Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, August 17 (Xinhua) Nuclear fusion is a process that combines two light atoms, such as hydrogen isotopes, into a heavy atom, releasing huge amounts of energy. Compared with nuclear fission, which splits heavy elements such as uranium or plutonium, fusion is considered a safe and almost unlimited source of energy. At present, nuclear power plants use nuclear fission technology to generate electricity.

Pexels USA is pinning its hopes on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to achieve controllable nuclear fusion power generation. The laboratory achieved a second fusion ignition on July 30, creating an energy surplus (that is, more energy than needed to trigger the fusion reaction). In order to promote research and achieve the third ignition and more, the United States is preparing to invest another $112 million in more than a dozen supercomputing projects (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 819 million yuan).

These projects are organized by the newly established Scientific Discovery through the Advanced Computing (SciDAC) Program, which combines two existing Defense Department programs to use supercomputing resources, including trillions of sub-systems, to solve complex nuclear fusion energy problems.

"the modeling and simulation work of these partners will reveal a variety of physical processes experienced by plasmas under extreme conditions and guide the design of nuclear fusion test devices." Said Jean Paul Allain, director of FES, deputy minister of science of the Department of Energy.

However, much remains to be done to achieve a sustainable fusion ignition with surplus energy. Although the fusion ignition on July 30 provides a higher energy output than the light atom fuel tank (the exact value is unknown, but it may be better than the 2.05 megajoule input and 3.15 megajoule output achieved in December last year), but this only takes into account the energy transferred to the particles themselves, and the transfer of energy to the particles (through 192 lasers) is still very inefficient. LLNL needs to invest an astonishing 322 megajoules to emit the laser itself, which makes the whole process still in a state of global energy loss.

Therefore, a better understanding of the quantum processes related to nuclear fusion is the direction of exploration. Before quantum computers can provide a viable computing platform to solve this problem (which may take a decade or so), a supercomputer based on standard computing is currently the best way to explore the orderly chaotic process that occurs when a laser hits a particle.

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