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Tag Archives: fusion
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Box Office Fusion: ‘Barbie’ Heads for Staggering $155M-Plus Opening, ‘Oppenheimer’ Eyes $77M – Hollywood Reporter
- Box Office Fusion: ‘Barbie’ Heads for Staggering $155M-Plus Opening, ‘Oppenheimer’ Eyes $77M Hollywood Reporter
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- View Full Coverage on Google News
US scientists reach long-awaited nuclear fusion breakthrough, source says
CNN
—
For the first time ever, US scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain, a source familiar with the project confirmed to CNN.
The US Department of Energy is expected to officially announce the breakthrough Tuesday.
The result of the experiment would be a massive step in a decadeslong quest to unleash an infinite source of clean energy that could help end dependence on fossil fuels. Researchers for decades have attempted to recreate nuclear fusion – replicating the fusion that powers the sun.
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will make an announcement Tuesday on a “major scientific breakthrough,” the department announced Sunday. The breakthrough was first reported by the Financial Times.
Nuclear fusion happens when two or more atoms are fused into one larger one, a process that generates a massive amount of energy as heat. Unlike nuclear fission that powers electricity all over the world, it doesn’t generate long-lived radioactive waste.
Scientists across the globe have been inching toward the breakthrough, using different methods to try to achieve the same goal.
The National Ignition Facility project creates energy from nuclear fusion by what’s known as “thermonuclear inertial fusion.” In practice, US scientists fire pellets that contain a hydrogen fuel into an array of nearly 200 lasers, essentially creating a series of extremely fast, repeated explosions at the rate of 50 times per second.
The energy collected from the neutrons and alpha particles is extracted as heat, and that heat holds the key to producing energy.
“They contain the fusion reaction by bombarding the outside with lasers,” Tony Roulstone, a fusion expert from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, told CNN. “They heat up the outside; that creates a shockwave.”
Even though getting a net energy gain from nuclear fusion is a big deal, it’s happening on a much smaller scale than what’s needed to power electric grids and heat buildings.
“It’s about what it takes to boil 10 kettles of water,” said Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College in London. “In order to turn that into a power station, we need to make a larger gain in energy – we need it to be substantially more.”
In the UK, scientists are working with a huge donut-shaped machine outfitted with giant magnets called a tokamak to try to generate the same result.
The missing mass converts to an enormous amount of energy. The plasma needs to reach at least 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. The neutrons, which are able to escape the plasma, then hit a “blanket” lining the walls of the tokamak, and their kinetic energy transfers as heat. This heat can then be used to warm water, create steam and power turbines to generate power.
Last year, scientists working near Oxford were able to generate a record-breaking amount of sustained energy. Even so, it only lasted 5 seconds.
Whether it’s using magnets or shooting pellets with lasers, the result is ultimately the same: Heat sustained by the process of fusing the atoms together holds the key to helping produce energy.
The big challenge of harnessing fusion energy is sustaining it long enough so that it can power electric grids and heating systems around the globe.
Chittenden and Roulstone told CNN that scientists around the globe now must work toward dramatically scaling up their fusion projects, and also bring the cost down. Getting it commercially viable will take years of more research.
“At the moment we’re spending a huge amount of time and money for every experiment we do,” Chittenden said. “We need to bring the cost down by a huge factor.”
However, Chittenden called this new chapter in nuclear fusion “a true breakthrough moment which is tremendously exciting.”
Roulstone said there’s much shows more work needs to happen to make fusion able to generate electricity on a commercial scale.
“The opposing argument is that this result is miles away from actual energy gain required for the production of electricity,” he said. “Therefore, we can say (it) is a success of the science but a long way from providing useful energy.”
U.S. to reveal scientific milestone on fusion energy
WASHINGTON, Dec 12 (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday will announce that scientists at a national lab have made a breakthrough on fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars that one day could provide a cheap source of electricity, three sources with knowledge of the matter said.
The scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have achieved a net energy gain for the first time, in a fusion experiment using lasers, one of the people said.
While the results are a milestone in a scientific quest that has been developing since at least the 1930s, the ratio of energy going into the reaction at Livermore to getting energy out of it needs to be about 100 times bigger to create a process producing commercial amounts of electricity, one of the sources said.
The FT first reported the experiment.
Fusion works when nuclei of two atoms are subjected to extreme heat of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million Fahrenheit) or higher leading them to fuse into a new larger atom, giving off enormous amounts of energy.
But the process consumes vast amounts of energy and the trick has been to make the process self-sustaining and get more energy out than goes in and to do so continuously instead of for brief moments.
[1/2] Technicians use a service system lift to access the target chamber interior for inspection and maintenance at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a laser-based inertial confinement fusion research device, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States in 2008. Philip Saltonstall/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Handout via REUTERS
If fusion is commercialized, which backers say could happen in a decade or more, it would have additional benefits including the generation of virtually carbon-free electricity which could help in the fight against climate change without the amounts of radioactive nuclear waste produced by today’s fission reactors.
Running an electric power plant off fusion presents tough hurdles however, such as how to contain the heat economically and to keep lasers firing consistently. Other methods of fusion use magnets instead of lasers.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is slated to hold a media briefing on Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. EST (1500 GMT) on a “major scientific breakthrough.”
The department has no information ahead of the briefing, a spokesperson said.
Lawrence Livermore focuses mainly on national security issues related to nuclear weapons and the fusion experiment could lead to testing safer testing of the nation’s arsenal of such bombs.
But advances at the labs could also help efforts at companies that hope to develop power plants fired by fusion including Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Focused Energy and General Fusion.
Investors including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr have poured money into companies building fusion. Private industry secured more than $2.8 billion last year, according to the Fusion Industry Association for a total of about $5 billion in recent years.
Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Philippa Fletcher, Marguerita Choy and Richard Chang
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
The U.S. fusion energy breakthrough: Everything you need to know
But how big of a deal is the “net energy gain” anyway — and what does it mean for the fusion power plants of the future? Here’s what you need to know.
Existing nuclear power plants work through fission — splitting apart heavy atoms to create energy. In fission, a neutron collides with a heavy uranium atom, splitting it into lighter atoms and releasing a lot of heat and energy at the same time.
Fusion, on the other hand, works in the opposite way — it involves smushing two atoms (often two hydrogen atoms) together to create a new element (often helium), in the same way that stars creates energy. In that process, the two hydrogen atoms lose a small amount of mass, which is converted to energy according to Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc². Because the speed of light is very, very fast — 300,000,000 meters per second — even a tiny amount of mass lost can result in a ton of energy.
What is “net energy gain,” and how did the researchers achieve it?
Up to this point, researchers have been able to fuse two hydrogen atoms together successfully, but it’s always taken more energy to do the reaction than they get back. Net energy gain — where they get more energy back than they put in to create the reaction — has been the elusive holy grail of fusion research.
Now, researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California are expected to announced that they have attained net energy gain by shooting lasers at hydrogen atoms. The 192 laser beams compress the hydrogen atoms down to about 100 times the density of lead and heat them to approximately 100 million degrees Celsius. The high density and temperature cause the atoms to merge into helium.
Other methods being researched involve using magnets to confine superhot plasma.
“If it’s what we’re expecting, it’s like the Kitty Hawk moment for the Wright brothers,” said Melanie Windridge, a plasma physicist and the CEO of Fusion Energy Insights. “It’s like the plane taking off.”
Does this mean fusion energy is ready for prime time?
No. Scientists refer to the current breakthrough as “scientific net energy gain” — meaning that more energy has come out of the reaction than was inputted by the laser. That’s a huge milestone that has never before been achieved.
But it’s only a net energy gain at the micro level. The lasers used at the Livermore lab are only about 1 percent efficient, according to Troy Carter, a plasma physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles. That means that it takes about 100 times more energy to run the lasers than they are ultimately able to deliver to the hydrogen atoms.
So researchers will still have to reach “engineering net energy gain,” or the point at which the entire process takes less energy than is outputted by the reaction. They will also have to figure out how to turn the outputted energy — currently in the form of kinetic energy from the helium nucleus and the neutron — into a form that is usable for electricity. They could do that by converting it to heat, then heating steam to turn a turbine and run a generator. That process also has efficiency limitations.
All that means that the energy gain will probably need to be pushed much, much higher for fusion to actually be commercially viable.
At the moment, researchers can also only do the fusion reaction about once a day. In between, they have to allow the lasers to cool down and replace the fusion fuel target. A commercially viable plant would need to be able to do it several times per second, says Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT. “Once you’ve got scientific viability,” he said, “you’ve got to figure out engineering viability.”
What are the benefits of fusion?
Fusion’s possibilities are huge. The technology is much, much safer than nuclear fission, since fusion can’t create runaway reactions. It also doesn’t produce radioactive byproducts that need to be stored, or harmful carbon emissions; it simply produces inert helium and a neutron. And we’re not likely to run out of fuel: The fuel for fusion is just heavy hydrogen atoms, which can be found in seawater.
When could fusion actually power our homes?
That’s the trillion-dollar question. For decades, scientists have joked that fusion is always 30 or 40 years away; over the years, researchers have variously predicted that fusion plants will be operational in the 90s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and the 2020s. Current fusion experts argue that it’s not a matter of time, but a matter of will — if governments and private donors finance fusion aggressively, they say, a prototype fusion power plant could be available in the 2030s.
“The timeline is not really a question of time,” Carter said. “It’s a question of innovating and putting the effort in.”
US scientists reach long-awaited nuclear fusion breakthrough, source says
CNN
—
For the first time ever, US scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain, a source familiar with the project confirmed to CNN.
The US Department of Energy is expected to officially announce the breakthrough Tuesday.
The result of the experiment is a massive step in a decadeslong quest to unleash an infinite source of clean energy that could help end dependence on fossil fuels. Researchers have for decades attempted to recreate nuclear fusion – replicating the fusion that powers the sun.
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will make an announcement Tuesday on a “major scientific breakthrough,” the department announced Sunday. The breakthrough was first reported by the Financial Times.
Nuclear fusion happens when two or more atoms are fused into one larger one, a process that generates a massive amount of energy as heat.
Scientists across the globe have been inching toward the breakthrough; in February, UK scientists announced they had more than doubled the previous record for generating and sustaining nuclear fusion.
In a huge donut-shaped machine called a tokamak outfitted with giant magnets, scientists working near Oxford were able to generate a record-breaking amount of sustained energy. Even so, it only lasted 5 seconds.
The heat sustained by the process of fusing the atoms together holds the key to helping produce energy.
As CNN reported earlier this year, the process of fusion creates helium and neutrons – which are lighter in mass than the parts from which they were originally made.
The missing mass then converts to an enormous amount of energy. The neutrons, which are able to escape the plasma, then hit a “blanket” lining the walls of the tokamak, and their kinetic energy transfers as heat. This heat can then be used to warm water, create steam and power turbines to generate power.
The machine that generates the reaction has to undergo serious heat. The plasma needs to reach at least 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the core of the sun.
The big challenge of harnessing fusion energy is sustaining it long enough so that it can power electric grids and heating systems around the globe.
A UK fusion scientist told CNN that the result of the US breakthrough is promising, but also shows more work needs to happen to make fusion able to generate electricity on a commercial scale.
“They have worked on the design and the makeup of the target and the shape of the energy pulse to get much better results,” Tony Roulstone, from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, told CNN.
“The opposing argument is that this result is miles away from actual energy gain required for the production of electricity. Therefore, we can say (it) is a success of the science but a long way from providing useful energy.”
Fusion energy, the ‘holy grail’ of clean power, a step closer to reality
Huge amounts of public and private funds have been funneled into the fusion race worldwide, with the aim of ultimately manufacturing fusion machinery that could bring electricity to the grid with no carbon footprint, no radioactive waste and far fewer resources than it takes to harness solar and wind power. Beyond the climate benefits, promoters say it could help bring cheap electricity to impoverished parts of the world.
“To most of us, this was only a matter of time,” said a senior fusion scientist familiar with the work of the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where the discovery was made.
The development was first reported by the Financial Times on Sunday. It was confirmed by two people familiar with the research, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid getting ahead of the official announcement. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was slated make the announcement Tuesday at a media event billed as the unveiling of “a major scientific breakthrough.”
The department and the lab declined to comment. A lab official said researchers there are still finalizing their analysis and will not be releasing any official findings before Tuesday.
The science of nuclear fusion relies on smashing two atoms together at incredibly high speeds and transforming the energy from that reaction into electricity that can power homes and offices without emitting carbon into the air or dumping radioactive waste into the environment.
In the decades scientists have been experimenting with fusion reactions, they had not until now been able to create one that produces more energy than it consumes. While the achievement is significant, there are still monumental engineering and scientific challenges ahead.
Creating the net energy gain required engagement of one of the largest lasers in the world, and the resources needed to recreate the reaction on the scale required to make fusion practical for energy production are immense. More importantly, engineers have yet to develop machinery capable of affordably turning that reaction into electricity that can be practically deployed to the power grid.
Building devices that are large enough to create fusion power at scale, scientists say, would require materials that are extraordinarily difficult to produce. At the same time, the reaction creates neutrons that put a tremendous amount of stress on the equipment creating it, such that it can get destroyed in the process.
And then there is the question of whether the technology could be perfected in time to make a dent in climate change.
Even so, researchers and investors in fusion technology hailed the breakthrough as an important advancement.
“There is going to be great pride that this is something that happened in the United States,” said David Edelman, who leads policy and global affairs at TAE, a large private fusion energy company. “This is a very important milestone on the road toward fusion energy.”
It comes as the Biden administration is prioritizing fusion energy research in its climate and energy agenda. The projects are among the front of the line for the tens of billions of dollars in subsidies and grants authorized through the major climate package Biden signed over the summer, called the Inflation Reduction Act.
Over the past several decades, the United States, Russia and various European nations have allocated billions in government dollars trying to master the science, believing that if they could, it would be a boon for the world.
Fusion power is ‘approaching’ reality thanks to a magnetic field breakthrough
Fusion power may be a more realistic prospect than you think. As Motherboard reports, researchers at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered that a new magnetic field setup more than tripled the energy output of the fusion reaction hotspot in experiments, “approaching” the level required for self-sustaining ignition in plasmas. The field was particularly effective at trapping heat within the hotspot, boosting the energy yield.
The hotspot’s creation involved blasting 200 lasers at a fusion fuel pellet made from hydrogen isotopes like deuterium and tritium. The resulting X-rays made the pellet implode and thus produce the extremely high pressures and heat needed for fusion. The team achieved their feat by wrapping a coil around a pellet made using special metals.
The notion of using magnets to heat the fuel isn’t new. University of Rochester scientists found they could use magnetism to their advantage in 2012. The Lawrence Livermore study was far more effective, however, producing 40 percent heat and more than three times the energy.
Practical fusion reactors are still many years away. The output is still far less than the energy required to create self-sustaining reactions. The finding makes ignition considerably more achievable, though, and that in turn improves the chances of an energy-positive fusion system. This also isn’t the end of the magnetism experiments. A future test will use an ice-laden cryogenic capsule to help understand fusion physics. Even if ignition is still distant, the learnings from this study could provide a clearer path to that breakthrough moment.
[RD/ORP1] “Voidvelgr” Fusion Monster & “Dark Hole”
Yes, I promise these two things are related.
RD/ORP1-JP047 ヴォイドヴェルグ・アポカリプス Voidvelgr Apocalypse
Level 9 DARK Galaxy Fusion Effect Monster
ATK 2500
DEF 2000
Materials: “Voidvelgr Pale Rider” + “Dark Prophet”
[REQUIREMENT] You can activate this by sending 1 card from your hand to the GY.
[EFFECT] During this turn, this card gains 1000 ATK and cannot be destroyed by effects. If you activate this effect during the Main Phase it was Special Summoned, you can also add 1 “Dark Hole” from your GY to your hand.
RD/ORP1-JP048 ダーク・プロフェット Dark Prophet
Level 1 DARK Galaxy Effect Monster
ATK 0
DEF 0
[REQUIREMENT] During the turn this card is Normal Summoned, you can activate this by shuffling 3 DARK Galaxy monsters from your GY back into your Deck.
[EFFECT] Choose 1 “Fusion” in your GY and add it to your hand.
RD/ORP1-JP069 ブラック・ホール Black Hole (Dark Hole)
[LEGEND]
Normal Spell Card
[REQUIREMENT] None
[EFFECT] Destroy all monsters on the field.
Also, a Video of how to use these three cards together:
Source
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