One gram of deuterium and tritium is eventually providing you the same amount of energy as burning eight tons of oil. It's a green energy. There is no CO2 whatsoever. A greenhouse effect, a gas is created with this reaction. Of course, to reproduce a sun on Earth, so it's to create a medium that eventually reaches hundreds of millions of degrees. This is what we need to do in order to trigger these kind of nuclear reactions.
This week, researchers at the US National Ignition Facility in California achieved a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion. For the first time, humans have harnessed the process that powers the stars to generate more energy from a fusion reaction than was used to start it — otherwise known as ‘ignition’. But how close are we to moving this from laboratories to power plants, and will it become the clean, safe, and abundant source of energy the world so desperately needs? Ian Sample speaks to Alain Bécoulet about what’s being called ‘one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century’. Help support our independent journalism at
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