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Last year, scientists using laser beams at a U.S. national lab in California repeated a fusion breakthrough called ignition where for an instant the amount of energy coming from the fusion ...
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a private company spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, plans what it calls the world's first grid-scale fusion power plant in Virginia, to generate ...
If all goes to plan, Virginia will be the site of the world’s first grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant, able to harness this futuristic clean power and generate electricity from it by the ...
Nuclear fusion, the reaction that powers the sun and other stars, involves smashing two or more atoms together to form a denser one, in a process that releases huge amounts of energy.
Fusion ignition is the point at which a nuclear fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining. This occurs when the energy being given off by the reaction heats the fuel mass more rapidly than it cools. In other words, fusion ignition is the point at which the increasing self-heating of the nuclear fusion removes the need for external heating. [ 1 ]
But the biggest news arrived in December 2022 when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), an inertial fusion facility whose primary mission is to test the reliability of the U.S.’s ...
Experiments in 2020 and 2021 yielded the world's first burning plasmas, in which most of the plasma heating came from nuclear fusion reactions. [11] This result was followed on August 8, 2021 by the world's first ignited plasma, in which the fusion heating was sufficient to sustain the thermonuclear reaction.
In 1972, John Nuckolls wrote a paper predicting that compressing a target could create conditions where fusion reactions are chained together, a process known as fusion ignition or a burning plasma. [2] On August 8, 2021, the NIF at Livermore National Laboratory became the first ICF facility in the world to demonstrate this (see plot).