Laser fusion experiment extracts net energy from fuel - Nature

Tags

Top Highlights

• Using the world's most powerful assembly of lasers, a team of researchers say they have, for the first time, extracted more energy from controlled nuclear fusion than was absorbed by the fuel to trigger it — crossing an important symbolic threshold on the long path toward exploiting this virtually boundless source of energy.

• Whereas nuclear fission extracts energy released during the break-up of very heavy nuclei such as those of uranium, nuclear fusion — the process that powers stars and thermonuclear bombs — produces energy from the coalescence of light nuclei, such as those of hydrogen. During such a reaction, a tiny part of the masses of the separate hydrogen nuclei is converted into energy.