Fusion breakthrough is a milestone for climate, clean energy

Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, center, joined from left by Arati Prabhakar, the president's science adviser, and National Nuclear Security Administration Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Marvin Adams, during a news conference in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2022. (AP)
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, center, joined from left by Arati Prabhakar, the president's science adviser, and National Nuclear Security Administration Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Marvin Adams, during a news conference in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2022. (AP)
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Updated 14 December 2022

Fusion breakthrough is a milestone for climate, clean energy

Fusion breakthrough is a milestone for climate, clean energy
  • Fusion works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat

WASHINGTON: Scientists announced Tuesday that they have for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it — a major breakthrough in the decades-long quest to harness the process that powers the sun.
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved the result last week, the Energy Department said. Known as a net energy gain, the goal has been elusive because fusion happens at such high temperatures and pressures that it is incredibly difficult to control.
The breakthrough will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and other officials said.
“Ignition allows us to replicate for the first time certain conditions that are found only in the stars and the sun,” Granholm told a news conference in Washington. “This milestone moves us one significant step closer” to having zero-carbon fusion energy “powering our society.”
Fusion ignition is “one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century,″ Granholm said, adding that the breakthrough “will go down in the history books.”




This June 14, 2018, image released by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, shows scientist working at the lab's National Ignition Facility, a laser-based inertial confinement fusion research facility. (AFP)

Appearing with Granholm, White House science adviser Arati Prabhakar called the fusion ignition achieved Dec. 5 “a tremendous example of what perseverance really can achieve” and “an engineering marvel beyond belief.”
Proponents of fusion hope it could one day displace fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. Producing carbon-free energy that powers homes and businesses from fusion is still decades away. But researchers said the announcement marked a significant leap forward.
“It’s almost like it’s a starting gun going off,” said professor Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leader in fusion research. “We should be pushing toward making fusion energy systems available to tackle climate change and energy security.”
Kim Budil, director of the Livermore Lab, said there are “very significant hurdles” to commercial use of fusion technology, but advances in recent years mean the technology is likely to be widely used in “a few decades” rather than 50 or 60 years as previously expected.
Fusion works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat. Unlike other nuclear reactions, it doesn’t create radioactive waste.
President Joe Biden called the breakthrough a good example of the need to continue to invest in research and development. “Look what’s going on from the Department of Energy on the nuclear front. There’s a lot of good news on the horizon,” he said at the White House.
Billions of dollars and decades of work have gone into fusion research that has produced exhilarating results — for fractions of a second. Previously, researchers at the National Ignition Facility, the division of Lawrence Livermore where the success took place, used 192 lasers and temperatures multiple times hotter than the center of the sun to create an extremely brief fusion reaction.
The lasers focused an enormous amount of heat on a miniature spherical capsule, said Marvin Adams, deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, an Energy Department agency. The result was a superheated plasma environment where a reaction generated about 1.5 times more energy than was contained in the light used to produce it.
Riccardo Betti, a professor at the University of Rochester and expert in laser fusion, said there’s a long road ahead before the net energy gain leads to sustainable electricity.
He likened the breakthrough to when humans first learned that refining oil into gasoline and igniting it could produce an explosion. “You still don’t have the engine, and you still don’t have the tires,” Betti said. “You can’t say that you have a car.”
The net energy gain achievement applied to the fusion reaction itself, not the total amount of power it took to operate the lasers and run the project. For fusion to be viable, it will need to produce significantly more power and for longer periods.
Budil said people sometimes joke that the Livermore lab, known as LLNL, “stands for ‘Lasers, Lasers, Nothing but Lasers.’” But she said the lab’s motto “sums up our approach nicely: Science and technology on a mission.”
It is incredibly difficult to control the physics of stars. Whyte said the fuel has to be hotter than the center of the sun. The fuel does not want to stay hot — it wants to leak out and get cold. Containing it is a challenge, he said.
Results from the California lab exceeded expectations, said Jeremy Chittenden, a professor at Imperial College in London specializing in plasma physics.
Although there’s a long way to go to turn fusion into a usable power source, Chittenden said, the lab’s achievement makes him optimistic that it may someday be “the ideal power source that we thought it would be” — one that emits no carbon and runs on an abundant form of hydrogen that can be extracted from seawater.
One approach to fusion turns hydrogen into plasma, an electrically charged gas, which is then controlled by humongous magnets. This method is being explored in France in a collaboration among 35 countries called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, as well as by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a private company.
Last year the teams working on those projects on two continents announced significant advancements in the vital magnets needed for their work.
Carolyn Kuranz, a University of Michigan professor and experimental plasma physicist, hoped the result would help bring “increased interest and vigor” to fusion research — including from private industry, which she and others said will be needed to get fusion energy to the grid.
“If we want to prevent further climate change, we are going to need diverse options of energy production to deploy,” Kuranz said. “And nuclear energy — both fission and fusion — really must be a part of that equation. We’re not going to get there with renewables alone.”
 

 


War has killed 262 Ukrainian athletes, sports minister says

War has killed 262 Ukrainian athletes, sports minister says
Updated 13 sec ago

War has killed 262 Ukrainian athletes, sports minister says

War has killed 262 Ukrainian athletes, sports minister says
Russia’s war against Ukraine has claimed the lives of 262 Ukrainian athletes and destroyed 363 sports facilities, the country’s sports minister, Vadym Huttsait, said on Saturday.
Meeting the visiting president of the International Federation of Gymnastics, Morinari Watanabe, Huttsait said no athletes from Russia should be allowed at the Olympics or other sports competitions.
“They all support this war and attend events held in support of this war,” Huttsait said, according to a transcript on President Volodymyr Zelensky’s website.
The International Olympic Committee has recommended the gradual return of Russian and Belarusian athletes to international competition as neutrals. It has not decided on their participation in the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Ukraine said on Friday its athletes will not be allowed to take part in qualifying events for the 2024 Games if they have to compete against Russians, a decision the IOC has criticized.
Reuters could not independently verify the number of Ukrainian athletes killed or how many facilities have been destroyed.
In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion on Ukraine in February 2022, a number of Ukrainian national-level athletes have taken up arms voluntarily to defend their country.
Among those killed this year alone have been figure skater Dmytro Sharpar, who died in combat near Bakhmut, and Volodymyr Androshchuk, a 22-year-old decathlon champion and future Olympic hopeful.

Finns vote as far right aims to unseat PM Sanna Marin

Finns vote as far right aims to unseat PM Sanna Marin
Updated 02 April 2023

Finns vote as far right aims to unseat PM Sanna Marin

Finns vote as far right aims to unseat PM Sanna Marin
  • Marin's Social Democratic Party (SDP) was in third place with 18.7 percent, behind center-right National Coalition (19.8 %), and the nationalist euroskeptic Finns Party (19.5 %)

HELSINKI: Finland votes Sunday in legislative elections that could see the country take a dramatic turn to the right, as center-right and anti-immigration parties vie to unseat Social Democratic Prime Minister Sanna Marin.
After the breakthrough by nationalists in neighboring Sweden and the far right’s victory in Italy last year, Finland could become the latest country to join the nationalist wave in Europe.
The vote comes just days ahead of Finland’s formal accession to the NATO defense alliance, made possible after Turkiye ratified the country’s membership bid on Thursday.
“The polls show that the more right-wing political trend in Finland is gaining strength,” Juho Rahkonen from the E2 research institute told AFP.
Traditionally, the biggest of the eight main parties in parliament gets the first chance to build a government, and since the 1990s that party has always claimed the prime minister’s office.
“We are aiming to win this election and continue our work for a more sustainable future,” Marin told reporters at the sidelines of her final campaign event in Helsinki.
The latest survey published Thursday by public broadcaster Yle showed the center-right National Coalition holding a thin lead at 19.8 percent, with the nationalist euroskeptic Finns Party in second place at 19.5 percent.
The Social Democratic Party (SDP) led by Marin, who took office in 2019 as the world’s youngest prime minister at age 34, was in third place with 18.7 percent.
“We have had a great campaign. We have the best candidates all over Finland and we are first in the polls, so I’m optimistic,” National Coalition leader Petteri Orpo told AFP at a campaign rally on Saturday.
While Marin ranks as Finland’s most popular prime minister this century in polls, she is struggling to convert her popularity into SDP seats in parliament.
“Although she is exceptionally popular, she also arouses opposition. The political divide has been reinforced,” Rahkonen said.
While some view her as a strong leader who deftly navigated the Covid-19 pandemic and the NATO membership process, others see the rising public debt on her watch and scandals over video clips of her partying as signs of her inexperience.
Finland’s debt-to-GDP ratio has risen from 64 percent in 2019 to 73 percent, which Orpo’s National Coalition wants to address by cutting spending by six billion euros ($6.5 billion).
Marin has defended her track record and accused the National Coalition of wanting to “take from the poor to give to the rich.”

A top spot for the far-right Finns Party, and a far-right prime minister, would be a first in Finland, with its leader Riikka Purra poised to top her party’s record score.
Her euroskeptic party wants a hard line on immigration, pointing to neighboring Sweden’s problems with gang violence as a cautionary tale.
“The biggest issue at the moment is the growing juvenile delinquency,” she told AFP on Saturday, claiming that “most of these street gangs and young criminals in the streets are migrants.”
Support for the populist party has surged since last summer, spurred by the “rise in energy prices and the general decline in purchasing power” following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Rahkonen said.
While the party served in a center-right government in 2015, it later split into two factions, one hard-line and the other moderate, with only the hard-liners still in parliament.
The Finns Party sees an EU exit as its long-term goal and wants to postpone Finland’s target of carbon neutrality for 2035.

Negotiations to build a government are expected to be thorny.
Marin has ruled out forming a government with what she calls the “openly racist” Finns Party, while Orpo has said he will keep his options open, despite clashing with the Finns Party on immigration, the EU and climate policy.
This gives him a central role in forming the next government, as both the Finns Party and the SDP would likely need him to obtain a majority.
Voting stations open at 9:00 am (0600 GMT) and close at 8:00 p.m. (1700 GMT), when the results of advance voting will be published. About 40 percent of voters have cast their ballots in advance.
 


At least 21 dead after tornadoes rake US Midwest, South

At least 21 dead after tornadoes rake US Midwest, South
Updated 02 April 2023

At least 21 dead after tornadoes rake US Midwest, South

At least 21 dead after tornadoes rake US Midwest, South
  • Debris and memories of regular life lay scattered inside the shells of homes and on lawns: clothing, insulation, roofing paper, toys, splintered furniture, a pickup truck with its windows shattered

WYNNE, Arkansas: Storms that dropped possibly dozens of tornadoes killed at least 21 people in small towns and big cities across the South and Midwest, tearing a path through the Arkansas capital, collapsing the roof of a packed concert venue in Illinois, and stunning people throughout the region Saturday with the damage’s scope.
Confirmed or suspected tornadoes in at least eight states destroyed homes and businesses, splintered trees and laid waste to neighborhoods across a broad swath of the country. The dead included seven in one Tennessee county, four in the small town of Wynne, Arkansas, three in Sullivan, Indiana, and four in Illinois.
Other deaths from the storms that hit Friday night into Saturday were reported in Alabama and Mississippi, along with one near Little Rock, Arkansas, where city officials said more than 2,600 buildings were in a tornado’s path.
Residents of Wynne, a community of about 8,000 people 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Memphis, Tennessee, woke Saturday to find the high school’s roof shredded and its windows blown out. Huge trees lay on the ground, their stumps reduced to nubs. Broken walls, windows and roofs pocked homes and businesses.
Debris and memories of regular life lay scattered inside the shells of homes and on lawns: clothing, insulation, roofing paper, toys, splintered furniture, a pickup truck with its windows shattered.
Ashley Macmillan said she, her husband and their children huddled with their dogs in a small bathroom as a tornado passed, “praying and saying goodbye to each other, because we thought we were dead.” A falling tree seriously damaged their home, but no one in the family was hurt.
“We could feel the house shaking, we could hear loud noises, dishes rattling. And then it just got calm,” she said.
Recovery was already underway, with workers using chainsaws and bulldozers to clear the area. Utility crews worked to restore power.
At least seven people died in Tennessee’s McNairy County, east of Memphis along the Mississippi border, said David Leckner, the mayor of Adamsville.
“The majority of the damage has been done to homes and residential areas,” Leckner said, adding that although it appeared all people were accounted for, crews were going door to door to be sure.
Gov. Bill Lee drove to the county Saturday to survey the damage, noting that the storm came days after six people were killed in a school shooting in Nashville.
“But it looks like your community has done what Tennessean communities do, and that is rally and respond,” he said.
Jeffrey Day said he called his daughter after seeing on the news that their community of Adamsville was being hit. Huddled in a closet with her two-year-old son as the storm passed over, she answered the phone screaming.
“She kept asking me, ‘What do I do, daddy?’” Day said. “I didn’t know what to say.”
In Belvidere, Illinois, part of the roof of the Apollo Theatre collapsed as about 260 people were attending a heavy metal concert. Some of them pulled a 50-year-old man from the rubble, but he was dead when emergency workers arrived. Officials said 40 other people were hurt, including two with life-threatening injuries.
“They dragged someone out from the rubble, and I sat with him and I held his hand and I was (telling him), ‘It’s going to be OK.’ I didn’t really know much else what to do,” concertgoer Gabrielle Lewellyn told WTVO-TV.
On Saturday, crews were cleaning up around the Apollo, with forklifts pulling away loose bricks. Business owners picked up shards of glass and covered shattered windows.
In Crawford County, Illinois, three people were killed and eight others injured after a tornado hit around New Hebron, Bill Burke, the county board chair, said.
Sheriff Bill Rutan said 60 to 100 families were displaced.
“We’ve had emergency crews digging people out of their basements because the house is collapsed on top of them, but luckily they had that safe space to go to,” Rutan said at a news conference.
Illinois state Rep. Adam Niemerg called the tornado “catastrophic.”
That tornado was not far from where three people were killed in Indiana’s Sullivan County, about 95 miles (150 kilometers) southwest of Indianapolis.
Sullivan Mayor Clint Lamb said at a news conference that an area south of the county seat of about 4,000 “is essentially unrecognizable right now” and that several people were rescued from rubble overnight. There were reports of as many as 12 people injured, he said, and search-and-rescue teams combed damaged areas.
“I’m really, really shocked there isn’t more as far as human issues,” he said, adding that recovery “is going to be a very long process.”
In the Little Rock area, at least one person was killed and more than 50 were hurt, some critically.
The National Weather Service said that tornado was a high-end EF3 twister with wind speeds up to 165 mph (265 kph) and a path as long as 25 miles (40 kilometers).
Masoud Shahed-Ghaznavi was lunching at home when it roared through his neighborhood, causing him to hide in the laundry room as sheetrock fell on his head and windows shattered. When he emerged, the house was mostly rubble.
“I see everything around me is sky,” Shahed-Ghaznavi recalled. He barely slept Friday night.
“When I closed my eyes, I couldn’t sleep, imagined I was here,” he said Saturday outside his home.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard to help local responders.
Another suspected tornado killed a woman in northern Alabama’s Madison County, county official Mac McCutcheon said. And in northern Mississippi’s Pontotoc County, officials confirmed one death and four injuries.
Tornadoes also caused damage in eastern Iowa and broke windows northeast of Peoria, Illinois.
The storms struck just hours after President Joe Biden visited Rolling Fork, Mississippi, where tornadoes last week destroyed parts of town.
It could take days to determine the exact number of tornadoes, said Bill Bunting, chief of forecast operations at the Storm Prediction Center. There were also hundreds of reports of large hail and damaging winds, he said.
“That’s a quite active day,” he said. “But that’s not unprecedented.”
More than 530,000 homes and businesses in the affected area lacked power at midday Saturday, over 200,000 of them in Ohio, according to PowerOutage.us.
The sprawling storm system also brought wildfires to the southern Plains, with nearly 100 new ones reported Friday in Oklahoma, according to the state forest service.
At least 32 people were injured in the fires, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Health. There were reports of more than 40 homes destroyed around the state.
The storms also caused blizzard conditions in the Upper Midwest.
A threat of tornadoes and hail remained for the Northeast including in parts of Pennsylvania and New York.


Three British men being held in Afghanistan: UK non-profit group

Three British men being held in Afghanistan: UK non-profit group
Updated 02 April 2023

Three British men being held in Afghanistan: UK non-profit group

Three British men being held in Afghanistan: UK non-profit group
  • Britain’s foreign ministry said the five “had no role in the UK government’s work in Afghanistan and traveled to Afghanistan against the UK government’s travel advice”

LONDON: Three British men have been detained by the Taliban in Afghanistan, UK non-profit group the Presidium Network said on Saturday.
The group said on Twitter it had been “working closely with two of the families.”
“We are working hard to secure consular contact with British nationals detained in Afghanistan and we are supporting families,” the UK’s foreign ministry added in a statement.
Scott Richards of the Presidium Network told Sky News: “We believe they are in good health and being well treated.
“We have no reason to believe they’ve been subject to any negative treatment such as torture and we’re told that they are as good as can be expected in such circumstances.”
There had been “no meaningful contact” between authorities and the two men Presidium is assisting, he added.
These two men are believed to have been held by the Taliban since January.
It is not known how long the third man has been held for.

Media reports named the men as charity medic Kevin Cornwell, 53, an unnamed manager of a hotel for aid workers and YouTube star Miles Routledge.
Presidium on Twitter urged the Taliban to be “considerate of what we believe is a misunderstanding and release these men.”
Last year the Taliban freed a veteran television cameraman and four other British nationals it had held for six months.
Peter Jouvenal was one of a “number” of Britons that the government in London said had been held by the hard-line Islamists.
Britain’s foreign ministry said the five “had no role in the UK government’s work in Afghanistan and traveled to Afghanistan against the UK government’s travel advice.”
“This was a mistake,” it added.
At the time, Afghanistan government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid accused the Britons of “carrying out activities against the country’s laws and traditions of the people of Afghanistan.”
“After consecutive meetings between the IEA (Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan) and Britain the said persons were released... and handed over to their home country,” he said.
“They promised to abide by the laws of Afghanistan, its traditions and culture of the people and not to violate them again,” he added.
The Taliban returned to power in August 2021 and has since sparked global outrage with its policies in particular toward women and girls.

 


Protesters face off in Kyiv as clergyman’s home raided

Protesters face off in Kyiv as clergyman’s home raided
Updated 02 April 2023

Protesters face off in Kyiv as clergyman’s home raided

Protesters face off in Kyiv as clergyman’s home raided
  • The hearing was initially adjourned as Pavlo complained of health issues but later resumed, with the court ordering a 60-day house arrest

KYIV, Ukraine: Protesters faced off outside a historic monastery in the Ukrainian capital on Saturday after the home of a leading clergyman was raided by the security services.
Metropolitan Pavlo of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has been accused of links with Moscow despite renouncing them, was called in for questioning on charges of inciting religious hatred.
The SBU security service said Pavlo is suspected of “justifying and denying the aggression by the Russian army against Ukraine and of glorifying its members” as well as “violating the equality of citizens on racial, national, regional and religious grounds.”
“The law and the responsibility for violating it are the same for everyone and a cassock is no guarantee of pure intentions,” SBU chief Vasyl Maliuk said in a statement, accusing Russia of using religion “to promote propaganda and divide Ukrainian society.”
The SBU said it had raided the home of Pavlo, who was later taken to court for a hearing to decide whether or not he should be detained, an AFP reporter saw.
The hearing was initially adjourned as Pavlo complained of health issues but later resumed, with the court ordering a 60-day house arrest.
He will have to wear an electronic surveillance device and “refrain from communicating with witnesses” as the inquiry continues, it said.
The development comes three days after the expiry of a deadline for an eviction order from Ukrainian authorities for the monks of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church who live in a part of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery.
The monks have said they will stay as long as possible at the site, an ancient golden-domed complex overlooking the Dnipro River that is the country’s most significant Orthodox monastery.
Dozens of Church supporters, including clergymen, could be seen outside the monastery on Saturday, waving religious symbols and praying in front of a small group of opponents.
The Pechersk monastery and other Church premises were raided last year by security services over suspected links to Russian agents.
The country also has an Orthodox Church of Ukraine, a separate institution that is entirely independent from Moscow.
In a video statement broadcast by Ukrainian media earlier on Saturday, Pavlo denied supporting the Russian invasion.
“They say I support the aggression of Russia against Ukraine. I have said, I say and I will say: I condemn all attacks on our state and what Russia and Putin have done is unjustifiable,” he said.