Physics Central Podcast on Fusion Energy
Physics Central produced a fantastic podcast on fusion energy, along with a series of great photos of leading fusion facilities around the country. The podcast gives an overview of how fusion works and explains the progress at two of the leading fusion experiments, the National Ignition Facility which is researching inertial fusion, and the ITER experiment, the leading internationally-backed magnetic fusion experiment.
From the article:
On this week’s podcast, we talked about two of the leading fusion energy experiments, the National Ignition Facility and ITER. It’s hard to get a real idea of these facilities without seeing them.
Located at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California, the National Ignition Facility shoots powerful lasers at a tiny pellet of hydrogen in hopes of getting it to “ignite.” This technique is called the Inertial Confinement, because the intense heat and pressure of the lasers to crush the hydrogen together from all angles. In a building the size of three football fields, workers prepare the 192 lasers aimed at the their targets. Each laser has to fire with better than millisecond precision so that each beam hits the fuel pellet at exactly the same time.
To read the full article, and to access the podcast, click here.
