Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a 'major scientific breakthrough' Tuesday in the decades-long quest to harness fusion, the energy that powers the sun and stars.
WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a"major scientific breakthrough" Tuesday in the decades-long quest to harness fusion, the energy that powers the sun and stars.
"This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility who have dedicated their careers to seeing fusion ignition become a reality, and this milestone will undoubtedly spark even more discovery," Granholm said at a news conference in Washington. The fusion breakthrough"will go down in the history books,'' she said.
Science EXPLAINER: Why fusion could be a clean-energy breakthrough "It's almost like it's a starting gun going off," said Professor Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leader in fusion research."We should be pushing towards making fusion energy systems available to tackle climate change and energy security.
Billions of dollars and decades of work have gone into fusion research that has produced exhilarating results — for fractions of a second. Previously, researchers at the National Ignition Facility, the division of Lawrence Livermore where the success took place, used 192 lasers and temperatures multiple times hotter than the center of the sun to create an extremely brief fusion reaction.
He likened the breakthrough to when humans first learned that refining oil into gasoline and igniting it could produce an explosion. It is incredibly difficult to control the physics of stars. Whyte said it has been challenging to reach this point because the fuel has to be hotter than the center of the sun. The fuel does not want to stay hot -- it wants to leak out and get cold. Containing it is an incredible challenge, he said.
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