Inertial fusion energy could have a bright future, despite the failure of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL; Livermore, CA) to ignite a fusion target by the target date of Sept. 30, 2012, says a National Research Council (NRC) report issued Feb. 20, 2013. The panel writes that the potential benefits of inertial fusion—including a carbon-free energy generation without the fuel limitations or large volume of high-level radioactive waste from fission—“justify it as part of the long-term U.S. energy R&D portfolio.” But that’s going to take time, and commercial inertial-fusion reactors are decades away.
The immediate priority is resolving why the giant laser at LLNL failed to achieve ignition with indirect-drive targets despite delivering pulses that theoretical models of the process predicted would be sufficient. Doing that and modifying NIF and targets to optimize performance “will likely take significantly more than a year,” the panel wrote. They also want to test direct-drive fusion at full NIF power. And they say that now is too early to make a final decision among technologies competing for use in an inertial-fusion energy demonstration.
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