Fusion Process News Today

The sun. , and stars, its this fusion process. when you say youve 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 cant work. its 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, youre absol...

Scientists have a lot more work to do to make it viable. lets 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 well 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...

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 th...

Traditional nuclear power plants. the big difference here is that you could create this nuclear reaction, and it could get this working, you dont have nuclear waste. none of this -- you do have some radioactive fallout, just like you might with hospital equipments, but you wont have the spent fuel and all this space to get rid of. so fusion works very differently, and infusion, whats happening, two atoms need to come together at a, you know, very high velocity, high temperature, and sort of, sma...

Justin rowlatt, bbc news, 0xfordshire. lets 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 were not going to be able to connect fusion power to the g...

Ites very short laser pulse. all the matter collides together, reach as temperature of 100 million degrees and we get the fusion process to occur and its all done in after instant. >> the energy released is harnessed by releasing liquid salt which produces steam. this steam powers huge turbines to generate electricity. the release of energy from a fusion reaction is 10 million times greater than burning coal. >> the challenge for nuclear fusion is to make that instant last longer than a few bill...

Of reactor number one. there is a localized criticality. where they believe a fusion process in the reactor causing burst of radiation and a blue flash, which we have seen happen in the past, like in japan 12 years ago it killed two workers in the space of seven months from the radiation doses they were getting. one development, 7,000 members of the u.s. military are helping the japanese find bodies that have yet to be discovered. the u.s. soldiers and servicemen are involved in a grim job in ja...