Is the era of unlimited energy approaching? New technology is expected to make nuclear fusion power generation a more practical commercial technology.

It is reported that the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is developing an argon fluoride (ArF) laser that may one day make nuclear fusion power generation a practical commercial technology. Its broadband ultraviolet laser is designed to have the shortest laser wavelength and can be magnified proportionally to provide power for nuclear fusion reaction.

With the increasing depletion of the earth's fossil energy, the term energy crisis, which once appeared only in science fiction plots, has become a stumbling block to human development. In today's nuclear age, the correct use of nuclear fusion (nuclear fusion) is considered to be one of the ways to solve the future energy crisis, which is expected to provide unlimited clean energy.

In fact, many scientists call nuclear fusion energy a game-changing technology. In fact, within any foreseeable time frame, the ability to generate clean energy from hydrogen will fundamentally change human civilization in ways we cannot imagine.

However, while scientists can recreate sun-like internal conditions to produce nuclear fusion reactions on Earth, these are limited to hydrogen bombs and laboratory experiments, where more energy is needed to create a nuclear fusion reaction than researchers can get, although recent experiments are getting closer and closer to a breakthrough.

Over the past 75 years, scientists have aimed to generate temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius and the pressure needed to ignite the fusion reaction, and generate enough residual energy to sustain it. This in itself will be a major achievement, but the technology must also be able to sustain the reaction indefinitely, while at the same time cheap enough and the reactor small enough to be practical.

The new deep ultraviolet laser developed by AFL is said to transfer energy to fuel beads with higher efficiency and produce higher temperatures to produce implosion. Using radiation hydrodynamics simulations, NRL scientists say that performance can be improved by a factor of 100, with an efficiency of 16%, compared with 12% for the most effective krypton fluoride laser.

Thanks to these improvements, ArF lasers could lead to smaller and cheaper fusion power plants, the researchers said. However, the team stressed that there is still a long way to go before fusion can be connected to the national Electroweb. The laser will need to provide a practical factory with the required energy, repetition rate, accuracy and billion times reliability.

To achieve this goal, the laboratory is conducting a three-phase project, the first of which is dedicated to the basic science and technology of ArF lasers. The second phase will focus on building and testing a complete high-energy ArF laser, and then the third phase will build an implosion facility consisting of 20 to 30 lasers.

Dr. Steve Obenschain, a research physicist at NRL, said: "these advantages can facilitate the development of medium-sized, low-cost converging substation modules that can operate at less than 1 megajoule of laser energy. This will greatly change the existing view that laser fusion energy is too expensive and power plants are too large. "

Nuclear fusion as an infinite energy supply technology with great potential, once put into use, it is bound to set off a drastic change in the whole energy field, and its impact will also be subversive. Nuclear fusion power generation is highly complementary to traditional power: such as on-demand power supply, load following, and little affected by climate and environment, it can be easily expanded to meet the energy needs of all mankind.