(Tiper Stock Exchange) – Use towards the breakthrough in nuclear fusion. The US Department of Energy will announce tomorrow, Tuesday 13 December, in a press conference, that the scientists they were able, for the first time in history, to produce a nuclear fusion reaction that generates more energy than is needed to ignite it.
The Washington Post writes it talking about “a milestone in the decade-long and expensive research to develop a technology that provides unlimited, clean and cheap energy”. For the American newspaper, this is the “Holy Grail” of carbon-free energy that scientists have been pursuing since the 1950s.
The discovery would have taken place at the National Ignition Facility housed in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California. Some researchers, interviewed by the Washington Post have confirmed advances but behind anonymity. The purpose of fusion research is to replicate the nuclear reaction through which energy is created on the Sun. Until now, the experiments had disappointed the expectations of scholars, who had indeed managed to trigger fusion, but using much more energy to obtain it than the reaction itself then released.
Speaking to the Financial Times, physicist Arthur Turrel said: “If this discovery is confirmed, we are witnessing a historic moment.”
(Photo: CRPP-EPFL Association Suisse Euratom CC BY-SA 2.5)