Will the recent advancement in nuclear fusion push us into the next stage of civilisation?
Boy do I love when science fiction becomes science fact. With new breakthroughs in nuclear fusion on the table, we could one day see the alternate world line lore of Fallout coming true. One day PC gamers could be running their rigs on personal mini fusion reactors—I mean, probably not, but I can dream of one day overfusioning my GPU.
Thus far, thermonuclear weapons have been the main use for nuclear fusion, but imagine a world where instead we could harness it to generate masses of clean energy. It's been a pipe dream of industry for decades, and reports from theResearchers at the National Ignition Facility in California fired 2.05 megajoules of energy at some heavy hydrogen, in the form of frozen deuterium and tritium.
With everything in place, NIF managed to generate 3.15 megajoules of energy from the reaction. The idea that we can generate the same amount of energy it takes to incite that reaction, plus half again, is unprecedented. It's an extravagant yield, one that could spell a revolution in energy supply. According to the U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, “This is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.”
Tritium, or hydrogen-3 is not something the Earth produces naturally in large quantities, but we can make it up by irradiating lithium in a nuclear reactor. In fact, nuclear fission reactors create Tritium as a byproduct already. Deuterium on the other hand is an abundant resource here on Earth, found in our very own oceans.
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