Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
    The phys.org article says, “The experiments revealed a significantly higher pressure of plasma—a key to fusion reactions—using hydrogen ice compared to gas injection when the rate of fueling is roughly evenly matched between the two methods.”
    There is currently a great deal of research into nuclear fusion. At least a half dozen companies in the U.S. alone are working on fusion reactor designs based on a number of different approaches with different fuels. The race is on to develop a nuclear fusion reactor prototype that can be the basis of commercial nuclear fusion power. Nuclear fusion is much cleaner than nuclear fission which is the basis of the global commercial nuclear power industry. Some designs for fusion reactors only need hydrogen gas, other designs may include deuterium, tritium, helium-3 or ions of lithium. These are all much safer that the heavy radioactive elements which are the basis of nuclear fission. The waste left behind by nuclear fission are dangerously radioactive for thousands of years and are piling up around the planet because no one has yet constructed a permanent geological repository although there are several test repositories being built. With respect to the return on energy and fuel expended, nuclear fusion is several times more powerful than nuclear fission. However, while we developed techniques to extract power from nuclear fission reactions decades ago, we have still not managed to build a nuclear fusion reactor which is able to generate more energy than it consumers even thought decades of research and billions of dollars have been invested.
    Nuclear fusion for power generation may still be decades away but a great deal of progress has been made. ITER is a huge international cooperative effort to achieve break-even nuclear fusion where as much energy is generated as is put into the reactor to trigger the fusion reaction. The ITER reactor is being constructed in France with money and components from a number of countries. Last summer, ITER announced that in seven years, they would have the first live tests with plasma in their tokamak. In August of 2019, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory operated by the DoE reported another important breakthrough which applies new artificial intelligence developments and super computers to scaling up nuclear fusion reactors and successfully manage the plasma in the reactor. Last October, the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Plasma Liner Experiment announced that their complex combination of plasma guns, powerful magnet and super lasers in a hybrid approach to fusion will be operational later this year. Last month, an Australian fusion startup named HB11 began acquiring patents for their approach to nuclear fusion.
    The development of a better approach to the injection of hydrogen into nuclear power reactors mentioned above at the start of this blog post means that the achievement of commercial nuclear fusion power is getting closer and closer. The implications of the development of a practical commercial nuclear fusion reactor are profound and far-reaching for the future of human civilization. The availability of virtually endless cheap zero-carbon energy that would be made possible by nuclear fusion may be the decisive factor in the expansion of humanity into space.