The National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California took ten years to complete in 2007 and wasn’t until recently, in 2022, that it made its first advances in energy from nuclear fusion.
NIF is ten stories tall and as large as three football fields. It houses an array of optics and mirrors to amplify and split photons into 192 ultraviolet laser beams. These beams are focused onto a gold cylindrical target with 1.9 megajoules of energy in less than 4 billionths a second. Comparable pressures and temperatures have only been seen in stars and thermonuclear bombs.
STOCK IMAGES OF FUSION ENERGY AND THE NATIONAL IGNITION FACILITY
The cylinder holds frozen pellets of deuterium and tritium. As they heat up, they collapse, fuse, and generate helium nuclei, neutrons and electromagnetic radiation.
The laser method is just one way to create fusion energy, which comes from the heat created by nuclear fusion reactions. This heat is released when two atoms of hydrogen collide to form one atom of helium and a neutron. Scientists began looking into fusion around the 1950s and proposed a range of designs for reactors.
Preliminary results from the experiment on 8 August 2022 indicated that fusion nearly achieved ignition – a benchmark in physics.
Even without this, scientists say it is a huge accomplishment that fusion produced more energy than it took in to produce the reaction.