The so-called “major scientific breakthrough” in the operation called nuclear fusion must have taken place at the Lawrence Livermore Lab in California.

On Tuesday, Jennifer Granholm announced that American scientists had succeeded in replicating a type of relationship “that has only been measured in the sun and the stars,” reports CNN.

– This is a milestone that brings us an important step towards the possibility of running societies with fusion energy with zero carbon dioxide emissions, says Jennifer Granholm.

Record increase

For a decade, scientists have been trying to solve the riddle of creating clean, unlimited energy without carbon dioxide. Nuclear fusion is a reaction when two or more atoms fuse together. In the experiment at the Lawrence Livermore lab, about 50 percent more energy was produced than was put in, the first time an experiment had achieved such a large amount of energy.

Net energy gain

Fusion has been called the energy source of the future, but so far challenges remain to be solved. The problem was that more energy was required to continue the process than can be extracted.

– They’ve been at it for 70 years, and they haven’t been able to extract more energy than they’ve spent, says SVT’s economic commentator Alexander Noren.

If fusion power can be used commercially in the future, it will be of great importance for climate change, emphasizes Alexander Noren.

– If it is implemented, it will be cheaper, less dangerous and less pollutant than nuclear power, he says.

According to Lorenzo Frazzinetti, a fusion researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology, fusion is often cited as the savior of the world’s growing energy needs, and this is only partially true.

– Energy demand is expected to increase exponentially. So humanity needs to use all available sustainable energy sources, from wind turbines to nuclear power to fusion.