posted by: Jason E. B. , On: Dec. 13, 2022, 9:38 p.m.

National Ignition Facility achieves fusion ignition

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced the achievement of fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) — a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power. On Dec. 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility(NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. This first-of-its-kind feat will provide unprecedented capability to support NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program and will provide invaluable insights into the prospects of clean fusion energy, which would be a game-changer for efforts to achieve President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy.

“This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility who have dedicated their careers to seeing fusion ignition become a reality, and this milestone will undoubtedly spark even more discovery,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to supporting our world-class scientists — like the team at NIF — whose work will help us solve humanity’s most complex and pressing problems, like providing clean power to combat climate change and maintaining a nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing.”

target chamber 121322 — The target chamber of LLNL’s National Ignition Facility, where 192 laser beams delivered more than 2 million joules of ultraviolet energy to a tiny fuel pellet to create fusion ignition on Dec. 5, 2022.

“We have had a theoretical understanding of fusion for over a century, but the journey from knowing to doing can be long and arduous. Today’s milestone shows what we can do with perseverance,” said Dr. Arati Prabhakar, the President’s chief adviser for Science and Technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

“Monday, December 5, 2022, was a historic day in science thanks to the incredible people at Livermore Lab and the National Ignition Facility. In making this breakthrough, they have opened a new chapter in NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program,” NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby said. “I would like to thank the members of Congress who have supported the National Ignition Facility because their belief in the promise of visionary science has been critical for our mission. Our team from around the DOE national laboratories and our international partners have shown us the power of collaboration.”

“The pursuit of fusion ignition in the laboratory is one of the most significant scientific challenges ever tackled by humanity, and achieving it is a triumph of science, engineering, and most of all, people,” LLNL Director Dr. Kim Budil said. “Crossing this threshold is the vision that has driven 60 years of dedicated pursuit — a continual process of learning, building, expanding knowledge and capability, and then finding ways to overcome the new challenges that emerged. These are the problems that the U.S. national laboratories were created to solve.”

“This astonishing scientific advance puts us on the precipice of a future no longer reliant on fossil fuels but instead powered by new clean fusion energy,” U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (NY) said. “I commend Lawrence Livermore National Labs and its partners in our nation’s Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) program, including the University of Rochester’s Lab for Laser Energetics in New York, for achieving this breakthrough. Making this future clean energy world a reality will require our physicists, innovative workers and brightest minds at our DOE-funded institutions, including the Rochester Laser Lab, to double down on their cutting-edge work. That’s why I’m also proud to announce today that I’ve helped to secure the highest-ever authorization of over $624 million this year in the National Defense Authorization Act for the ICF program to build on this amazing breakthrough.”

“After more than a decade of scientific and technical innovation, I congratulate the team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the National Ignition Facility for their historic accomplishment,” said U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (CA). “This is an exciting step in fusion and everyone at Lawrence Livermore and NIF should be proud of this milestone achievement.”

“This is an historic, innovative achievement that builds on the contributions of generations of Livermore scientists. Today, our nation stands on their collective shoulders. We still have a long way to go, but this is a critical step and I commend the U.S. Department of Energy and all who contributed toward this promising breakthrough, which could help fuel a brighter clean energy future for the United States and humanity,” said U.S. Senator Jack Reed (RI), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“This monumental scientific breakthrough is a milestone for the future of clean energy,” said U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (CA). “While there is more work ahead to harness the potential of fusion energy, I am proud that California scientists continue to lead the way in developing clean energy technologies. I congratulate the scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for their dedication to a clean energy future, and I am committed to ensuring they have all of the tools and funding they need to continue this important work.”

“This is a very big deal. We can celebrate another performance record by the National Ignition Facility. This latest achievement is particularly remarkable because NIF used a less spherically symmetrical target than in the August 2021 experiment,” said U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren (CA-19). “This significant advancement showcases the future possibilities for the commercialization of fusion energy. Congress and the Administration need to fully fund and properly implement the fusion research provisions in the recent CHIPS and Science Act and likely more. During World War II, we crafted the Manhattan Project for a timely result. The challenges facing the world today are even greater than at that time. We must double down and accelerate the research to explore new pathways for the clean, limitless energy that fusion promises.”

hohlraum 121322 — The hohlraum that houses the type of cryogenic target used to achieve ignition on Dec. 5, 2022, at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility.

“I am thrilled that NIF — the United States’ most cutting-edge nuclear research facility — has achieved fusion ignition, potentially providing for a new clean and sustainable energy source in the future. This breakthrough will ensure the safety and reliability of our nuclear stockpile, open new frontiers in science, and enable progress toward new ways to power our homes and offices in future decades,” said U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell (CA-15). “I commend the scientists and researchers for their hard work and dedication that led to this monumental scientific achievement, and I will continue to push for robust funding for NIF to support advancements in fusion research.”

LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and businesses, and DOE is currently restarting a broad-based, coordinated IFE program in the United States. Combined with private-sector investment, there is a lot of momentum to drive rapid progress toward fusion commercialization.

https://www.llnl.gov/news/national-ignition-facility-achieves-fusion-ignition

Fusion is the process by which two light nuclei combine to form a single heavier nucleus, releasing a large amount of energy. In the 1960s, a group of pioneering scientists at LLNL hypothesized that lasers could be used to induce fusion in a laboratory setting. Led by physicist John Nuckolls, who later served as LLNL director from 1988 to 1994, this revolutionary idea became inertial confinement fusion, kicking off more than 60 years of research and development in lasers, optics, diagnostics, target fabrication, computer modeling and simulation and experimental design.

To pursue this concept, LLNL built a series of increasingly powerful laser systems, leading to the creation of NIF, the world’s largest and most energetic laser system. NIF — located at LLNL in Livermore, California — is the size of a sports stadium and uses powerful laser beams to create temperatures and pressures like those in the cores of stars and giant planets, and inside exploding nuclear weapons.

X-rays 121322 — To create fusion ignition, the National Ignition Facility’s laser energy is converted into X-rays inside the hohlraum, which then compress a fuel capsule until it implodes, creating a high temperature, high pressure plasma.

Achieving ignition was made possible by dedication from LLNL employees as well as countless collaborators at DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Nevada National Security Site; General Atomics; academic institutions, including the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University; international partners, including the United Kingdom’s Atomic Weapons Establishment and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission; and stakeholders at DOE and NNSA and in Congress.

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Re: !!! One of the most important news releases of the year - if not the century - National Ignition Facility achieves fusion ignition!!!!

posted by: Jason E. B. , On: Dec. 13, 2022, 9:52 p.m.

Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers

The advancement by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers will be built on to further develop fusion energy research.

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Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California said they produced the first fusion reaction in a laboratory that created more energy than it took to start it.CreditCredit...Jason Laurea/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

By Kenneth Chang

Dec. 13, 2022Updated 3:42 p.m. ET

Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that they had crossed a long-awaited milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory.

That sparked public excitement as scientists have for decades talked about how fusion, the nuclear reaction that makes stars shine, could provide a future source of bountiful energy.

The result announced on Tuesday is the first fusion reaction in a laboratory setting that actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction.

“This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” Arati Prabhakar, the White House science adviser, said during a news conference on Tuesday morning at the Department of Energy’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “And even deeper understanding of the scientific principles that are applied here.”

If fusion can be deployed on a large scale, it would offer an energy source devoid of the pollution and greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the dangerous long-lived radioactive waste created by current nuclear power plants, which use the splitting of uranium to produce energy.

Within the sun and stars, fusion continually combines hydrogen atoms into helium, producing sunlight and warmth that bathes the planets. In experimental reactors and laser labs on Earth, fusion lives up to its reputation as a very clean energy source.

There was always a nagging caveat, however. In all of the efforts by scientists to control the unruly power of fusion, their experiments consumed more energy than the fusion reactions generated.

That changed at 1:03 a.m. on Dec. 5 when 192 giant lasers at the laboratory’s National Ignition Facility blasted a small cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser that contained a frozen nubbin of hydrogen encased in diamond.

The laser beams entered at the top and bottom of the cylinder, vaporizing it. That generated an inward onslaught of X-rays that compresses a BB-size fuel pellet of deuterium and tritium, the heavier forms of hydrogen

In a brief moment lasting less than 100 trillionths of a second, 2.05 megajoules of energy — roughly the equivalent of a pound of TNT — bombarded the hydrogen pellet. Out flowed a flood of neutron particles — the product of fusion — which carried about 3 megajoules of energy, a factor of 1.5 in energy gain.

This crossed the threshold that laser fusion scientists call ignition, the dividing line where the energy generated by fusion equals the energy of the incoming lasers that start the reaction.

“You see one diagnostic and you think maybe that’s not real and then you start to see more and more diagnostics rolling in, pointing to the same thing,” said Annie Kritcher, a physicist at Livermore who described reviewing the data after the experiment. “It’s a great feeling.”

The successful experiment finally delivers the ignition goal that was promised when construction of the National Ignition Facility started in 1997. When operations began in 2009, however, the facility hardly generated any fusion at all, an embarrassing disappointment after a $3.5 billion investment from the federal government.

Dr. Kim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, during Tuesday’s news conference at the Department of Energy in Washington.Credit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In 2014, Livermore scientists finally reported some success, but the energy produced was minuscule — the equivalent of what a 60-watt light bulb consumes in five minutes. Progress over the next few years was slight and small.

Then, in August last year, the facility produced a much larger burst of energy — 70 percent as much energy as the laser light energy.

In an interview, Mark Herrmann, program director for weapons physics and design at the Livermore, said the researchers then performed a series of experiments to better understand the surprising August success, and they worked to bump up the energy of lasers by almost 10 percent and improve the design of the hydrogen targets.

The first laser shot at 2.05 megajoules was performed in September, and that first try produced 1.2 megajoules of fusion energy. Moreover, analysis showed that the spherical pellet of hydrogen was not squeezed evenly, and some of the hydrogen essentially squirted out the side and did not reach fusion temperatures.

The scientists made some adjustments that they believed would work better.

“The prediction ahead of the shot was that it could go up a factor of two,” Dr. Herrmann said. “In fact, it went up a little more than that.”

The main purpose of the National Ignition Facility is to conduct experiments to help the United States maintain its nuclear weapons. That makes the immediate implications for producing energy tentative.

Fusion would be essentially an emissions-free source of power, and it would help reduce the need for power plants burning coal and natural gas, which pumps billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

But it will take quite a while before fusion becomes available on a widespread, practical scale, if ever.

“Probably decades,” Kimberly S. Budil, the director of Lawrence Livermore, said during the Tuesday news conference. “Not six decades, I don’t think. I think not five decades, which is what we used to say. I think it’s moving into the foreground and probably, with concerted effort and investment, a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant.”

Most climate scientists and policymakers say that to achieve that goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius, or the even more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, the world must reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

It averages about 10 shots per week. A commercial facility using the laser fusion approach would need much faster lasers, able to shoot at a machine-gun pace, perhaps 10 times a second.

NIF also still consumes far more energy than is produced by the fusion reactions.

Although the latest experiment produced a net energy gain compared to the energy of the 2.05 megajoules in the incoming laser beams, NIF needed to pull 300 megajoules of energy from the electrical grid in order to generate the brief laser pulse.

Other types of lasers are more efficient, but experts say a viable laser fusion power plant would likely require much higher energy gains than the 1.5 observed in this latest fusion shot.

“You’ll need gains of 30 to 100 in order to get more energy for an energy power plant,” Dr. Herrmann said.

He said Livermore would continue to push NIF fusion experiments to higher fusion output.

“That’s really what we’re going to be looking at honestly over the next few years,” Dr. Herrmann said. “These experiments show that even a little bit more laser energy can make a big difference.”

Researchers elsewhere are looking at variations of the NIF experiment. Other types of lasers at different wavelengths might heat the hydrogen more efficiently.

Some researchers favor a “direct drive” approach to laser fusion, using the laser light to directly heat the hydrogen. That would get more energy into the hydrogen, but could also create instabilities that thwart the fusion reactions.

In April, the White House held a summit to seek to accelerate commercial fusion efforts.

“Developing an economically attractive approach to fusion energy is a grand scientific and engineering challenge,” Tammy Ma, who leads an effort at Livermore to study the possibilities. “Without a doubt, it will be a monumental undertaking.”

Dr. Ma said that a report commissioned by the energy department to provide a framework for laser fusion energy research would come out soon.

“Such a program,” she said, “will inevitably require participation from across the community,” including academia, start-up companies and public utilities in addition to national laboratories like Livermore.

The results announced Tuesday will benefit the scientists working on the nuclear stockpile, the NIF’s primary purpose. By performing these nuclear reactions in a lab at a less destructive scale, scientists aim to replace the data they used to gather from underground nuclear bomb detonations, which the United States stopped in 1992.

The greater fusion output from the facility will produce more data “that allows us to maintain the confidence in our nuclear deterrent without the need for further underground testing,” Dr. Herrmann said. “The output, that 30,000 trillion watts of power, creates very extreme environments in itself” that more closely resemble an exploding nuclear weapon.

Riccardo Betti, chief scientist of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester, who was not involved with this particular Livermore experiment, said, “This is the goal, to demonstrate that one can ignite a thermonuclear fuel in the laboratory for the first time.”

“And this was done,” he added. “So this is a great result.”

Henry Fountain and Zach Montague contributed reporting.

Kenneth Chang has been at The Times since 2000, writing about physics, geology, chemistry, and the planets. Before becoming a science writer, he was a graduate student whose research involved the control of chaos. @kchangnyt

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/science/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html?campaign_id=34&emc=edit_sc_20221213&instance_id=80085&nl=science-times®i_id=62126346&segment_id=117066&te=1&user_id=8a7e0bc9031b0f470605446b7e721004

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!!! One of the most important news releases of the year - if not the century - National Ignition Facility achieves fusion ignition!!!!

National Ignition Facility achieves fusion ignition

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Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers

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!!! One of the most important news releases of the year - if not the century - National Ignition Facility achieves fusion ignition!!!!

Re: !!! One of the most important news releases of the year - if not the century - National Ignition Facility achieves fusion ignition!!!!