The Quest To Make Fusion Power A Reality Is Going Stronger Than Ever

A winery-dotted valley to the east of San Francisco holds one of the best prospects for a sustainable energy future. Here at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is where you’ll find the National Ignition Facility (NIF).

The same physics that powers the sun is being harnessed within the square walls of NIF. In the past year, NIF researchers have come closer than anybody else to achieve the holy grail of fusion research: producing more energy than was initially put in. That world would have to wait, which is unfortunate but expected for those knowledgeable about fusion. There was no repeat performance by NIF scientists in the next months.

Hopefully, a new work published in Physics Review Letters on November 4 will help them take the next step in solving a problem that has stumped energy researchers for decades. Their newest stunt involves setting off fusion reactions while inside the magnetic field of a powerful flux. Fusion power, in a nutshell, attempts to mimic the conditions inside the sun. You can get helium and a lot of energy by smashing specific types of hydrogen atoms together and making them stick. The problem, however, is that in order to make the atoms stick together, extremely high temperatures are needed, and these in turn necessitate enormous amounts of energy expenditure on the part of the fusion-operators.

In order to build a fusion power plant that is economically viable, it is necessary to generate more energy than is consumed. Ignition, as plasma physicists term this critical point, has been the holy grail of fusion research for quite some time. A gold-plated cylinder, tiny than a fingernail, is the preferred storage medium of the NIF. This cylindrical container, known as a hohlraum in the scientific community, contains a pellet of hydrogen fuel about the size of a peppercorn.

During fusion, scientists aim 192 laser beams toward the hohlraum to energize the cylinder and produce powerful X-rays inside. The pellet is subjected to a barrage of X-rays, which squeezes and batters it into an implosion hot enough to fuse hydrogen atoms. We can only hope for the best.