Nuclear fusion, the combining of the tiniest element, hydrogen atoms, to produce tremendous amounts of clean energy, isn’t far fetched. The sun (like all stars) has been doing it for a few billion years and humans have achieved fusion reactions for several decades, known as H bombs. The trick is to use fusion to generate power without destroying the building housing the machinery and city it’s sitting in.
The failed “cold fusion” episode from 1989 was junk science, but the rigorously peer-reviewed work of researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shows that they produced about 3 megajoules of energy by bombarding a hydrogen pellet with just over 2 megajoules of energy, in the form of 192 laser beams, a net gain.
There remain endless challenges of replicating this controlled experiment on a larger scale, much less plugging it into the electric grid. Still, scientists see the breakthrough as potentially unlocking a future of clean, plentiful energy, exactly what is needed when greenhouse gas emissions are heating the planet.
