80 Trillion Watts: A UK Startup Has Fired the World’s Most Powerful Cannon to Demonstrate Nuclear Fusion

More and more companies are striving to achieve clean energy through nuclear fusion. First Light Fusion, a British startup, aims to accomplish this at a low cost using a tungsten projectile.

Unprecedented progress. The company made significant progress this year by firing an 80-trillion-watt electromagnetic pulse machine, which is the most powerful in the world, at an unprecedented pressure.

First Light previously became the first private company to fire the Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. With its amplifier technology, the company has now achieved a pressure of 1.85 terapascals, surpassing the previous record of 1.5 terapascals. This milestone demonstrates that the pulse can generate the extreme conditions necessary for nuclear fusion.

Some background. Nuclear fusion is the same process that powers stars, where hydrogen atoms combine to form helium and release a massive amount of energy.

Scientists and engineers worldwide have been striving to achieve this process on Earth for decades, considering it would provide a clean and nearly unlimited energy source. However, as of now, the complexity and cost of traditional methods, which use lasers and powerful magnetic fields, have been significant barriers.

First Light’s projectile. First Light Fusion’s method involves using inertial plasma confinement. Its strategy entails launching a tungsten projectile at very high velocity to collide with a deuterium capsule housed inside a vacuum chamber.

The projectile must travel at a high velocity to generate enough impact energy to cause the fuel capsule to implode and trigger the fusion reaction between deuterium atoms, an isotope of hydrogen.

Pros and cons. First Light’s method avoids the complex lasers and magnets of magnetic confinement fusion reactors and their high energy cost, which makes fusion simpler and cheaper.

However, while these advances are significant, the scalability and long-term sustainability of inertial confinement fusion are still challenging. For First Light’s system to be viable, it needs to be able to launch a projectile every 30 seconds that sustains the fusion reaction over time, which is currently beyond the company’s capabilities.

This article was written by Matías S. Zavia and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.

Image | First Light Fusion

Related | U.S. Makes Huge Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion Research by Managing to Confine Plasma in a Magnetic Mirror