Jan. 15, 2025
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From Ignition in the Laboratory to Fusion Energy

By Charlie Osolin

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) physicist Dan Casey outlined the challenges involved in moving from the achievement of fusion ignition at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) to practical inertial fusion energy (IFE) at a recent Kavli Frontiers of Science symposium in Kyoto, Japan.

Casey received an Early Career Research Program Award from the U.S.  Department of Energy’s Office of Science/Fusion Energy Sciences in 2023 to apply the lessons of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments at NIF to IFE research. In his talk, he discussed LLNL’s current efforts to increase the energy yield of NIF ICF experiments and to understand how these results might translate to high-energy-gain fusion power systems.

“Demonstrating ignition in the laboratory (producing as much or more fusion energy than the laser energy delivered to the target) was a grand scientific challenge,” Casey said in a summary of his talk, “and yet harnessing that fusion energy will be yet another grand engineering challenge on the road to fusion power production.”

Dan Casey Answers Questions at Kavli Symposium
Dan Casey (center) answers questions from the audience following a symposium session titled “Nuclear fusion–The future of clean energy?” Casey was introduced by Athina Kappatou (left) from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany. Also speaking was Gen Motojima from the National Institute for Fusion Science in Toki City, Japan.

A central question facing an IFE reactor system, Casey said, is “whether inertial fusion targets can produce significant energy gain, reliably, cheaply, and rapidly when integrated with the full reactor system.

“Ignition experiments have shown a sensitivity to enhanced radiation losses induced by impurities from the capsule shell material mixing into the burning fusion fuel and implosion asymmetries, because both effects compete with fusion heating.

“The maximum target gain in ICF depends on a competition between fusion heating and losses from expansion, radiation, and conduction,” he said. “It is therefore critical to assess how these issues might impact hypothetical IFE power systems.”

Click here to view Casey’s talk.

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