The U.S. Department of Energy announced a “major scientific breakthrough” on Tuesday after scientists were reportedly able to harness the process that powers the sun.
The development was made last week at the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Known as a “net energy gain,” it is a major step towards developing a technology that might one day provide a clean and almost endless supply of energy.
“Ignition allows us to replicate for the first time certain conditions that are found only in the stars and the sun,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. “This milestone moves us one significant step closer” to having zero-carbon fusion energy “powering our society.”
Fusion ignition is “one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century,″ Granholm said, adding that the breakthrough “will go down in the history books.”
Scientists have been trying to replicate the same nuclear reaction that powers the sun since the 1950s in hopes of displacing fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. But, until now, no researchers have been able to produce more energy from the fusion reaction than it consumes.
“To most of us, this was only a matter of time,” one of the lab’s senior fusion scientists said of the successful experiment.
White House science adviser Arati Prabhakar called the fusion ignition “a tremendous example of what perseverance really can achieve” and “an engineering marvel beyond belief.”
“It’s almost like it’s a starting gun going off,” said professor Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leader in fusion research. “We should be pushing towards making fusion energy systems available to tackle climate change and energy security.”
Kim Budil, director of the Livermore Lab, said there are “very significant hurdles” to the commercial use of fusion technology, but advances in recent years mean the technology is likely to be widely used in “a few decades” rather than the 50 or 60 years that had been previously expected.
The breakthrough was described by President Joe Biden as a good example of the need to continue to invest in research and development.
“Look what’s going on from the Department of Energy on the nuclear front. There’s a lot of good news on the horizon,” Biden said at the White House.
The Biden administration has prioritized fusion energy research initiatives and committed tens of billions of dollars as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.
