{"id":243083,"date":"2026-08-23T02:59:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T07:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/melting-diamond-could-unlock-triple-fusion-gain-and-the-secrets-of-ice-giant-planets"},"modified":"2026-08-23T02:59:35","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T07:59:35","slug":"melting-diamond-could-unlock-triple-fusion-gain-and-the-secrets-of-ice-giant-planets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/melting-diamond-could-unlock-triple-fusion-gain-and-the-secrets-of-ice-giant-planets","title":{"rendered":"Melting diamond could unlock triple fusion gain and the secrets of ice giant planets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/melting-diamond-could-unlock-triple-fusion-gain-and-the-secrets-of-ice-giant-planets.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Diamond is more than a dazzling gem\u2014the extremely hard form of carbon makes up the pellet that encases fuel for inertial confinement fusion, and scientists believe it rains down deep inside ice giant planets like Neptune and Uranus. In both cases, the material experiences enormous pressures. Until now, experiments and simulations have disagreed about how it actually behaves under those conditions.<\/p>\n<p>In a new study, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41567-026-03413-1\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature Physics<\/i>, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) document how diamond melts under pressures three times greater than conditions at Earth\u2019s core.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe were able to take tiny diamond samples and shock-compress them to temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun and to pressures higher than the centers of Neptune and Uranus\u2014and still measure atomic structure, temperature, density and optical reflectivity,\u201d said author and LLNL scientist Marius Millot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Diamond is more than a dazzling gem\u2014the extremely hard form of carbon makes up the pellet that encases fuel for inertial confinement fusion, and scientists believe it rains down deep inside ice giant planets like Neptune and Uranus. In both cases, the material experiences enormous pressures. Until now, experiments and simulations have disagreed about how [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":630,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[873,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nuclear-energy","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243083","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\/630"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}