{"id":133694,"date":"2022-01-07T04:25:26","date_gmt":"2022-01-07T12:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/powerful-lasers-have-put-us-at-the-threshold-of-nuclear-fusion-ignition"},"modified":"2022-01-07T04:25:26","modified_gmt":"2022-01-07T12:25:26","slug":"powerful-lasers-have-put-us-at-the-threshold-of-nuclear-fusion-ignition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/powerful-lasers-have-put-us-at-the-threshold-of-nuclear-fusion-ignition","title":{"rendered":"Powerful Lasers Have Put Us at the \u2018Threshold\u2019 of Nuclear Fusion Ignition"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

For a few brief moments, the high-powered lasers generated 1.3 megajoules of fusion energy.<\/p>\n

\n

A breakthrough experiment last month at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory\u2019s (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California has turned up a whopping 1.3 megajoules of energy, or about three percent<\/a> of the energy contained in one kilogram of crude oil. The work<\/a>, as outlined in the journal Physical Review E<\/em>, puts physicists \u201cat the threshold of fusion<\/a> ignition,\u201d according to the lab\u2019s press release.<\/a><\/p>\n

Nuclear fusion, in the simplest terms, is a reaction in which atoms<\/a> are smashed together to generate an abundance of energy. In some ways, it\u2019s less dangerous than nuclear fission <\/a>\u2014a process that involves splitting heavy, unstable atoms into two lighter ones\u2014and has the potential to create a lot<\/em> more energy.<\/p>\n

All of today\u2019s functional nuclear power plants<\/a> currently use nuclear fission, and scientists have long been on the hunt for a way to make nuclear fusion a reality; consider it a kind of holy grail of clean energy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a few brief moments, the high-powered lasers generated 1.3 megajoules of fusion energy. A breakthrough experiment last month at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory\u2019s (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California has turned up a whopping 1.3 megajoules of energy, or about three percent of the energy contained in one kilogram of crude oil. The [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[873,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nuclear-energy","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133694\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}