How Close Are We To Unlocking Nuclear Fusion?
After last year’s breakthrough, is this sci-fi technology within reach?
The holy grail of climate technology is nuclear fusion power. It’s super compact, incredibly powerful, and extremely clean — at least in theory. Yet this planet-saving technology has been frustratingly out of reach for decades. We simply couldn’t get our reactors to produce more energy than they required to kickstart fusion, and so the whole concept fell into the realms of daydreamers and science fiction. But late last year, the National Ignition Facility conducted a fusion experiment that managed to produce 54% more power than the amount their scientists input! Suddenly, the prospect of a fusion-powered future became tangible. But how close is it to reality?
Before diving into this, let’s first recap fusion and how NIF works.
Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the Sun. The Sun is made of mostly hydrogen, and in its core, the temperature and pressure are so high that the collisions between hydrogen atoms have enough kinetic energy to overcome the repulsive forces that keep atoms separate. These collisions cause the two hydrogen atoms to fuse together into a single, larger helium atom, but because a helium atom is slightly less heavy than two hydrogen atoms (given that it needs fewer gluons…
