DailyDirt: Harnessing Fusion Energy

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We've brought up fusion energy here before, pointing out some incremental progress and the long road ahead before fusion energy is really a viable alternative to existing commercial energy sources. Solar power seems to be the closest thing we have to harnessing fusion right now, but we shouldn't give up all hope for a Mr. Fusion generator just yet. Here are just a few more links on harnessing fusion energy.

• The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has made another baby step towards creating a controlled fusion reactor. The pellet of fuel zapped by NIF's lasers has, for the first time, produced more energy than it used. However, the NIF is still really, really, really far from actually generating any useful energy because this break-even point doesn't account for any mechanisms that would capture the excess energy (or the long list of energy losses along the way). [url]
• The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System focuses 300,000 mirrors to turn water into steam. This facility should be able to power about 140,000 Californian homes, and it only occupies 5 square miles of land on the California-Nevada border. [url]
• Japanese construction firm Shimizu Corp has an ambitious plan to build an enormous array of solar panels around the moon's equator. This Luna Ring project would be able to collect solar power all the time and send it back to Earth... sometime in the next 20 years or so. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: california, energy, fusion, luna ring, solar power
Companies: shimizu corp