Fusion energy technology

“There are two milestones. One is a milestone regarding the so-called net energy gain. That is a milestone that needs to be achieved by any power source—that’s to produce a net energy gain. So in this case, for the first time in the history of nuclear fusion research, the energy input to the fusion reactions was less than the energy output. So the energy output was greater, and, therefore, there was a net energy gain.

“The second milestone is that for the first time in the history of this field, a hydrogen fuel was ignited at the nuclear level, so that is also something that—it happened before in hydrogen bombs, it happened in stars—but never happened in a controlled fashion in the laboratory.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Riccardo Betti, Ph.D.
Robert L. McCrory Professor, department of mechanical engineering and physics & astronomy, University of Rochester Grab This Quote

“The announcement on Tuesday indicated that, for the first time in any experiment, the amount of energy produced in a fusion experiment exceeded the amount of energy put in. So it exceeded the breakeven criteria—so more energy out than energy in. And that was the first time that has ever been done.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Karl Krushelnick, Ph.D.
Professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, University of Michigan Grab This Quote

“The most important takeaway from the recent achievement of the National Ignition Facility is that they definitively created fusion ignition in the laboratory for the first time. So the laser energy on the target was 2 megajoules, or 2 million joules. And the energy released from the experiment was 3 million joules.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Carolyn Kuranz, Ph.D.
Associate professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, University of Michigan Grab This Quote

“I wish that the public understands that a lot of the advancement is really in the science and in the physics. And, of course, we all wish that this can turn in to a viable energy source. But sometimes in the media this kind of news, they get hyped—that nuclear fusion can turn into an energy source in a relatively short time, and it’s just around the corner. This is not the case. Patience is very important.

“The progress is there. Sometimes the progress is for the experts to understand what the progress really is. But the public needs to be patient. And this is not going to turn into a power-producing system any time soon.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Riccardo Betti, Ph.D.
Robert L. McCrory Professor, department of mechanical engineering and physics & astronomy, University of Rochester Grab This Quote

“There has been research in fusion for 60 or 70 years, with the goal of making an energy source which is clean and is essentially an infinite source of fuel. At this point this is really one of the major steps that has been taken to understand how to make a fusion reactor, in terms of the physics problems. So up to this point there has been the work of many thousands of physicists to understand how to do it, and now we’ve attained essentially breakeven—or ignition—from the National Ignition Facility. And the question is how to turn this physics experiment into a working energy reactor, and that is handing over the problem from physicists to the engineers to make a high-repetition rate facility that operates more than just once a day, and also to be able to efficiently extract the energy from the fusion reactions and turn that into electricity.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Karl Krushelnick, Ph.D.
Professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, University of Michigan Grab This Quote

“When you see fusion in the headlines, I think it’s really important to understand how hard this is, and how just even doing this experiment was an amazing scientific and technological feat. And that sometimes research can be very slow. And we need to be very careful about the conclusions that we make. That being said, a lot of people have worked very hard on this for many, many years. And I think that fusion energy is grand societal challenge, and that we need to keep working on it. If not for our generation but for future generations on this planet.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Carolyn Kuranz, Ph.D.
Associate professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, University of Michigan Grab This Quote

“There are multiple steps to turn this into a viable energy source. The first thing is that this type of reaction has to be repeated many times per second in order to produce enough power that can be used to make, let’s say, electricity. The second thing, this event has to be made more powerful. So the energy output has to be many times the energy input. In last week the energy output was only 1.5 times the energy input. Instead, for a useful reaction that can be used for power generation, it needs to be like 50 to 100 times the energy output than the energy input.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Riccardo Betti, Ph.D.
Robert L. McCrory Professor, department of mechanical engineering and physics & astronomy, University of Rochester Grab This Quote

“There’s a lot of further study of the physics of these burning plasmas—plasma that has been ignited by fusion reactions—which is a fundamentally interesting physics context situation. But also how to potentially implement fusion as an energy source—to develop this experiment, this physics experiment as a source of energy, as a fusion reactor. And so I anticipate that there will be a lot of research in developing the engineering and technology into putting this physics result into a practical application as a clean energy source.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Karl Krushelnick, Ph.D.
Professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, University of Michigan Grab This Quote

“The next steps for fusion science I think remains to be determined. I think there’s going to be a lot of work understanding what went into this recent experiment and repeating the conditions of the fusion reaction. I think longer term we need to see what sort of interest and resources are put into fusion energy for energy production, from both the federal government and private industry.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Carolyn Kuranz, Ph.D.
Associate professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, University of Michigan Grab This Quote

“Many challenges to any energy system before it can be turned into a viable and economically attractive energy system. It requires years of development. Nuclear fusion is a particularly challenging way of making energy because the technology of nuclear fusion is very complex. So that takes many years of development. And also, you can make power, but the power has to be cheap enough and competitive with the other sources of energy. So if you think the targets, for instance, that were used last week, they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That cost of the target has to be brought down to pennies in order to make it economically viable. So there are many challenges, and that’s why it’s going to take decades to develop this.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Riccardo Betti, Ph.D.
Robert L. McCrory Professor, department of mechanical engineering and physics & astronomy, University of Rochester Grab This Quote

“The result from NIF has shown that energy can be produced from fusion reactions, and the process of ignition can be obtained. What’s next is to convert this energy source into an electricity source. And to do that one needs to develop the technology that produces the—to extract the energy from fusion reactions and also to improve the laser technology, to increase the repetition rate of the fusion reactions, and also to increase the efficiency of the extraction of energy from the neutrons, primarily, that come out as a result of the fusion reactions and turn those into electricity.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Karl Krushelnick, Ph.D.
Professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, University of Michigan Grab This Quote

“The nuclear fusion energy is different from the renewables that we think of like solar and wind and hydropower, in that while the fuel is naturally abundant—it occurs actually naturally in the ocean, and there is a significant amount of it. It is different, but it still is a zero-carbon energy source. So that is what we really need to focus on if we’re going to make an impact on climate change.

“Now, in order to get fusion energy to the power grid, there are certainly a lot of challenges going forward. This was a scientific achievement. But in order to get fusion energy on the power grid, we’re going to need to make advancements in laser technologies, in our target and fuel technologies. For example, the National Ignition Facility did this experiment maybe one per day. But we would need to have a laser and the fuel being rapidly inserted many times a minute or even many times a second. So we’d need to develop that technology, and also going into a demonstration power plant before it gets to the power grid.

“But now we can start to answer those questions—or even ask those questions of what is needed since this achievement was made.” (Posted December 13, 2022 | Download Video)

Carolyn Kuranz, Ph.D.
Associate professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, University of Michigan Grab This Quote