Nuclear Fusion: Inside the Lab that Made History

foreign [Music] facility at the Lawrence Livermore lab in Northern California this is where for the first time scientists were able to create a fusion reaction that generated more power than it took in a nearly Unlimited Supply of Clean safe sustainable energy that's been the promise of Fusion for decades but more than 70 years after Fusion research produced thermonuclear weapons we still don't have a fusion reactor that can generate electricity late last year though scientists here at the national ignition facility or nif achieved a breakthrough never accomplished in the history of fusion research we had a Wright brothers moment in achieving what we call Target gain greater than one Gordon Brunton is director of nif he's describing the moment 192 lasers fired simultaneously at a tiny cylinder containing hydrogen atoms for just a 20 billionth of a second I was asleep I woke up knowing that we were performing this experiment at about 4 am I immediately checked my phone to look at results and was overwhelmed with enthusiasm when I saw what appeared to be a really spectacular result that result showed more energy created when those lasers hit the target than it took to trigger the reaction that's the first time that's ever happened scientists have been chasing sustainable Fusion for decades because of what it promises there's no release of carbon so it could drastically change the course of human-caused climate change it's safe there's no risk of a meltdown that comes with our current nuclear fission plants and it's virtually Limitless because it only requires hydrogen the most abundant element in the universe fusion occurs when two lighter elements like hydrogen merge into a single heavier element in this case those hydrogen atoms merge to create helium the process of the atoms fusing together is nuclear fusion the same kind of reaction that causes the sun to release energy what we do here is called inertial confinement Fusion where we take a small amount of Fusion fuel and we take lasers in this case 192 beams that all add up to about 2 million joules of laser energy deliver that over billions of a second and have that laser then enable that pellet that Fusion pellet to go from millimeter scale to down to 100 Micron scale so width of a human hair type scales and if we can do that and we do it right we then get through these conditions that are more than 100 million degrees hotter than the center of sun pressures that are in the billions of atmospheres and if we do all this right then we can start what we call Fusion ignition [Music] This Is Where It Starts you're looking at one of the facility's two football field size laser Bays each containing 96 individual beam lines the beams start with just a small amount of energy this is where they come to get Amplified a quadrillion times now it's time to head for the Target chamber where scientists hope that energy will trigger a fusion reaction so this is a one-tenth scale model of the target chamber inside that we're about to see a scale model Andy would be about four inches next to this thing now you can see these ports along the top here and along the bottom here those are the quad ports those are for where the lasers those 192 lasers actually come into the target chamber and this is the real thing we are standing in front of the target chamber this is nearly 300 000 pounds of aluminum this is where it all happens above me you can see these quads those are groups of four out of those 192 lasers that make up this entire facility in front of me here this is called Dante they call it Dante because it basically measures the temperature of that Inferno that goes on when there's a reaction just how hot does it get every time scientists fire this up this target chamber becomes the hottest place in the solar system and what does it do to a Target about the size of a BB this is what's left of a target from a previous shot I asked Gordon to show us what happens inside a Target during an event the laser beams are delivered to the Target which is inside this little few millimeter hole inside the gold can half of the beams 96 beams are delivered in the top half of the the beams are delivered in the bottom December's event required a little over two megajoules of energy to trigger the reaction producing a little more than three megajoules that's about a fifty percent gain and that's why scientists are excited but those numbers aren't the whole story it took about 400 megajoules to operate the lasers that would ultimately hit the target with those two megajoules of energy but scientists point out nif was never designed to be efficient let alone a power plant it's a scientific instrument designed to prove what's possible in fact nif's research isn't intended for energy production it's to provide data ensuring that the United States arsenal of nuclear weapons is safe there are dozens of private companies currently working on Commercial Fusion Energy projects but most use what's known as magnetic confinement to generate a fusion reaction that's a different process than the inertial confinement that happens at nif and while most experts think large-scale use of fusion reactors to send powers to the grid is a decade or more away many will likely point to that December reaction as a seminal event it's not too grandiose to put it as this was a singular moment and when humankind was able to light Starfire in the laboratory and not have it petered out [Music] so at the time of filming this scientists here are hoping to make another attempt at ignition sometime in the next few months so we of course will all be anxiously watching and waiting for the results of that so what do you guys think do you think that we'll actually have sustainable Fusion sometime in our lifetimes let me know in those comments below if you enjoyed this video please don't forget to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to cmet for more what the future

Channel: CNET

Views: 128,219

Keywords: CNET, Technology, tech, lawrence livermore national laboratory, science, climate change, nuclear fusion, fusion, nuclear, power, energy, clean energy, llnl, Nuclear fusion, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Fusion energy, Fusion reactor, Fusion power, Fusion research, Fusion breakthrough, Fusion ignition, NIF, National Ignition Facility, Inertial confinement fusion, Laser-driven fusion, Magnetic confinement fusion, Tokamak, Stellarator, D-T fusion, D-D fusion, Tritium, Deuterium

Id: h8FPG6BDb0Q

Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Sun May 28 2023