World News for Students of English

19-12-2022 07:00

On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy announced that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, United States, achieved nuclear fusion for the first time ever.

This is a breakthrough on fusion energy, the process that powers the sun and stars, and it took decades of research on the underlying technologies. The scientists focused 192 lasers on a target of fuel to combine two light atoms into a denser one to release the energy. This happened quickly, and for the first time in history, it produced more energy that the lasers produced.

If companies can scale up the technology to a commercial level in the coming decades, nuclear fusion could one day slow climate change. However, more science needs to happen before fusion becomes commercially viable, and efforts to develop fusion shouldn’t slow down progress on alternative energy sources like solar and wind power, battery storage, and nuclear fission.

Difficult words: underlying (basic, significant), scale up (to increase something in size, number, or extent), viable (capable of working successfully).

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