Part 1 of 2 Parts
There is a great deal of research going in the field of nuclear fusion. If the conditions inside the Sun can be duplicated on Earth, humanity will have an inexhaustible cheap source of clean energy with no release of carbon dioxide or long-lived radioactive waste. Many of the research projects are based around a Soviet invention called a tokamak. Others are working with stellarators which are similar. Both of these approaches are based on using super powerful magnets to compress and heat a plasma. A totally different approach is called inertial confinement. Inertial confinement fusion is technology that attempts to initiate a nuclear fusion reaction by heating and compressing a fuel target which is typically a pellet. Powerful lasers are used to vaporize the pellet.
A new experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has achieved fusion ignition. This experiment produced more energy than any previous inertial confinement fusion experiment. The experiment proves that fusion ignition is possible with this approach. It is paving the way for reactions that produce more energy than they consume.
Physicists at Imperial College London are helping to analyze the data generated by the successful experiment which was conducted on the 8th of August, 2021. Twenty four Ph.D students from the Imperial College have gone on to work at the NIF. The College maintains strong links with the NIF and other such laboratories throughout the world connected by the Center for Inertial Fusion Studies (CIFS).
Professor Jeremy Chittenden is a Co-director of the CIFS at Imperial. He said that "demonstration of ignition has been a major scientific grand challenge since the idea was first published almost 50 years ago. It was the principal reason for the construction of NIF and has been its primary objective for over a decade.”
“After ten years of steady progress towards demonstrating ignition, the results of experiments over the last year have been more spectacular, as small improvements in the fusion energy output are strongly amplified by the ignition process. The pace of improvement in energy output has been rapid, suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kick-start the process.”
“This is crucial for opening up the promise of fusion energy and allowing physicists to probe the conditions in some of the most extreme states in the Universe, including those just minutes after the Big Bang. Controlled fusion in the laboratory is one of the defining scientific grand challenges of this era and this is a momentous step forward.”
Professor Steven Rose is a Co-director of the CIFS at the College. He said that “the NIF team have done an extraordinary job. This is the most significant advance in inertial fusion since its beginning in 1972. What has been achieved has completely altered the fusion landscape and we can now look forward to using ignited plasmas for both scientific discovery and energy production.”
Please read Part 2 next