They say that good things come in threes, and the U.S. is definitely banking on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to deliver just that when it comes to hot fusion. Having achieved their second successful fusion ignition with an energy surplus (meaning that more energy was produced than was required to achieve the fusion reaction itself) within a national lab on July 30th, the U.S. now aims to spur research and facilitate a successful third ignition — and beyond. To do that, the country is ready to invest a further $112M into a dozen supercomputing projects.
Fusion (short for nuclear fusion) refers to the ability to fuse two light atoms into a single, heavier one: a process that when successful, leads to the release of massive amounts of energy in the form of electrons. Unlike fission (which works by breaking down heavy elements such as uranium or plutonium), nuclear fusion is expected to be a safe, nearly-unlimited source of energy. When done right, fusing two light atoms (such as deuterium and tritium, each a hydrogen isotope that carries additional neutrons compared to "plain" hydrogen) brings about an energy surplus that is more than four times the amount that fission processes can generate. That also makes it a process worth about four million times the amount of energy released from coal burning (at a per-kilogram basis) — its merits are obvious.
