Summary
The StarTalk podcast recently featured an episode on nuclear fusion and its potential as a future energy source. The episode featured Dr. Bruno Van Won, the operations manager at the National Ignitions Facility of Lawrence Livermore National Labs, who explained what nuclear fusion is and how it works. The National Ignitions Facility is a research facility that uses lasers to create nuclear fusion reactions, with the goal of creating a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction that can be used as a source of energy.
The process of achieving nuclear fusion involves compressing a small amount of fuel with lasers to create a hot spot that ignites the fuel and creates a nuclear fusion reaction. The National Ignition Facility is pursuing inertial fusion energy, which involves fusing deuterium and tritium together to form a helium atom and a neutron. This process requires incredibly high temperatures, in the tens or even hundreds of millions of degrees. Harvesting the neutrons generated in the fusion process is part of the energy budget for inertial fusion energy.
The National Ignition Facility has the world's most powerful laser which is used to compress a basketball-sized capsule into a pea-sized one to create a perfect implosion to achieve nuclear fusion. The process involves bombarding lithium or molten lithium with neutrons to create tritium, which can then be extracted to create fuel. The fusion reaction with deuterium-tritium is the most efficient and effective way of achieving ignition and operating the system.
The team at the National Ignition Facility is working on improving the efficiency of the laser system to achieve higher gains in fusion energy. The ultimate goal is to develop a working model of an inertial fusion energy plant that can produce gigajoules of energy. Magnetic confinement fusion, such as the Tokamak, is another approach to Fusion, where plasma is held together using magnets in a large vacuum chamber.
In conclusion, the podcast episode provided an informative discussion on nuclear fusion and the potential of laser-based fusion energy as a clean and abundant source of energy. While the technology is still in the experimental phase, the National Ignition Facility is making significant progress towards achieving a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction.
