Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku praised a recent nuclear fusion experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“This is a giant step toward the holy grail of energy research,” said Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College and City University of New York. “To get to the balance point, to extract more energy than you put in, this could end up becoming a game changer.”
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced a key achievement in nuclear fusion that on August 8 had been able to produce 1.3 megajoules of energy at its national ignition facility, albeit very briefly. Kaku told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” that the achievement was a giant step toward clean energy.
“A fusion reactor is carbon neutral, it doesn’t create carbon dioxide, it doesn’t create a lot of nuclear waste found in uranium fission plants, it doesn’t melt,” said the author of The God Equation : The The Search for a Theory of Everything “. “The fuel is seawater. Hydrogen from seawater could be the base fuel.”
Fusion, the least known and opposite reaction to nuclear fission, is when two atoms come together to form a heavier atom and release energy. It’s the way the sun makes energy.
Kaku explained some of the drawbacks of nuclear fusion and why it is not currently an easily accessible source of energy.
“It turns out that when you heat hydrogen to tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of the sun, things become unstable and that’s why that reaction occurred for over a hundred trillion seconds, just a touch of your finger, so in other words, we want to have a continuous flow of energy, not bursts of energy, as we found here, ”Kaku said.