- In 2022, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab had a major fusion energy breakthrough.
- In the year since, the lab has reached ignition three more times.
US scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab have entered what they're calling the "age of ignition."
The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore had a major breakthrough in December 2022 when, for the first time ever, it achieved "ignition."
That means it generated more energy from a nuclear fusion device than it used to produce the reaction in the first place.
There are a few ways of producing a fusion reaction on Earth.
NIF uses lasers to create temperatures of 180 million degrees Fahrenheit and intense pressure 100 billion times that of the planet's atmosphere. It takes a lot of energy to power those lasers.
When NIF achieved ignition in 2022, it was a landmark experiment more than 70 years in the making. But NIF was just getting started.
The following year, it repeated its experiments achieving ignition three more times, figuring out how to produce even more energy than what it achieved the first time around.
In December 2022, it generated 1.1 megajoules of extra energy, then 1.83 MJ that following July, 0.5 MJ on October 8, and finally 1.2 MJ at the end of that month.
NIF's primary role is weapons research, but its repeated success with ignition could have an impact on fusion energy.
A world run on fusion
Fusion power is considered by some to be the holy grail of emissions-free energy. Right now nuclear reactors run on fission, the energy created when atoms split apart.
On the other hand, fusion — when atoms combine — is the cosmos' energy of choice and is what powers stars like our sun.
Some estimates predict that fusion could produce almost 4 million times as much energy as fossil fuels like coal or oil and four times as much as fission.
Right now, multiple countries are working toward building the first fusion reactor to generate electricity.
Japan, for example, recently completed the world's largest fusion reactor yet — the JT-60SA tokamak. And France is working on an even larger reactor — ITER — that, when finished, will stand nearly 100 feet tall.
JT-60SA and ITER are the next generation of fusion reactors. However, they're still only meant for research purposes. Scientists will use what they learn from these mammoth machines to figure out how to generate fusion energy on a large scale with future reactors that won't be built for many decades.
On the flip side, many private companies in the US are hoping to start providing commercial electricity on a smaller scale within a decade, but they face many challenges.
Private investors are getting into the game
In the US, investors have recently poured $6 billion into private fusion research, launching a sort of race among private companies like Zap Energy, Helion, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and more.
Billionaires like Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and Jeff Bezos have even hopped on the fusion funding bandwagon.
There's a lot of hope for fusion's potential as the climate crisis continues and energy demands climb.
But both science and engineering problems remain.
Only NIF has been able to reach ignition, so far. Moreover, the fuel many facilities use to power their reactions is very expensive.
And while many call fusion green energy, it still produces nuclear waste, albeit less long-lived than fission reactors.
Plus, countries are racing to adopt clean energy and limit global warming by 2035. That date is likely too soon for the widespread use of fusion energy.
There's still quite a gap between the age of ignition and the age of fusion power.