A recent ASME SmartBrief article highlighted a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talk presentation by Physicist Tammy Ma of the LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Lab). The article stated that the lab’s latest efforts are to bring fusion power to the commercial power grid. As Ma told the audience, “When we make fusion energy a reality, energy will become so plentiful that it will no longer be a limited resource. This will change the world as we know it.” Power from fusion reactors has been a dream for as long as I can remember.
In December of 2022, LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved a net-positive fusion reaction, meaning it generated more energy than went in with lasers to start the reaction. The LLNL has received a grant from the Department of Energy to continue their work. On February 12th of this year, the lab’s fusion reactor produced 5.2 megajoules of energy using 2.2 megajoules of laser energy. The laser is in a 10 story building 3 football fields long. As Ma noted, 192 laser beams travel through a mile of optics before converging on a single target the size of a peppercorn. The fuel for the reactor is deuterium, a form of hydrogen which not only has a proton at its nucleus, but a neutron as well. Deuterium is obtained from seawater.
What is startling is that Ma said that one pound of nuclear fuel has the same amount of energy as 5,000 barrels of oil or 3.5 million pounds of coal. That’s right 3.5 million. She said there is enough fusion fuel on earth to last 30 billion years at our current rate of usage. Hard to wrap my head around these numbers.
Note that Ma’s group is focused only on the fusion reactor. There is still the issue of designing and building a power plant to produce usable energy. That is where a great many engineers of all disciplines will be needed. – Dr. Tom
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