ON SUNDAY, AN EXCITING NEWS STORY was teased by the Financial Times that the Department of Energy would announce on Tuesday that scientists had been able to create a net energy gain using nuclear fusion. The news comes from the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where the work has been done.
Fusion has been sought since the 1950s and is based on energy created by the sun. It’s touted as unlimited, cheap, clean, safe, and most importantly to the woke, carbon-free power. Billions has been spent over decades to smash together two atoms at very high speeds and transform that energy into electricity that can be used to power anything, without producing radioactive waste like fission plants do. What scientists achieved was described thusly by Scientific American:
“The facility used its set of 192 lasers to deliver 2.05 megajoules of energy onto a pea-sized gold cylinder containing a frozen pellet of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The pulse of energy caused the capsule to collapse, creating temperatures only seen in stars and thermonuclear weapons, and the hydrogen isotopes fused into helium, releasing additional energy and creating a cascade of fusion reactions. The laboratory’s analysis suggests that some 3.15 megajoules of energy was released—roughly 54% more than the energy that went into the reaction and more than double the previous record of 1.3 megajoules.”
The problem has been producing a net gain in energy produced over energy expended. What still needs to happen is the manufacture of large lasers and equipment that can continually and reliably do this, and produce electricity that can be practically deployed into the power grid. That nuclear fusion creates neutrons that place enormous stress on equipment makes the process even more difficult.
The announcement comes, conveniently, at a time when a large swath of the western world is likely to go very cold this winter due to skyrocketing oil and gas prices due to shortages, inflation, and piss-poor political planning. Unfortunately, commercial use of nuclear fusion as a reliable energy source is still at least a decade away, which, come to think of it, is exactly what we were all told in the 1960s. So the announcement may simply be a way for the Biden regime to take old news and make it new for political consumption.
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