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Scientists have apparently made a critical breakthrough in a long-sought energy system that could make clean, carbon-free and non-radioactive electricity production in the decades to come.
A Department of Energy news conference is scheduled for Tuesday morning to announce a « major scientific breakthrough. » The scientists involved said Monday they were not yet able to comment.
In stories published Sunday evening, the Financial Times and the said the agency will announce that scientists at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have for the first time created a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it took to create.
Considered the holy grail of energy production, fusion is the opposite of the fission process that powers nuclear plants. Fusion creates power by fusing two atoms together, fission power comes from splitting them apart.
Lawrence Livermore spokesman Breanna Bishop declined to reveal details about the announcement.
« Our analysis is still ongoing, so we’re unable to provide details or confirmation at this time, » she said in an email to USA TODAY. « We look forward to sharing more on Tuesday when that process is complete. »
Scientists around the world have been working for nearly a century on this clean, potentially limitless source of power.
If the scientists have finally achieved the goal of creating more power than they used, commercial power generation will remain years away, but it still would be a remarkable achievement. Fusion research began in the 1930s and work on the idea of energy from fusion dates to the 1950s.What is fusion energy?
Fusion is the process that powers the Sun. In the intense gravity and the 27 million degree heat of its core, atoms collide with each other and merge, releasing massive amounts of energy in the process.
On Earth, the process is enormously difficult, expensive and power-intensive. The atoms, typically deuterium and tritium, must be heated to 150 million degrees Celsius. The resulting plasma is held in place by massive magnets in what is known as a « magnetic bottle. »
Fusion generates four times more energy per kilogram than the fission used to power nuclear plants and nearly four million times more energy than burning oil or coal, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
