the sun. , and stars, it s this fusion process. when you say you ve been trying for years, i mean, fusion has been this kind of subject of a controversy, i mean, a whole bunch of naysayers have said this is a ludicrous boondoggle to pursue. it can t work. it s not gonna work. and yet, the u.s. government has been spending money on it for very long times. talk a little bit about the, just the controversy that even surrounded the funding and line of research for all these decades. yeah, you re absolutely right. and it s not just criticism coming from the right, or criticism coming from the left, i, mean there are, across the ideological spectrum, people are being suspicions to this, because a big recent u.s. government is sort of investing a lot of money and trying to replicate this fusion was, it had to do nuclear opens. you know, this massive laser, the world s biggest laser that, you know, it s in a room the size of three football seats at the lawrence river laboratory, that was bui
scientists have a lot more work to do to make it viable. let s bring in the author of sun in a bottle and the science of wishful thinking. so great to have you on bright and early this morning. this is capturing the process that powers the sun in the hopes that, i guess, one day we ll be able to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and use this kind of energy to power our homes? yes. fusion is getting light atoms together and releasing energy. if the rumors of what happened today are true, this is the first defensible claim that scientists have been able to do this to generate net energy through the fusion process in the lab rather than in something like a nuclear explosion. however, this announcement does come with a couple of problems. okay. like what? well, the first thing is that
quest to harness fusion that powers the sun and stars. rene marsh has much more detail. what did we just hear from the energy department on this what and does it mean for the future of clean energy? yeah, so the scientists at this department of energy lab in california, they have effectively figured out how to bottle the sun. they were using 192 lit high power lasers to force and heat fusing the atoms together, unleashing this power that replicates the conditions that we see in the sun and the stars. but on december 5th, that is when the breakthrough happened for the very first time, this fusion process produced more energy than was used by the lasers to drive it. and that is so critical. in order for anything to be a viable energy source, the output of energy must far outweigh the input of energy used to generate it. the department of energy
traditional nuclear power plants. the big difference here is that you could create this nuclear reaction, and it could get this working, you don t have nuclear waste. none of this you do have some radioactive fallout, just like you might with hospital equipments, but you won t have the spent fuel and all this space to get rid of. so fusion works very differently, and infusion, what s happening, two atoms need to come together at a, you know, very high velocity, high temperature, and sort of, smash together, to form this reaction. it s the same reaction that, you know, creates the energy in a stark, or creates the energy in the sun. and doing this just requires, you know, getting temperatures up to the temperature of the core of the sun, and you know, incredible speeds, and it just takes a lot of equipment, a lot of costs, to try to do it for decades, to get the results that will be announced tomorrow. okay, the key sentence there that have always something to think about this, the
justin rowlatt, bbc news, 0xfordshire. let s get more now from doctor amy gandy, senior lecturer in nuclear materials engineering at the university of sheffield. while! it sounds incurably exciting. i think some of the hottest temperatures ever produced on earth, are there any downside to tour? this are there any downside to tour? is you had in the report, it is a very, very challenging, so it is a very difficult technology to harness, so we re not going to be able to connect fusion power to the grade any time soon, but the uk government have committed a lot of funding for their own energy production programme which hopes to demonstrate that we can get electricity from fusion by 2040, so a very ambitious target. so there are still an awful lot of challenges, but it s very different to fishing as we had before, in terms of you can t have a runaway chain reaction. the fusion process is inherently different, so instead of forcing athens parts, you