That’s more than 100 billion times shorter than the Wright Brothers’ first, 12-second flight — but a brief, shining moment that could have
Ma’s office is a giant box of lasers the size of three football fields in the corner of a 7,000-acre lab in Livermore. Running across the soaring white ceilings are miles of square tubes holding 192 of the most energetic lasers in the world, all snaking toward a round room at the center. A little more than 2 megajoules of energy going into the target chamber became 3.15 megajoules coming out — a modest gain of around 50%, but enough to make history and allow scientists to call the experiment a true success.Tammy Ma speaks at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on May 9.
“We made a number of modifications to try to compensate for the fact that the capsules weren’t perfect and some of those worked better than others.” Budil said. “And so the hope is always there. But if you look at the history of experiments that we’ve done, very small changes on the input bring very large changes in yield on the output side.”
So far, the nuclear-fusion field has been mainly divided into those that use lasers to spark ignition like a series of firecrackers, and those that deploy magnets strong enough to lift an aircraft carrier to control streams of plasma flowing around a doughnut-shaped machine called a tokamak. Helion Energy is making the boldest promises of the startup lot, and attracting some of the biggest backers in tech, including a $375-million investment from Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI. Helion claims its prototype the shape of huge dumbbell will fire plasma rings at a million miles an hour and demonstrate the ability to produce electricity through fusion by next year.