SFGATE's Drew Magary on why this isn't the holy grail — but it's still a cause for celebration.
Since the beginning of time, mankind has yearned to create the sun. And for over 70 years, scientists have known how to create an artificial nuclear fusion reaction, forcing positively-charged particles to slam together and fuse, generating an enormous amount of heat. It’s something that the sun has been doing for roughly 4.6 billion years.
That all changed on Dec. 5, at 1:03 a.m., when a handful of night-owl scientists at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory bombarded a tiny capsule of frozen hydrogen with 192 intense lasers, forcing the atoms to bounce around the container at an incredibly high speed. The protons in these atoms were positively charged, which means they repel each other.
More damning, the scientists only produced a net gain in energy if you count the power from those 192 lasers themselves, and not the power needed to run those lasers. These are very hot, concentrated lasers, which means that it takes an awful lot of power — hundreds of times the amount of energy produced in the reactor. So the official energy surplus announced this week is something of a trick of accounting.
Broughton also noted that, while the scientists were able to produce an energy surplus from the fusion reaction, there was no way to HARNESS that energy. There was no water tank in their testing room that made steam to spin a turbine. There was just a brilliant burst of heat, and then nothing.
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