A Denver-based start-up plans to use powerful lasers to spark a fusion reactor.
The National Ignition Facility in California uses powerful lasers to spark fusion reactionsAmong the experiments was an effort to see if nuclear fusion, the reaction which powers the sun, could be sparked on earth in a controlled setting.results had been promisingThat knowledge caught the attention of two young graduate students working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the late 2000s, Conner Galloway and Alexander Valys.
Nuclear fusion is the process of fusing hydrogen nuclei together, which produces immense amounts of energy. The reaction creates helium and not the long-lived radioactive waste of the fission process which is used in existing nuclear power stations.Those tests in the 1980s led to the US government building the National Ignition Facility in California, a project to see if nuclear fuel pellets could be ignited using a powerful laser..
NIF had to make do with a laser that could pump out two megajoules of energy. Mr Galloway and Mr Valys are planning to experiment with lasers that can supply up to 20 megajoules of energy.Such a laser beam would hit the fuel capsule with a powerful punch. It would be like taking the energy of a 40-tonne articulated lorry travelling at 60mph and focussing it on the centimetre-sized capsule for a few billionths of a second.
The other way, known as magnetic confinement fusion, uses powerful magnets to trap a burning cloud of atoms called plasma.In particular, how do you extract the heat generated during fusion so you can do something useful with it, like drive a turbine to make electricity? "My concern is that even the most optimistic view is that we'd be lucky to have commercial fusion reactors by 2050. And long before then we need to have decarbonized the energy supply if we're not going to melt the planet," he says.
The founders are confident that they can fire the lasers and replace the fuel capsules while keeping that flow going.
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