The US Department of Energy announced on Tuesday a new milestone in nuclear fusion, an advance that could revolutionize energy production and the operation of nuclear power plants in the future.
Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have succeeded in carrying out nuclear fusion.
What does it consist of and how does it differ from fission, the system currently used by power plants?
In the video that accompanies this news item, Manuel Lozano Leyva, Emeritus Professor of Atomic and Nuclear Physics at the University of Seville, explains it.
Lozano Leyva has answered six key questions to understand the progress achieved and its importance: What is the difference between fusion and fission?
How was the merger achieved?
Why is this process said to replicate how the Sun works?
How is this advance brought to a nuclear power plant?
When will these plants become a reality?
And why is it said that it is a clean, cheap and inexhaustible energy?
“Nuclear fission consists of a heavy nucleus being divided into two fragments and the grace is that the initial mass with respect to that of the final fragments is different and the difference has been converted into energy.
Fusion is quite another thing.
It is that light nuclei come together, giving others a little heavier that are more stable.
The initial mass is greater than the final result”, explains the professor.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment has replicated the operation of the Sun: “It is about concentrating all the energy of 192 high-power lasers at a certain point.
That influx of lasers takes it to millions of degrees of temperature, they melt and it manages to generate more energy than it consumes to produce it and bring it to that temperature ”.
