The U.S. Department of Energy announced Tuesday that it has accomplished net energy gain—one of the most major breakthroughs in making fusion a viable form of energy—for the first time ever. This milestone, experts hope, paves the way for a possible future of unlimited clean energy.
“This is an incredibly exciting result,” Stephanie Diem, a fusion energy researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Daily Beast. She added that the breakthrough “demonstrates how investment in modeling and detailed physics understanding is paying off with these recent advances.”
U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday that researchers at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California were able to produce more energy from a fusion reaction than was required to create it during a Dec. 5th experiment—hence the “net energy gain.”
“We have taken the first tentative steps towards a clean energy source that could revolutionize the world.”
— Arati Prabhakar, White House Office of Science and Technology
“This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility who have dedicated their careers to seeing fusion ignition become a reality, and this milestone will undoubtedly spark more discovery,” Granholm said.
“Last week, they shot a bunch of lasers at a pellet of fuel, and more energy was released from the fusion ignition than the energy of the lasers going in,” Arati Prabhakar, policy director for the White House Office of Science and Technology, said at the press conference. “This is such a tremendous example of what perseverance really can achieve.”
The experiment used a process called inertial confinement fusion, which involved shooting nearly 200 of the world’s most powerful lasers at a tiny amount of hydrogen in order to replicate the nuclear fusion reaction that occurs every single moment on the sun. The lasers used 2.05 megajoules of energy to start the reaction—resulting in the creation of 3.15 megajoules of energy. That’s a more than 153 percent increase in power.
While momentous, there are a few caveats. For one, the reaction lasted a nanosecond—so it’s not quite the constant, self-sustaining process that we see play out on the sun. The amount of energy produced was also a mere fraction of what we get from a regular wall electricity outlet. LLNL director Kim Budil also told reporters that researchers are still “a few decades” away from being able to create a commercially viable fusion reactor.
However, this breakthrough is a consequential (if somewhat small) step forward towards the ultimate goal of limitless, zero-carbon energy production. “We have taken the first tentative steps towards a clean energy source that could revolutionize the world,” Prabhakar said.
Along with clean energy initiatives, the fusion reaction also paves the way for a slightly more nefarious undertaking: the strengthening of the U.S. national defense infrastructure. Marv Adams, the deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, explained that the net energy gain produced by the NIF helps “advance national security” in three ways.
“In a world where we have fought wars over energy, energy resources, and access to resources used in energy production, fusion brings us hope and an amazing challenge.”
— Stephanie Diem, University of Wisconsin-Madison
For one, it helps defense programs “maintain competence” without testing nuclear weapons. It also helps bolster our weapons deterrence. The breakthrough also jettisons the U.S. to the forefront of fusion energy research—serving as a signal to both our allies (and enemies) that “we know what we’re doing,” Adams said.
The announcement also included a few slightly mixed signals from the speakers. While Budil stressed that we were still decades away from seeing fusion reactors that could be used as part of widespread energy infrastructures, Granholm said that President Joe Biden envisions a commercial fusion reactor within “10 years.”
However, Budil explained that while inertial confinement fusion had achieved net energy gain, other types of fusion reaction—specifically magnetic fusion—was much further along.
“The foundational technology to begin to scale up toward a power plant is further along in the magnetic fusion community,” Budil said. “It’s building more directly off the work that’s been done in recent decades at facilities like JET in the United Kingdom, the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and MIT.”
Nevertheless, Budil and her colleagues were bullish on the fact that the latest accomplishment was a major first step in proving out the viability of fusion energy for commercial purposes, and potentially eliminating the energy woes that have plagued society since the industrial revolution..
“In a world where we have fought wars over energy, energy resources, and access to resources used in energy production, fusion brings us hope and an amazing challenge,” Diem said. “I’m incredibly excited to see what’s next in this field as we continue to push innovation and drive towards a cleaner, more sustainable and equitable and just future.”
