Massive breakthrough in nuclear fusion achieved

December 13, 2022

US scientists have reported a major, "game changer" breakthrough in nuclear fusion research that could help produce endless, clean energy. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists announced Tuesday they had created the first net energy gain from a nuclear fusion using lasers.

That means the California facility managed to output more energy than it input - having potentially groundbreaking implications for the creation of sustainable energy in the future.

So, what is fusion, how does it create energy and why was this announcement so important?

Senior lecturer in nuclear engineering at The University of New South Wales Dr Patrick Burr told ACM fusion was one of the two main types of ways to extract energy from nuclear reactions.

It works by joining together light elements, like hydrogen, which collapse onto one another, fusing into a heavier atom.

"And in the process of doing that, it produces an astonishingly large amount of energy," Dr Burr said.

While fission is already being drawn from conventional nuclear reactors around the world relatively easily by splitting atoms, fusion hasn't been practically proven in decades of effort until this week, he said.

"It's the first time we've experimentally shown that it's possible to get more energy out from a fusion reaction than the amount of energy we put in to get it started," Dr Burr said.

The UNSW expert said the advancement "really could be a game changer" in the fight against climate change.

"It really would allow us to decarbonise at a much faster rate," he said.

"And be more importantly, a sustained solution ... that for centuries, possibly millennia, might be able to power civilisation."

But realistically, the commercial application of the proof of principle achieved in California is still some years away, he said.

"There is a joke in the fusion community that fusion energy is 30 years away and it's basically always been 30 years away," Dr Burr said.

Head of the department of nuclear physics and accelerator applications at the Australian National University Professor Andrew Stuchbery told ACM said while the advancement was a "great step forward", results could be several decades away.

"It's not going to help us with climate change - I don't think we could develop the technology that fast," he said.

"We need to be doing things about climate change now."

Professor Stuchbery said the successful experiment would have used a "pulse", lasting a brief duration to create the positive output of energy.

"One would need to scale that up to repeated pulses or something that perhaps could run continuously," he said.

Scientists must also find a way to create enough energy from the reaction to power the lasers being used to create it - powerful lasers which use an incredible amount of energy.

The hope is that this week's success will attract greater attention and funding to develop fusion power, he said.

"It's an exciting achievement - and it might not deliver tomorrow but it may well deliver into the future," Professor Stuchbery said.