Breakthrough: Laser-Powered Fusion Experiment Nears ‘Ignition’
The post Breakthrough: Laser-Powered Fusion Experiment Nears ‘Ignition’ appeared first on POWER Magazine.
An experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) National Ignition Facility (NIF) appears to have approached fusion ignition as it recreated the extreme temperatures and pressures at the heart of the sun for a tiny fraction of a second. The momentous step has fueled new optimism for fusion energy.
The experiment on Aug. 8 “was enabled by focusing laser light from NIF—the size of three football fields—onto a target the size of a BB that produces a hot-spot the diameter of a human hair, generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second,” LLNL reported on Aug. 18. It achieved a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ)—and initial analysis suggests this is an eightfold improvement over experiments conducted in spring 2021, and an increase of 25 times over NIF’s 2018 record yield.
The production of that energy—which is more than any previous inertial confinement fusion experiment—proves ignition is possible, said experts from the Imperial College London, which are part of the “very large team” of industry and academia that has worked over many decades to demonstrate ignition.…