Breakthrough In Fusion

On August 8th 2022, after a year of anylizing data, scientists from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's National Ignition Facility celabrated their breakthrough in nuclear fusion. The breakthrough, which came in August of 2021, was a successful fusion ignition. Nuclear fusion is what powers the sun. It occurs when two light atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier one with the result being a powerful release of energy.

Unlike the sun, which uses gravity to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium atoms, the researchers used a pellet of deuterium/tritum as fuel and a piston which is made of rhe same. 192 lasers were trained on the pellet in an effort to create a hot spot. The result is a super hot plasma. The reaction, which only lasted 100 trillionths of a second, yeilded 1.3 megajoules or an estimated release of 10 quadrillon watts of power.