Last week, U.S. scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced a first-of-its-kind fusion reaction that generated more energy than was put into it, placing humanity a step closer to harnessing the very process that powers our sun.
Commercially viable fusion power has perennially been 20 years in the future. Yet the scientific consensus seems that the result reported last Tuesday put humanity on a definite timeline toward achieving the dream of fusion power in the definite future.
"This is a historic achievement... over the past 60 years, thousands of people have contributed to this endeavor, and it took real vision to get us here," said LLNL director Dr. Kim Budil.
"Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century," said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
Some have deemed fusion to be an elusive holy grail that could unlock humanity's carbon-free future. The fusion process involves forcing atoms together using tremendous amounts of heat and pressure. So close together are the atoms during this process that they combine to create new atoms, simultaneously releasing vast amounts of energy.. Still, forcing atoms together this way requires replicating conditions more extreme than those experienced at the center of the sun while also coming at a tremendous monetary cost.
The breakthrough experiment reported last Tuesday alone cost $3.5 billion to run.
During that experiment, scientists compressed hydrogen molecules into a capsule of sorts that was then struck by a 192-beam laser; heating said capsule to an unimaginable 100 million degrees Celsius, or 180,000,032 degrees Fahrenheit. Under the laser's heat, the hydrogen atoms collapsed in on themselves, releasing helium and a net 3.15 megajoules of energy compared to the 2.05 megajoules put in.
Yet, despite the success reported by LLNL, commercially viable fusion remains a long way off. The experiment only managed to produce enough energy to boil a dozen or so pots of water, meaning it will likely be years before the technology is cost-effective enough to be run at the scales needed to run today's power stations.
Still, when asked about the future of fusion power, Dr. Budil of the LLNL cited significant obstacles but said that "with concerted efforts and investment, a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plan."
For some investors, the future of fusion is seemingly already imminent. According to BloombergNEF, investment in fusion startups like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion Energy jumped to $2.3 billion in 2021 and will likely surpass more than $1 billion this year.
Some publicly traded firms have been investing in fusion as well. Italian energy firm Eni
