"When Alex and I learned about those tests at Los Alamos, our reaction was like 'wow, inertial fusion has already worked!'. Laboratory-scale pellets were ignited, the details were classified, but enough was made public that we knew that ignition was achieved."
"If fusion can be harnessed, then it promises abundant electricity, generated without producing CO2. The reaction creates helium and not the long-lived radioactive waste of the fission process which is used in existing nuclear power stations."
"Those tests in the 1980s led to the US government building the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California, a project to see if nuclear fuel pellets could be ignited using a powerful laser."
"While physicists around the world marvelled at that breakthrough, it had taken the scientists at NIF much longer than expected. 'They were energy starved,' says Mr Galloway."
#nuclear-fusion #energy-research #los-alamos-national-laboratory #national-ignition-facility #environmental-sustainability
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