There was an announcement from the Livermore National Lab in California today regarding their search for solutions to the fusion energy challenge. For years now scientists have been trying to create fusion reactions that produce more energy than they consume, so far, they haven't managed it. It would seem that this milestone has now been reached! At Livermore they've run an experiment that has produced 3.15MJ of energy for a cost of 2.05MJ of energy put in via laser beams, this is a breakthrough although the energy cost didn't include that required to make the lasers work (just the laser energy itself) and for scale that amount of energy is not quite enough to boil 20 kettles, so no cigars just yet!
Sounds promising though, if they can figure out how to scale this experiment up and commercialise it (no mean feat!) then they could be onto something big. On the plus side, solving fusion would help solve Global Warming and also put an economic end to troublesome leaders like Putin (and other oil/gas rich dictators) but may also put the USA in a politically dominant position again, just like they were when they had nukes first in 1945, an interesting extra dimension to this important scientific quest!
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