NIF's AWAY! A Step to the Fusion Drive

Using the most powerful laser system ever built, scientists have brought us one step closer to nuclear fusion power, a new study says.

The same process that powers our sun and other stars, nuclear fusion has the potential to be an efficient, carbon-free energy source—with none of the radioactive waste associated with the nuclear fission method used in current nuclear plants.

Thanks to the new achievement, a prototype nuclear fusion power plant could be operating within a decade, speculated study leader Siegfried Glenzer, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Glenzer and colleagues used the world's largest laser array—the Livermore lab's National Ignition Facility—to heat a BB-size fuel pellet to millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

"These lasers are pulsed, and for a very short amount of time"—one ten-billionth of a second—"the power they produce is more than all the power generated by the entire electrical grid of the United States" at any given moment, Glenzer said.

The test confirmed that a technique called inertial fusion ignition could be used to trigger nuclear fusion—the merging of the nuclei of two atoms of, say, hydrogen—which can result in a tremendous amount of excess energy. Nuclear fission, by contrast, involves the splitting of atoms.

The laser demonstration means scientists are now much closer to triggering nuclear fusion in a controlled setting—something that's never been done before and which is necessary if fusion is to be harnessed for energy.

Wow. This is really kewl and damned depressing at the same time. A bit of background is available here.

depressing first. The NIF has waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over budget. It's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay behind schedule. In fact, if not for Shrub, I suspect it would have been canceled even with its supposed place in our testing regime. I know a nontrivial number of physicists, including those in the fusion program, that are annoyed with this: it sucks down money, they feel, is better spent elsewhere.

The damned kewl part is that we'er a step closer to inertial confinement fusion. While probably not the best way to produce power unlike the MHD fusion. However, it is INFINITELY closer to what we need for fusion drives in space. Now, assembling this is space is going to be a stone cold...monster...but once you have, you can get some impressive results for propulsion.

Potential irony here: we could get fusion drives long, long before we get fusion reactors.

Oh, note, maybe there's a reason to get that lunar He3 after all, James.