How America can radicalize one trillion watts electricity generation capacity

• Published date: 14 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

Decades ago, America's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) began work on a scientific breakthrough that only became a reality on December 5, 2022. That day, a team at LLNL's National Ignition Facility (NIF) produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. This development, which promises to radically change power generation capacity among other things, was made public on December 13, 2022 by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). United States Bureau Chief OLUKOREDE YISHAU, who was part of a briefing on the breakthrough, breaks down this potential path to a fusion power energy plant which can staggeringly alter for good America's one trillion watts electricity generation capacity.

As the Programme Director for the Weapon Physics and Design (WPD) Programme at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Mark Herrmann is one of an exceptional thousands of people behind a major scientific breakthrough that is a potential path to a fusion power energy plant capable of seeing America multiplying its one trillion watts electricity generation capacity to 500 trillion watts. Herrmann, who leads LLNL's weapon science research and development, including focused experiments, integral hydrodynamic and subcritical experiments, high-energy-density (HED) experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), was guest at a briefing organised by the Department of State Foreign Press Center on the import of the breakthrough.

Herrmann said an experiment on December 5th, 2022 on the National Ignition Facility exceeded the threshold for fusion ignition.

'The amount of energy that was released by fusion was greater than the amount of energy we put in, demonstrating that fusion is - in the laboratory is a possibility for generating very extreme environments and potentially someday generating more energy out than goes in, and a potential path to a fusion power energy plant,' he said.

The NIF laser with 192 beams, he said, can generate about 500 trillion watts of power.

'So you're used to power in terms of 100 watt lightbulb, or we can talk about the electrical generating capacity of the United States. It's about 1 trillion watts. So at any point in time, all the electricity from all the power plants in the U.S. is about 1 trillion watts. So this laser generates 500 times that and deposits it into that little tiny target, but it only does it for a very short amount of time - four billionths of a...