Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough achieved by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction that was used to ignite it.

Table of Contents

About Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough 2022

Nuclear Fusion Reaction happens when two light nuclei merge to form a single heavier nucleus.
- Since total mass of that single nucleus is less than the mass of the two original nuclei, the leftover mass is energy that is released in the process.
Application: Energy from nuclear fusion is touted as a clean, abundant and safe source of energy that could eventually allow humanity to break its dependence on the fossil fuels driving a global climate crisis.
- It powers the sun and other stars.
Current nuclear energy use across the world comes from the fission process, in which the nucleus of a heavier element is split into those of lighter elements in a controlled manner.
Advantage of Fusion over Fission: Nuclear fusion offers the possibility of “basically unlimited” fuel if the technology can be made commercially viable.
- Easy Availability of Raw Material: Current efforts focus on fusing a pair of hydrogen isotopes — deuterium and tritium, which are available in seawater.
- Greater Output: Fusion of two nuclei of a heavier isotope of hydrogen, called tritium, produces at least four times as much energy as the fission of a uranium atom, which is the current process of generating electricity in a nuclear reactor.
- Climate Friendly: Fusion is a carbon-free source of energy, and has negligible radiation risks.
- No radioactive waste: It doesn’t produce radioactive waste.

Significance of the Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Research

At the Lawrence Livermore facility, scientists use high-energy laser beams to create the extreme heat to enable fusion also called ‘inertial fusion’.
The U.S. Department of Energy described the achievement of fusion ignition as a “major scientific breakthrough” that will lead to advancements in national defense and the future of clean power.

Challenges and Future Prospects

Fusion reactions happen only at very high temperatures, ten times the temperature that exists at the core of the Sun and creating such an extreme environment in a laboratory requires huge amounts of energy.
Attempts to master the fusion process have been going on at least since the 1950s, but it is incredibly difficult and is still at an experimental stage.
Use of the fusion process for generating electricity at a commercial scale is still two to three decades away.

Similar Experiments

International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)

It is a collaboration of 35 nations launched in 1985.
It aims to build the world’s largest tokamak to prove the feasibility of fusion.
- Tokomak is a device, which creates a powerful magnetic field to confine reactive charged particles.
ITER, when operational, would become the biggest machine anywhere in the world, more complex than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, or the LIGO project to detect gravitational waves.
India joined the ITER project in 2005.
The Institute for Plasma Research in Ahmedabad, a laboratory under the Department of Atomic Energy, is the lead institution from the Indian side participating in the project.
As a member country, India is building several components of the ITER reactor, while also carrying out a number of experiments and R&D activities related to the project.

Joint European Torus (JET) Project

In 1978, the European Community (along with Sweden and Switzerland) launched the Joint European Torus (JET) project in the UK.

Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST)

In China, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) at China Academy of Sciences’ Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) is experimenting Fusion Technology.
- In January 2022, the EAST reactor broke the record for the longest sustained nuclear fusion with temperatures of 126 million degrees Fahrenheit – roughly five times hotter than the sun – sustained for 17 minutes.