Future Perfect  Fusion power as a safe alternative to fission power

With various countries undergoing liberalization for faster economic development, the energy needs of the world are growing at a very fast pace. The availability of fossil fuels is only for a limited time period and their effects are also very devastating for the global environment. As increased carbon levels in atmosphere have been found to damage economic systems throughout the world, the nuclear power is emerging as a more useful and easily explorable option for fulfilling the energy needs without causing any environmental damage.

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UK joins laser nuclear fusion project

The UK has formally joined forces with a US laser lab in a bid to develop clean energy from nuclear fusion. Unlike fission plants, the process uses lasers to compress atomic nuclei until they join, releasing energy. The National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US is drawing closer to producing a surplus of energy from the idea.

The UK company AWE and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have now joined with Nif to help make laser fusion a viable commercial energy source.

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Fusion power is it getting any closer

A star is born. And, less than a second later, it dies. On a drab science park just outside the Oxfordshire village of Culham, some of the world’s leading physicists stare at a monitor to review a video of their wondrous, yet fleeting, creation.

“Not too bad. That was quite a clean one,” observes starmaker-in-chief Professor Steve Cowley. Just a few metres away from his control room, a “mini star” not much larger than a family car has just burned, momentarily bright, at temperatures approaching 23 million degrees centigrade inside a 70-tonne steel vessel.

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Is Fusion Power Finally For Real

From the other side of a wide glass window on the third story of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world’s largest laser array looks an awful lot like the world’s largest plumbing project. Row after row of 16-inch-diameter pipes are packed into a room like cigarettes in a box—only the box is the size of three football fields. A catwalk thick with miles of cable runs through the center. Large metal ducts snake overhead and along the walls. I have to take it on faith that the pipes, called beam tubes, don’t contain water or gas, but 192 separate laser beams zipping back and forth. When the beams finally exit the room, their strength amplified more than a quadrillion times, they will converge on a pencil-eraser-size target in one short, powerful pulse. And in those 20-billionths of a second, I’m told, atoms of hydrogen will smash together with such force that they’ll essentially create a star.

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