The process mimics that which generates heat in stars from the hydrogen contained in water.
A US laboratory has managed to generate for the first time more energy than that used in a nuclear fusion process, as Arati Prabhakar, policy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, has just confirmed at a press conference in Lawrence Livermore Federal National Laboratory in California.
In this laboratory, on December 5, an energy gain was achieved for fractions of seconds by means of nuclear fusion. Of the roughly 2 megajoules of energy expended to ignite the process, about 3 megajoules were obtained, said Marvin Adams, head of defense at the National Nuclear Security Administration. These numbers are higher than those that circulated in the past days among the scientific community.
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The system is based on the same physical phenomenon with which energy is generated in stars. With this, clean energy is produced from a cheap and unlimited resource: the hydrogen contained in water. Until now, the energy expended in nuclear fusion experiments has never been greater than that generated.
However, the road to industrial development is still long and uncertain. It will take decades to get viable applications, according to Kim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore Federal National Laboratory.