That gas is heated until the atoms lose their electrons, creating a doughnut of hot, glowing fuel known as a plasma. At each end of the tube, the process starts with the injection of a small quantity of hydrogen and helium gas. Helion's design is basically a long tube of magnetic coils. As we walk through the company's manufacturing facility, Kirtley explains how it works. Helion was founded in 2013 with a single goal - to put fusion power on the grid. "We can generate electricity at theoretically much lower cost than we do it now," he says. Helion's CEO David Kirtley believes that fusion could change the world. The energy from the pellet was greater than the power put in by the lasers, marking a major milestone for fusion as an energy source. Last December, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility used an array of 192 lasers to squeeze a tiny frozen pellet of fusion fuel until it burst. The process is not unlike a nuclear weapon, and that's why the first successful test to produce net power took place at a nuclear weapons laboratory. The other approach, known as inertial confinement, uses lasers to squeeze tiny pellets of hydrogen fuel until they start a runaway fusion reaction. It might someday generate net power, but it is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Currently, nations from around the globe are trying to build just such a machine in the south of France. It's a tough approach, and it requires a large vessel that can hold the hot gas without touching it. One, known as magnetic confinement, requires suspending the hot plasma inside a magnetic shell. For decades they have been pursuing two approaches. The goal of fusion scientists is to build a device that could harness all that power to safely generate a steady current of electricity. The Two-Way Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion The most common place this happens is in stars, including our sun. It's only in the hottest and densest environments in the universe that the atoms can overcome this powerful repulsion and actually stick. Like the north ends of two magnets, these positive charges repel one another as they get close - and the closer they get, the more the tiny atoms swerve and bounce trying to avoid each other. The cores of atoms, known as nuclei, are positively charged. It's that conversion from mass to energy that makes fusion among the most powerful processes in the universe. That missing mass is converted to energy, via Einstein's famous equation E=mc2. When the atoms stick, they create new elements and particles that weigh less than the total mass of the originals. Nuclear fusion does the opposite: It generates energy by sticking lightweight atoms together. Nuclear power plants today use a process called fission, which harvests the energy released by breaking heavy atoms apart. Whichever company can make its fusion technology work would likely earn a valuation that would rival the biggest Silicon Valley firms today. climate envoy John Kerry is expected to lay out a strategy for trying to commercialize fusion power worldwide. On Tuesday, at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, U.S. Meanwhile, the planet's only hope for stopping global warming is to do away with fossil fuels. Electricity demand is expected to surge globally in the coming decades, in part due to an increased reliance on greener technologies such as electric vehicles and appliances. Will it be enough to save the planet?įor investors, the payoff could be enormous.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |