“Startup using water as nuclear fuel claims net energy gain milestone”
Startup using water as nuclear fuel claims net energy gain milestone (interestingengineering.com)
ENG8, a fusion energy company based in Gibraltar, has claimed to have consistently obtained a five-time energy gain from its experiments. The company’s claims were validated at the Culham Innovation Centre in Oxfordshire, one of the leading fusion centers under the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the company press release said.
Nuclear fusion offers a non-polluting and less risky method to meet the world’s energy demands. While the process has been ongoing on the Sun for billions of years, humanity is still trying to perfect how it can replicated on Earth.
Research in the area has focused on using magnets and lasers to create plasma where nuclei of smaller atoms can be fused to create energy. However, energy gain has not been achieved through these approaches so far. This means that the energy spent to create fusion energy is much higher than the energy generated. Therefore, a claim that energy output is five times more than that put in is a major milestone that energy companies around the globe would be interested in.
