Fusion at Sandia National Lab Shows Progress
The progress at Sandia National Laboratory is making a lot of headlines. TechNewsDaily put out an article, summarizing the interesting work Sandia is doing on combining two approaches to fusion – magnetic confinement and inertial confinement – into one. By using lasers to heat up the fuel before crushing it with magnetic fields, Sandia believes it will be able to achieve net energy gain by the end of next year. From the article:
A crushed tube the size of a thread spool has brought the United States one step closer to harnessing nuclear fusion as a clean, almost limitless power source.
The experiment at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico tested how well a tiny cylinder could withstand the crushing magnetic force from the lab’s “Z machine” — a pulsed-power accelerator that zapped the cylinder with 25 million amperes of electric current. The “liner” cylinder collapsed on itself, as would be expected, but remained intact enough to theoretically squeeze together deuterium or tritium fuel, triggering nuclear fusion.
“Our experiments were designed to test a sweet spot predicted by the simulations where a sufficiently robust liner could implode with a sufficiently high velocity,” said Ryan McBride, a researcher at the laboratories in Albuquerque.
To read the full article, click here.
