Researchers have announced a key breakthrough in nuclear fusion, an elusive technology that advocates have long said holds the promise of cheap, abundant carbon-free power. Fusion has the potential to transform the global energy landscape, but there’s still a huge gap between this milestone and developing an actual power plant.
Triggering a fusion reaction is an extremely complicated process requiring enormous amounts of energy. Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco announced Dec. 13 that their fusion test had a net energy gain — that is, it produced more power than it consumed. Scientists have been trying to achieve this for decades. The breakthrough creates the possibility of a system that would have enough energy to sustain a fusion reaction plus produce excess power that could be tapped and sold. It demonstrates that fusion technology could eventually be used to generate electricity on a commercial scale.
