CENTRE COUNTY, Pa. — Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that history was made. For the first time, scientists were able to produce more energy from nuclear fusion than they used to power the experiment.
"Nuclear fusion is the process in which we take two nuclei of light atoms, and we combine them, and in the combination of those masses together, we get this tremendous amount of energy from that reaction," said Jean Paul Allain, the department head of nuclear energy at Penn State University.
This so-called net energy gain with nuclear fusion could one day be a leading source of energy.
"Like any other energy source, whether solar, wind, or any other source, we have to now prove we can do it cheaply, effectively, and reliably. That is going to take a lot more work," added Prof. Allain.
Nuclear fusion energy is what powers both the sun and the stars. This discovery puts mankind one step closer to limitless, carbon-free energy without dealing with any nuclear waste.
"We are preparing for energy transition — transitioning off fossil fuels. Nuclear energy, both fusion and fission, provides mankind a way for us to obtain that clean energy safely and to scale, and that scale is because we can get a lot of energy with a little bit of mass," Allain said.
The next step is to figure out how to harvest this energy.
"How can we extract that energy and convert that energy into electricity? And not just electricity but high-temperature heat, which could power factories and industrial heat needs that we have," said Allain.
Prof. Allain says it may be decades before we see this energy used on the power grid, but he said advancements could be made sooner rather than later.
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