The search for an endless supply of free energy has been around ever since humans have been around.
However, it now seems that we are approaching the moment when we may have access to a supply of endless environmentally friendly energy, although at some considerable development costs.
An experimental JT-60SA nuclear reactor in Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture seems the best opportunity of far to be able to deliver a sustainable and near limitless power source, according to recent press reports.
The struggle to be able to produce limitless energy from a Fusion Reaction (the same energy that powers the Sun) rather than from a Fissile Reaction (the same produced in Nuclear Reactors and of course nuclear bombs) has been going on for many decades. Only recently has major progress been achieved, both in the JT-60A trials and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (LLNL) where scientists manage to get more energy out than the energy that was used to run the reaction.
Therein lies the ‘rub’; how to reduce the energy needed to sustain a fusion reaction so that it is possible to get long term access to this so called limitless ‘free’ energy. For example, the group at the LLNL had to use lasers to fuse two light atoms into a single one, releasing 3.15MJ (megajoules) of energy from 2.05MJ of input – roughly enough to boil a kettle!
It seems we are close, but there is still some way to go to having this type of energy at the flick of a switch.
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