A major breakthrough has been announced by US scientists in the race to recreate nuclear fusion.

Physicists have pursued the technology for decades as it promises a potential source of near-limitless clean energy.

On Tuesday researchers confirmed they have overcome a major barrier – producing more energy from a fusion experiment than was put in.

But experts say there is still some way to go before fusion powers homes.

The experiment took place at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California.

LLNL director Dr Kim Budil said: “This is a historic achievement… over the past 60 years thousands of people have contributed to this endeavour and it took real vision to get us here.”

Nuclear fusion is described as the “holy grail” of energy production. It is the process that powers the Sun and other stars.

It works by taking pairs of light atoms and forcing them together – this “fusion” releases a lot of energy.

It is the opposite of nuclear fission, where heavy atoms are split apart. Fission is the technology currently used in nuclear power stations, but the process also produces a lot of waste that continues to give out radiation for a long time. It can be dangerous and must be stored safely.

Nuclear fusion produces far more energy, and only small amounts of short-lived radioactive waste. And importantly, the process produces no greenhouse gas emissions and therefore does not contribute to climate change.

But one of the challenges is that forcing and keeping the elements together in fusion requires very high temperatures and pressures. Until now, no experiment has managed to produce more energy than the amount put in to make it work.

How close is a fusion-powered future?

The amount of energy they’ve generated in this experiment is tiny – just enough to boil a few kettles. But what it represents is huge.

The promise of a fusion-powered future is one step closer. But there’s still a long way to go before this becomes a reality.

This experiment shows that the science works. Before scientists can even think about scaling it up, it needs to be repeated, perfected, and the amount of energy it generates will have to be significantly boosted.

This experiment has cost billions of dollars – fusion does not come cheap. But the promise of a source of clean energy will certainly be a big incentive for overcoming these challenges.

The National Ignition Facility in California is a $3.5bn (£2.85bn) experiment.

It puts a tiny amount of hydrogen into a capsule the size of a peppercorn.

Then a powerful 192-beam laser is used to heat and compress the hydrogen fuel.

The laser is so strong it can heat the capsule to 100 million degrees Celsius – hotter than the centre of the Sun, and compress it to more than 100 billion times that of Earth’s atmosphere.

Under these forces the capsule begins to implode on itself, forcing the hydrogen atoms to fuse and release energy.

On announcing the breakthrough Dr. Marvin Adams deputy administrator for defense programs at the US National Nuclear Security Administration said that the laboratory’s lasers had input 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, which had then produced 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output.

Dr Melanie Windridge, CEO of Fusion Energy Insights, told the BBC: “Fusion has been exciting scientists since they first figured out what was causing the Sun to shine. These results today really put us on the path to the commercialization of the technology.”

Prof Jeremy P. Chittenden, professor of plasma physics and co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London called it “a true breakthrough moment”.

“It proves that the long sought-after goal, the ‘holy grail’ of fusion, can indeed be achieved,” he said.

This has been the sentiment echoed by physicists globally, who praised the work of the international science community.

Prof Gianluca Gregori, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford said: “Today’s success rests upon the work done by many scientists in the US, UK and around the world. With ignition now achieved, not only fusion energy is unlocked, but also a door is opening to new science.”

On the question of how long before we could see fusion being used in power stations, Dr Budil, the LLNL director, said there were still significant hurdles but 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 plant”.

This is progress from when scientists used to say 50 – 60 years in answer to that question.

One of the main hurdles is getting cost down and scaling up the energy output.

The experiment was only able to produce enough energy to boil about 15-20 kettles and required billions of dollars of investment. And although the experiment got more energy out than the laser put in, this did not include the energy needed to make the lasers work – which was far greater that the amount of energy the hydrogen produced.

World Opinions – BBC News

L’article Breakthrough in nuclear fusion energy announced est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

The Nobel Prize in Physics has gone to three scientists who sought to predict the long-term evolution of a complex system such as the climate by modelling variables — weather, human actions — that create disorder within those systems.

BREAKING NEWS:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2021 #NobelPrize in Physics to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems.” pic.twitter.com/At6ZeLmwa5

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2021

What is the link between the modelling of global warming, which earned Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann half the prize, and the work of the third winner, Giorgio Parisi, who focused on the underlying disorder of matter?

All three study complex systems: large-scale climate or the behaviour of certain materials at an infinitely small scale. From the erratic fluctuations within these systems, the three physicists succeeded in teasing out simpler behaviours and reliable predictions.

Did you miss the announcement of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics earlier today?

Watch the very moment the prize was announced and see the full announcement at https://t.co/6cdrlGk1Si#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/Gehb4dVkXK

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2021

“We recognised that emerging phenomena sometimes require us to look at all the individual complicated physical mechanisms and knit them together to make a prediction,” said Nobel Physics Committee member John Wettlaufer, on hand when the awards were announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.

Climate “is THE complex system par excellence,” said Freddy Bouchet, a physicist at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research.

A large number of variables, in other words, interact — atmosphere, oceans, soils, vegetation — rendering any reliable forecast beyond a few weeks elusive.

But alongside and within this observable chaos there are also clear trends that can be linked to well-identified causes, such as long-term global warming attributable to human activity.

Discover more about our 2021 physics laureate in this thread! #NobelPrize https://t.co/jntexwwCvt

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2021

– Hidden rules –

“In climate science, the random and the systematic overlap,” said Bouchet. “The mathematical tools developed by Klaus Hasselmann have made it possible to separate the two in order to better understand the evolution of climate.”

Being able to tease out patterns in what is random — the signal in the noise — is fundamental to understanding the evolution of extreme weather such as heat waves, storms and hurricanes.

The models developed by the Japanese-American Syukuro Manabe have succeeded in cracking the signature code of climate subsystems.

"It will take me a few days to answer all the phone calls that I had today."

Physics laureate Giorgio Parisi talks to us following the announcement of his #NobelPrize in Physics. pic.twitter.com/S2UrIMRzGy

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2021

“These are the first models which made it possible to calculate the effect of the increase in carbon dioxide of anthropogenic origin on global warming at the core of contemporary climate models”, Bouchet said.

Giorgio Parisi, for his part, made a major contribution to the theory of these complex systems by revealing the hidden rules that govern them.

“I started to lay the foundations of this science — which did not exist at the beginning of the 1980s — by studying nature through mathematics”, the Italian researcher told Corriere della Sera newspaper earlier this year.

It is a science that allows us, for example, to explain the changing form of a cloud of starlings in flight.

Parisi provided the mathematical tools to understand how random processes can play a decisive role in the development of large structures, such as those governing climate.

Today, they are applied in biology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

World Opinions News – Twitter

L’article Physics Nobel: deciphering climate disorder to better predict it.. Video est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.