US researchers announce 'major scientific breakthrough' in nuclear fusion
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US researchers announced a historic nuclear fusion breakthrough on Tuesday that could pave the way for alternative clean energy sources.The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) said an experiment it conducted this month "produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive i...
However, our potential to spread through space, by colonizing distant planets and building space stations, is limited by the amount of energy we can harness to power such efforts. But all that might be about to change due to a breakthrough in our ability to create a potentially unlimited source of clean energy through a process known as nuclear fusion. This breakthrough, which was officially announced today by the U.S. secretary of energy Jennifer Granholm, was achieved by scientists working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Nuclear fusion combines atomic nuclei to release massive amounts of energy, and it is the process that naturally occurs inside stars. It is essentially the opposite of nuclear fission, the process used in most nuclear power plants today, which splits atomic nuclei to produce energy. The major difference is that fusion does not produce harmful radioactive waste and is virtually unlimited in supply. Scientists and engineers have been working on harnessing this process for many decades but with little success, so this new advancement is a big deal, to put it lightly. Arthur Turrell, a plasma physicist at Imperial College London, told the Financial Times, "If this is confirmed, we are witnessing a moment of history. Scientists have struggled to show that fusion can release more energy than is put in since the 1950s, and the researchers at Lawrence Livermore seem to have finally and absolutely smashed this decades-old goal." One of the biggest challenges in space exploration is the amount of energy required to power long-term missions and establish human settlements on other planets. Solar panels, the most common method of generating…