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Science News: A Fusion Breakthrough


The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is said to have produced a breakthrough result in nuclear fusion. 

Our species has had its hopes raised and dashed before about the idea of fusion energy -- a sun-like engine tamed and located on earth. In the '90s there was a brief kerfuffle about room-temperature fusion, soon written off. Though the idea still has its fans, the general consensus is that the two chemists concerned got into trouble by wandering out of their lane. Chemistry is not physics and deals with matters orders of magnitude larger. 

Or as my friend the proton once said, "when this molecule sits around the house she sits arooooooud the house." Yuck yuck yuck.

But the LLNL results look like the real deal. And I have to say, I love the logo. Love the idea of somebody saying "if we just drop the 'N' we can make a neat logo out of three nested Ls." Maybe the N is thought to be implied because, well, nesting. 

A lot of lasers, aimed at a target the size of a bb, produces an energy "hot spot" the size of a human hair. The hot spot lasted for 100 trillionths of a second. Big deal? Well, yes.  Scientists will have gotten the ball into the end zone of this sort of research when they can create a fusion reaction that produces more energy than is expended by the lasers employed to create that hot spot. 

That goal is called "fusion ignition." Intriguingly, the latest experiment produced 2/3d the energy of the lasers employed. That's better than ever before and suggests they are on the 66 yard line of this hypothetical football field.

Okay, there is no 66 yard line. But it works out to the 34th yard line of the opposing team. 

That's field goal range! 

 

 


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