Added 1 new A* page:American scientists announced that the fusion experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California last week "for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it." This has been the milestone everyone has been shooting for in the field for quite some time, so it's firm sign that progress is being made. 192 "lasers focused an enormous amount of heat on a miniature spherical capsule [...] the result was a superheated plasma environment where a reaction generated about 1.5 times more energy than was contained in the light used to produce it."
Of course, operating the whole project still took more energy and it was all very expensive to boot, so there's still a long way to go before we're all roasting our fusion burgers, but the results "exceeded expectations," and "advances in recent years mean the technology is likely to be widely used in 'a few decades' rather than 50 or 60 years as previously expected."
~~~~~~~~~
The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
|
