Nuclear Fusion power – how long will we have to wait ?

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Just before Christmas, it was announced for the first time that researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US had successfully achieved “ignition” within a nuclear fusion reaction. This generated a lot of excitement in the press, not all of it well-informed, so I thought it might be interesting to explore this topic in more detail. What is nuclear fusion ? Why was this news so significant ? When will we begin to benefit …

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Nuclear Fusion Energy Breakthrough…

purple and pink plasma ball

Fusion energy has been promised for decades now. I remember watching BBC Horizon documentaries about it in the 1990s; it was always ‘just around the corner’. But now it seems we have an actual breakthrough. For the first time, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California could generate more energy than it took to start a reaction. Fusion is different from nuclear fission. It is a very clean energy source, with none of the pollution and greenhouse gases …

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