nuclear fusion is very different from fission (which breaks atoms into pieces). Nuclear fusion is the same process like the process that makes the Sun to work.
The Sun is compressing hydrogen into helium and it releases energy, and he does all these naturally, we instead need artificial ways and cutting edge technology to heat and compress hydrogen and cope with the huge temperature generated by this process.
This breakthrough was achieved in a facility as big as a football field where 192 lasers have pointed to a hydrogen pellet the size of a peppercorn and heated it to a level which is equal to 150 million times the normal pressure and turned into helium releasing energy in this process.
Many other European and Asian countries are competing on the same field to achieve nuclear fusion in safe conditions at ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in France, so that is so important to keep this project alive and working in the US, even if it has required more than $5 billion to be built and needs only $330 million a year to work properly.
The first who will replicate the Sun’s activity in safe conditions here on Earth holds the keys to success in the field of clean and inexhaustible energy.
We are still decades away from effective nuclear fusion, but by doing small steps every year in this direction (competition is good here), gives us hope that we will achieve nuclear fusion sooner than we think.
Anyway, in order to move our civilisation to the next level, we need to use this tremendous clean energy potential represented by the nuclear fusion and which is also used by the Sun for billions of years already.