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!King_Amazon! enjoys going on roller-coasters, while simultaneously doing the can-can. He also loves to go on long walks in da 'hood under the moonlight. His favorite color is Lucius Red with a dab of Violet Shine. If !King_Amazon! could be any two actors, he would be Jean-Claude Carrot Top.
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Is fusion success in sight? |
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Category Science and Technology News
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Is fusion success in sight?
Experiments at the National Ignition Facility have given researchers confidence that they'll achieve a milestone in nuclear fusion sometime this year.
The tests involved blasting a cylinder the size of a pencil eraser, known as a "hohlraum," with 192 laser beams and seeing whether researchers could tweak the energy to create the right kind of implosion. The results suggested that they could - and that the $3.5 billion blaster in California just might produce the world's first controlled fusion reaction, with more energy coming out than going in.
For more than a half-century, scientists have been trying to harness the nuclear fusion reaction to generate what could be prodigious amounts of energy. The reaction involves crushing together light atoms (like hydrogen) so forcefully that they fuse into heavier atoms (like helium). Each reaction converts a tiny amount of mass from the atoms directly into energy.
When you multiply that demonstration of E=mc2 by trillions, you start producing power on the scale of an H-bomb or the sun.
The research reported by the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, represents a step toward actual energy production in a controlled reaction. But there are still many steps to go before scientists reach that break-even point. Even if NIF is successful, it will take years to adapt the technology for commercial applications. And that's the most optimistic view.
Jeffrey Atherton, the program director for target experimental systems at NIF, is an optimist.
"The potential for NIF and fusion energy as the game-changer [for energy resources] is enormous," he told me. He acknowledged that commercial fusion was far from a sure bet, but said the technology had to be included in... [Read More]
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