Two orders of magnitude more: The Sandia researchers reported this week in Physical Review Letters that they had heated the plasma to about 35 million degrees Celsius and detected about 2 trillion neutrons coming from each shot. (One reaction of fusing two deuteriums produces helium-3 and a neutron.) Although the result shows that a substantial number of reactions is taking place—100 times as many as the team achieved a year ago—the group will need to produce 10,000 times as many to achieve breakeven. “It is good progress but just a beginning,” says Sandia senior scientist Mike Campbell. “We need to get more energy into the gas and increase the initial magnetic field and see if it scales in the right direction.”
<more> http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/10/z-machine-makes-progress-toward-nuclear-fusion
