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Here’s how scientists reached nuclear fusion ‘ignition’ for the first time.

The experiment, performed in 2022, also revealed a never-before-seen phenomenon

In December 2022, scientists at the National Ignition Facility (pictured) achieved nuclear fusion “ignition,” in which the energy produced by the fusing of atomic nuclei exceeds that needed to kick the fusion off.

Jason Laurea/LLNL

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By Emily Conover

February 16, 2024 at 9:30 am

One of nuclear fusion’s biggest advances wouldn’t have happened without some impeccable scientific artistry.

In December 2022, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California created fusion reactions that produced an excess of energy — a first. In the experiment, 192 lasers blasted a small chamber, setting off fusion reactions — in which smaller atomic nuclei merge to form larger ones — that released more energy than initially kicked them off ( SN: 12/12/22 ). It’s a milestone known as “ignition,” and it has been decades in the making.

Now, researchers have released details of that experiment in five peer-reviewed papers published online February 5 in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review E . The feat demanded an extraordinary level of finesse, tweaking conditions just so to get more energy out of the lasers and create the ideal conditions for fusion.

The work is “exquisitely beautiful,” says physicist Peter Norreys of the University of Oxford. Norreys, who was not involved with the research, compares the achievement to conducting a world-class orchestra: Different elements of the experiment had to be meticulously coordinated and precisely timed.

Scientists also discovered a long-predicted heating effect that could expose the physics of other violent environments, such as exploding stars called supernovas. “People say [physics is] a dry subject,” Norreys says. “But I always think that physics is at the very forefront of creativity,”

The road to nuclear fusion’s big break

Fusion, the same process that takes place in the sun, is an appealing energy source. Fusion power plants wouldn’t emit greenhouse gases. And unlike current nuclear fission power plants, which split atomic nuclei to produce energy, nuclear fusion plants wouldn’t produce dangerous, long-lived radioactive waste. Ignition is the first step toward harnessing such power.

Generating fusion requires extreme pressures and temperatures. In the experiment, the lasers at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility pelted the inside of a hollow cylinder, called a hohlraum, which is about the size of a pencil eraser. The blast heated the hohlraum to a sizzling 3 million degrees Celsius — so hot that it emitted X-rays. Inside this X-ray oven, a diamond capsule contained the fuel: two heavy varieties of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium. The radiation vaporized the capsule’s diamond shell, triggering the fuel to implode at speeds of around 400 kilometers per second, forming the hot, dense conditions that spark fusion.

Previous experiments had gotten tantalizingly close to ignition ( SN: 8/18/21 ). To push further, the researchers increased the energy of the laser pulse from 1.92 million joules to 2.05 million joules. This they accomplished by slightly lengthening the laser pulse, which blasts the target for just a few nanoseconds, extending it by a mere fraction of a nanosecond. (Increasing the laser power directly, rather than lengthening the pulse, risked damage to the facility.)

The team also thickened the capsule’s diamond shell by about 7 percent — a difference of just a few micrometers — which slowed down the capsule’s implosion, allowing the scientists to fully capitalize on the longer laser pulse.  “That was a quite remarkable achievement,” Norreys says.

But these tweaks altered the symmetry of the implosion, which meant other adjustments were needed. It’s like trying to squeeze a basketball down to the size of a pea, says physicist Annie Kritcher of LLNL, “and we’re trying to do that spherically symmetric to within 1 percent.”

That’s particularly challenging because of the mishmash of electrically charged particles, or plasma, that fills the hohlraum during the laser blast. This plasma can absorb the laser beams before they reach the walls of the hohlraum, messing with the implosion’s symmetry.

To even things out, Kritcher and colleagues slightly altered the wavelengths of the laser beams in a way that allowed them to transfer energy from one beam to another. The fix required tweaking the beams’ wavelengths by mere angstroms — tenths of a billionth of a meter.

“Engineering-wise, that’s amazing they could do that,” says physicist Carolyn Kuranz of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not involved with the work. What’s more, “these tiny, tiny tweaks make such a phenomenal difference.”

After all the adjustments, the ensuing fusion reactions yielded 3.15 million joules of energy — about 1.5 times the input energy, Kritcher and colleagues reported in Physical Review E . The total energy needed to power NIF’s lasers is much larger, around 350 million joules. While NIF’s lasers are not designed to be energy-efficient, this means that fusion is still far from a practical power source.

Another experiment in July 2023 used a higher-quality diamond capsule and obtained an even larger energy gain of 1.9, meaning it released nearly twice as much energy as went into the reactions ( SN: 10/2/23 ). In the future, NIF researchers hope to be able to increase the laser’s energy from around 2 million joules up to 3 million , which could kick off fusion reactions with a gain as large as 10.

What’s next for fusion

The researchers also discovered a long-predicted phenomenon that could be useful for future experiments: After the lasers heated the hohlraum, it was heated further by effects of the fusion reactions, physicist Mordy Rosen and colleagues report in Physical Review Letters .

Following the implosion, the ignited fuel expanded outward, plowing into the remnants of the diamond shell. That heated the material, which then radiated its heat to the hohlraum. It’s reminiscent of a supernova, in which the shock wave from an exploding star plows through debris the star expelled prior to its explosion ( SN: 2/8/17 ).

“This is exactly the collision that’s happening in this hohlraum,” says Rosen, of LLNL, a coauthor of the study. In addition to explaining supernovas, the effect could help scientists study the physics of nuclear weapons and other extreme situations.

NIF is not the only fusion game in town. Other researchers aim to kick off fusion by confining plasma into a torus, or donut shape, using a device called a tokamak. In a new record, the Joint European Torus in Abingdon, England, generated 69 million joules , a record for total fusion energy production, researchers reported February 8.

After decades of slow progress on fusion, scientists are beginning to get their atomic orchestras in sync.

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US scientists repeat fusion ignition breakthrough for 2nd time

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Scientists achieve a breakthrough in nuclear fusion. Here’s what it means.

A U.S. lab has successfully sparked a fusion reaction that released more energy than went into it. But there’s still a long way to go toward fusion as a clean energy source.

For more than 60 years, scientists have pursued one of the toughest physics challenges ever conceived: harnessing nuclear fusion, the power source of the stars , to generate abundant clean energy here on Earth. Today, researchers announced a milestone in this effort. For the first time, a fusion reactor has produced more energy than was used to trigger the reaction.

On December 5, an array of lasers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, fired 2.05 megajoules of energy at a tiny cylinder holding a pellet of frozen deuterium and tritium, heavier forms of hydrogen. The pellet compressed and generated temperatures and pressures intense enough to cause the hydrogen inside it to fuse. In a tiny blaze lasting less than a billionth of a second, the fusing atomic nuclei released 3.15 megajoules of energy—about 50 percent more than had been used to heat the pellet.

Though the conflagration ended in an instant, its significance will endure. Fusion researchers have long sought to achieve net energy gain, which is called scientific breakeven. “Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said at a Washington, D.C. media briefing.

In reaching scientific breakeven, NIF has shown that it can achieve “ignition”: a state of matter that can readily sustain a fusion reaction. Being able to study the conditions of ignition in detail will be “a game-changer for the entire field of thermonuclear fusion,” says Johan Frenje, an MIT plasma physicist whose laboratory contributed to NIF’s record-breaking run.

The achievement does not mean that fusion is now a viable power source. While NIF’s reaction produced more energy than the reactor used to heat up the atomic nuclei, it didn’t generate more than the reactor’s total energy use. According to Kim Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the lasers required 300 megajoules of energy to produce about 2 megajoules’ worth of beam energy. “I don’t want to give you the sense that we’re going to plug the NIF into the grid—that’s not how this works,” Budil added. “It’s a fundamental building block.”

Even so, after decades of trying, scientists have taken a major step toward fusion power. “It looks like science fiction, but they did it, and it’s fantastic what they’ve done,” says Ambrogio Fasoli, a fusion physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

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Sparking fusion ignition

Though nuclear fusion and nuclear fission both draw energy from the atom, they operate differently. Today’s nuclear power plants rely on nuclear fission, which releases energy when large, heavy atoms such as uranium break apart due to radioactive decay. In fusion, however, small, light atoms such as hydrogen fuse into bigger ones. In the process, they release a small part of their combined mass as energy.

In laboratories, coaxing hydrogen nuclei to fuse into helium requires creating and confining a “plasma”—an electrically charged gas, where electrons are no longer bound to atomic nuclei—at temperatures several times hotter than inside the sun. Scientists learned decades ago how to unleash this process explosively inside hydrogen bombs, and today’s fusion reactors can make it happen in a controlled way for fleeting instants.

Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, fusion reactors have had the same basic goal: create as hot and dense a plasma as possible, and then confine that material for long enough that the nuclei within it reach ignition. The trouble is, plasma is unruly: It’s electrically charged, which means it both responds to magnetic fields and generates its own as it moves. To support fusion, it has to reach truly staggering temperatures. Yet it’s so diffuse, it easily cools off.

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Physicist Riccardo Betti, an expert on laser-driven nuclear fusion at the University of Rochester, likens the challenge of fusion ignition to burning gasoline in an engine. A small amount of gasoline mixes with air and then ignites from a spark. The spark isn’t massive, but it doesn’t have to be: All it has to do is ignite a small fraction of the gasoline-air mixture. If that tiny fraction ignites, the energy it releases is enough to ignite the rest of the fuel.

In terms of energy released, nuclear reactions pack roughly a million times more punch than chemical reactions do—and are vastly harder to get going. Past fusion experiments may have achieved the right temperatures or the right pressures or the right plasma confinement times to reach ignition, but not all those factors at once. “Basically, the spark was generated, but it wasn’t strong enough,” Betti says.

A pellet of fuel

NIF’s method of sparking the nuclear fuel starts with a peppercorn-size pellet that contains a frozen mix of deuterium and tritium, two heavier isotopes of hydrogen. This capsule is placed within a gold cylinder roughly the size of a pencil eraser that’s called a hohlraum, which is then mounted on an arm in the middle of a large, laser-studded chamber.

To trigger fusion, NIF fires 192 lasers all at once at the hohlraum, which angle into it through two holes. The beams then slam into the hohlraum’s inner surface, which causes it to spit out high-energy x-rays that rapidly heat up the outer layers of the capsule, making them burn off and fly outward. The inner part of this capsule rapidly compresses to nearly a hundred times denser than lead—which forces the deuterium and tritium inside to reach the temperatures and pressures needed for fusion.

In 1997, the National Academy of Sciences defined what “ignition” would mean for the facility , which broke ground that same year: when fusion energy released exceeds the energy of the lasers.The facility opened in 2009, and reaching this threshold ended up taking more than a decade. In August 2021, NIF reported its best-ever experimental run up to that point: 1.32 megajoules of released fusion energy for 1.92 megajoules of inputted laser energy.

The 2021 run signaled that ignition could be achieved within the NIF reactor. To finally cross the threshold, NIF researchers made a few minor tweaks, which included operating at slightly higher laser energies. “Any small changes, if you do them right, will have significant changes on the outcome,” Frenje says.

The dream of a fusion power plant

For all of NIF’s success, commercializing this style of fusion reactor wouldn’t be easy. Betti, the University of Rochester physicist, says that such a reactor would need to generate 50 to 100 times more energy than its lasers emit to cover its own energy use and put power into the grid. It’d also have to vaporize 10 capsules a second, every second, for long periods of time. Right now, fuel capsules are extremely expensive to make, and they rely on tritium, a short-lived radioactive isotope of hydrogen that future reactors would have to make on-site.

But most of these challenges aren’t unique to NIF, and the world’s many fusion labs and companies are chipping away at them. Last year the Joint European Torus (JET), an experimental reactor in Culham, England, set a record for the most fusion energy ever released during a single experimental run. Construction on JET’s successor— a huge international experiment known as ITER —is underway in France. And private companies in the United States and United Kingdom have built next-generation superconducting magnets, which could help create smaller, more powerful kinds of reactors.

It’s hard to say when, or even if, this work will yield a new energy future. But fusion researchers see the technology as an incredible tool for humankind whenever it’s ready—whether that’s 20, 50, or 100 years from now.

“When people say fusion is very complex, it’s true, but when people say that fusion is too complex, it’s not,” Fasoli says. “We know how to do complex things … Going to the moon is not simple. Achieving this result in fusion, it’s not simple. And we’ve demonstrated we can do it.”

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For First Time, Researchers Produce More Energy from Fusion Than Was Used to Drive It, Promising Further Discovery in Clean Power  and Nuclear Weapons Stewardship

WASHINGTON, D.C. — 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 December 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 historic, first-of-its kind achievement 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.”

“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 Advisor 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,” said NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby . “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 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.”

“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.

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, Calif.—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.

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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Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

European scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion - the energy process that powers the stars.

The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen.

If nuclear fusion can be successfully recreated on Earth it holds out the potential of virtually unlimited supplies of low-carbon, low-radiation energy.

The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power).

This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.

It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France.

"The JET experiments put us a step closer to fusion power," said Dr Joe Milnes, the head of operations at the reactor lab. "We've demonstrated that we can create a mini star inside of our machine and hold it there for five seconds and get high performance, which really takes us into a new realm."

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The ITER facility in southern France is supported by a consortium of world governments, including from EU member states, the US, China and Russia. It is expected to be the last step in proving nuclear fusion can become a reliable energy provider in the second half of this century.

Operating the power plants of the future based on fusion would produce no greenhouse gases and only very small amounts of short-lived radioactive waste.

"These experiments we've just completed had to work," said JET CEO Prof Ian Chapman. "If they hadn't then we'd have real concerns about whether ITER could meet its goals.

"This was high stakes and the fact that we achieved what we did was down to the brilliance of people and their trust in the scientific endeavour," he told BBC News.

Fusion works on the principle that energy can be released by forcing together atomic nuclei rather than by splitting them, as in the case of the fission reactions that drive existing nuclear power stations.

In the core of the Sun, huge gravitational pressures allow this to happen at temperatures of around 10 million Celsius. At the much lower pressures that are possible on Earth, temperatures to produce fusion need to be much higher - above 100 million Celsius.

No materials exist that can withstand direct contact with such heat. So, to achieve fusion in a lab, scientists have devised a solution in which a super-heated gas, or plasma, is held inside a doughnut-shaped magnetic field.

The Joint European Torus (JET), sited at Culham in Oxfordshire, has been pioneering this fusion approach for nearly 40 years. And for the past 10 years, it has been configured to replicate the anticipated ITER set-up.

The fusion announcement is great news but sadly it won't help in our battle to lessen the effects of climate change.

There's huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready for commercialisation. One estimate suggests maybe 20 years. Then fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of perhaps another few decades.

And here's the problem: the need for carbon-free energy is urgent - and the government has pledged that all electricity in the UK must be zero emissions by 2035. That means nuclear, renewables and energy storage.

In the words of my colleague Jon Amos: "Fusion is not a solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This is a solution to power society in the second half of this century."

The French lab's preferred "fuel" to make the plasma will be a mix of two forms, or isotopes, of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium.

JET was asked to demonstrate a lining for the 80-cubic-metre toroidal vessel enclosing the magnetic field that would work efficiently with these isotopes.

For its record-breaking experiments in 1997, JET had used carbon, but carbon absorbs tritium, which is radioactive. So for the latest tests, new walls for the vessel were constructed out of the metals beryllium and tungsten. These are 10 times less absorbent.

The JET science team then had to tune their plasma to work effectively in this new environment.

"This is a stunning result because they managed to demonstrate the greatest amount of energy output from the fusion reactions of any device in history," commented Dr Arthur Turrell, the author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion And The Race To Power The Planet.

"It's a landmark because they demonstrated stability of the plasma over five seconds. That doesn't sound very long, but on a nuclear timescale, it's a very, very long time indeed. And it's very easy then to go from five seconds to five minutes, or five hours, or even longer."

JET can't actually run any longer because its copper electromagnets get too hot. For ITER, internally cooled superconducting magnets will be used.

Fusion reactions in the lab famously consume more energy to initiate than they can output. At Jet, two 500 megawatt flywheels are used to run the experiments.

But there is solid evidence that this deficit can be overcome in the future as the plasmas are scaled up. ITER's toroidal vessel volume will be 10 times that of JET. It's hoped the French lab will get to breakeven. The commercial power plants that come after should then show a net gain that could be fed into electricity grids.

This is a long game and it's significant that of the 300 or so scientists working as JET, a quarter are in the early part of their careers. They will have to carry the baton of research forward.

"Fusion takes a long time, it is complex, it is difficult," said Dr Athina Kappatou, who's in her thirties. "This is why we have to ensure that from one generation to the next, there are the scientists, there are the engineers and the technical staff who can take things forward."

Many technical challenges remain, however. In Europe, these challenges are being worked on by the Eurofusion consortium, which comprises some 5,000 science and engineering experts from across the EU, Switzerland and Ukraine.

The UK is a participant, too. Its full involvement in ITER, however, will require first for Britain to "associate" to certain EU science programmes, something that so far has been held up by disagreements over post-Brexit trading arrangements, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland.

JET is likely to be decommissioned after 2023 with ITER beginning plasma experiments in 2025, or soon after.

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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.

By Kenneth Chang

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.

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• NEWS EXPLAINER
• 13 December 2022

Nuclear-fusion lab achieves ‘ignition’: what does it mean?

• Jeff Tollefson &
• Elizabeth Gibney

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The US National Ignition Facility has reported that it has achieved the phenomenon of ignition. Credit: Jason Laurea/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Scientists at the world’s largest nuclear-fusion facility have for the first time achieved the phenomenon known as ignition — creating a nuclear reaction that generates more energy than it consumes. News of the breakthrough at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF), made on 5 December and announced today by US President Joe Biden’s administration, has excited the global fusion-research community. That research aims to harness nuclear fusion — the phenomenon that powers the Sun — to provide a source of near-limitless clean energy on Earth. Researchers caution that, despite this latest success, a long path remains to achieving that goal.

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Nature 612 , 597-598 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04440-7

Additional reporting by Nisha Gaind

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December 14, 2022

The US achieved a major nuclear fusion breakthrough. Here's why fusion power is still decades away

by Tanner Stening, Northeastern University

The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday announced that a national lab in California made a "major scientific breakthrough"—namely, that it produced a nuclear fusion reaction that resulted in a net energy gain, a condition known as "ignition."

Federal officials said that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, a facility that focuses primarily on simulating nuclear explosions , achieved the long-anticipated breakthrough earlier this month—one that's being widely reported as a potentially sustainable, low-carbon clean energy solution.

Fusion occurs when two nuclei collide and combine into heavier atoms—here, hydrogen into helium—releasing a burst of energy during the process. It's the reaction that powers the sun and other stars; the nuclear fusion process, in nature, is self-sustaining.

During a joint press conference detailing the achievement on Tuesday, National Nuclear Security Administration Administrator Jill Hruby said the fusion experiment involved directing 192 high-energy lasers at a target "about the size of a peppercorn, heating a capsule of deuterium and tritium to over 300 million degrees Celsius (180 million Fahrenheit), and briefly simulating the conditions of a star."

With that, Hruby said humanity has taken the "first tentative steps toward a clean energy source that could revolutionize the world." Fusion scientists have been trying to achieve ignition—a break-even point—for decades.

"The idea is that scientists have been trying to get more energy out of a fusion reaction than it takes to put into the fusion reaction in the first place," says Gregory Fiete, professor of physics at Northeastern. "This is the first real claim, so far as I know, of crossing the break-even point, where you've gotten more energy than you've put into this fusion process."

Fiete notes, however, that the method used to achieve this net energy gain is "not something believed to be scalable to renewable energy ." When asked about the timeline for commercialization, federal energy officials said on Tuesday that fusion energy solutions still face "very significant hurdles."

Indeed, the breakthrough, while an extraordinary scientific feat by itself—an important proof of principle—further underscores the long-standing challenges that have prevented sustainable fusion energy from becoming a reality (the joke goes, fusion power is always just decades away).

Fiete says researchers at the lab's National Ignition Facility (NIF) produce thermonuclear reactions that take place for "fractions of a second," with the goal of simply observing the physics of these complex phenomena. It's one thing, he says, to demonstrate a net energy gain in a controlled setting using costly equipment, and another to create a roadmap for harnessing the resulting energy at scale.

Another lab in construction in Europe, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, plans to investigate fusion energy solutions using a machine called a tokamak, which produces fusion reactions using magnetic fields instead of lasers.

"There the focus is on the clean energy aspect, and it's a very different technique using magnetic fields to confine the plasma, whereas in NIF, where this breakthrough occurred, they're using lasers that are focused down to a single point ," Fiete says.

Additionally, the ITER facility will focus on methods for collecting the heat that results from fusion reactions, Fiete says. It's unclear whether, and if, the methods deployed in the U.S. will translate into methods and strategies for collecting and storing energy that is outlined as part of work to take place at the France-based reactor.

Oleg Batishchev, professor of the practice of physics at Northeastern, says that mankind will need to find a way to mass produce tritium, one of the heavier forms of hydrogen used in nuclear fusion, if the energy sector were to try to pursue solutions based on the NIF experiment.

"What they achieve now is a breakthrough, no doubt," Batishchev says. "They put some energy in, and they got more energy out. But how do you use it? It's unclear."

"You can use electricity to burn hydrogen, for example, but you need the electricity to produce it, so there's no gain here unless the electricity is free," Batishchev adds. "If you use a match to light another match—you're not gaining much from that. But if you use a match to start a big fire, well then you're gaining a lot because you have a fire."

Provided by Northeastern University

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Scientists Repeat Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough in a Step Toward More Clean Energy

Still, nuclear fusion power plants are likely decades away and may come too late to play a role in addressing climate change

Margaret Osborne

Daily Correspondent

California researchers have successfully completed a nuclear fusion reaction that achieved “ignition”—or yielded more energy than was put into it—for only the second time in history, report Tom Wilson and Alice Hancock for the Financial Times . With this feat, the team has repeated their breakthrough results from an experiment in December .

Nuclear scientists say this is a key step toward producing clean and potentially cheap power—though they warn the fledgling form of energy still has a long way to go before it becomes a viable option. 

“Since demonstrating fusion ignition for the first time at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in December 2022, we have continued to perform experiments to study this exciting new scientific regime. In an experiment conducted on July 30, we repeated ignition at NIF,” a spokesperson from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) tells the Financial Times . “As is our standard practice, we plan on reporting those results at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications.”

Nuclear power plants across the globe currently produce energy through a process called fission, which involves the splitting of an atom’s nucleus into two parts. While fission generates a substantial amount of energy with almost no greenhouse gas emissions , it also produces long-lived radioactive waste as a byproduct. 

Scientists have long been aware of another process called fusion , in which two light nuclei combine together and release vast amounts of energy. Fusion is the reaction that powers the sun and other stars, and it has the potential to create enormous amounts of energy with less dangerous byproducts. But for decades, researchers have struggled to recreate and harness it. 

“It’s super hard,” Omar Hurricane , chief scientist for the inertial confinement fusion program at LLNL, told Scientific American ’s Philip Ball in June. “We’re basically making stars on Earth.” 

Then, in December 2022, a team at LLNL in California announced they had, for the first time ever, created a fusion reaction with a net energy gain. Using 192 giant lasers , the team delivered 2.05 megajoules to their target, which subsequently released 3.15 megajoules of energy output.

Now, just eight months later, a spokesperson for the lab tells Reuters that the reaction has been repeated, and this time, it produced an even higher energy output. 

“We are witnessing a moment in history: controlling the power source of the stars is the greatest technological challenge humanity has ever undertaken,” physicist Arthur Turrell tells Anthony Cuthbertson of the Independent . “This experimental result will electrify efforts to eventually power the planet with nuclear fusion—at a time when we’ve never needed a plentiful source of carbon-free energy more.”

Despite its benefits, however, nuclear fusion is likely not a silver bullet for climate change—researchers warn that it could be another few decades before fusion becomes a feasible energy source. Meanwhile, climate scientists have stated that to keep global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and hit net zero emissions by 2050. 

“If we stick at trying to do this through massive-scale projects, which take billions of dollars to construct and tens of years to develop, it could well be that fusion arises too late to have an impact on climate change,” Jeremy Chittenden , a physicist at Imperial College London, told New Scientist ’s Matthew Sparkes in December. “What I believe we really need to do is to concentrate upon increasing the diversity of approaches so that we can try to find something that has a lower impact cost and a faster turnaround, so that we might be able to get something in ten or 15 years’ time.”

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Margaret Osborne | | READ MORE

Margaret Osborne is a freelance journalist based in the southwestern U.S. Her work has appeared in the  Sag Harbor Express  and has aired on  WSHU Public Radio.

The U.S. Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Is a Huge Milestone—But Unlimited Clean Energy Is Still Decades Off

I n some ways, scientists at the Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) have been a bit down and out. The $3.5 billion facility was designed to replicate the atom-smashing reactions that occur inside the sun, a difficult process that requires enormous amounts of heat and pressure, and could theoretically solve humanity’s energy and climate woes.

But technical obstacles put NIF a decade behind in its goal of achieving fusion “ignition,” that is, getting more energy out of one of those reactions than it put in. The facility uses the largest lasers in the world to try and do that, focusing energy on a tiny capsule filled with hydrogen isotopes. But those lasers, based on 1980s technology, were in some ways already dated by the time they were installed, taking hours to cool down each time they are fired. And much of the team’s resources aren’t even devoted to achieving the holy grail of nuclear fusion, instead being focused on weapons research .

On Dec. 5—after decades of effort —scientists at the laboratory finally created a controlled fusion reaction that released more energy than the researchers blasted into it, an important step toward the long sought-after goal of generating almost unlimited power from clean, plentiful fusion energy. (Notably we have uncontrolled fusion reactions down pat—they’re the basis of hydrogen bombs). After bringing in an external team of scientists to confirm the findings, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the development on Dec. 13. “This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in a press release. “This milestone will undoubtedly spark even more discovery.”

“We were not sure if it was ever going to work,” says Peter Littlewood, a physics professor at the University of Chicago and former director of Argonne National Lab, a DOE research center. “They deserve a tremendous amount of credit for slogging through this.”

Today’s news builds on a notable success achieved by the National Ignition Facility in August 2021, when it fired its lasers on a capsule of deuterium and tritium (hydrogen atoms with an extra one or two neutrons, respectively), setting off a reaction that unleashed 1.3 megajoules (MJ) of energy. It wasn’t as much as the 1.9 MJ that the lasers blasted into it, but it was still eight times more energy output than the facility’s previous record. Then, for months afterward, the NIF team failed to replicate the results. Whisperings started, with some physics community observers calling for the facility to finally be shut down. In July of this year, Nature reported that scientists at NIF had ceased trying to replicate their results from last year, and were instead focusing on a new strategy. It seems that focus has now paid off.

The NIF success also comes a few months after another successful fusion experiment in the U.K. Instead of lasers, scientists there used a donut-shaped tokamak, a machine that uses magnetic fields to heat hydrogen atoms to extraordinary temperatures in order to create a fusion reaction. Though that experiment didn’t reach the break-even point in terms of energy output, the results helped validate an approach being pursued by a multi-nation consortium building the larger $22 billion ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) tokamak project in France. That project, its designers claim, will create a reaction that outputs ten times more energy than researchers add in.

Scientists have been trying for decades to generate an output like the one achieved at the NIF, and the results are undoubtedly an important scientific and technical milestone. But tokamak technology is closer to potential commercialization than the NIF laser approach; Energy Department officials say that pursuing both methods is important to building up the science of nuclear fusion.

Fusion technology still faces an array of extremely difficult technical hurdles, and Littlewood says it will be decades before it could potentially be used to power homes and businesses, if it ever reaches that point at all. He terms the technology a “hail mary pass” to solve the climate crisis (fusion reactions produce no emissions, and wouldn’t have the meltdown risk or difficulties disposing of used fuel that plague nuclear fission reactors .) But the new experimental results don’t exactly mean that the technology will be coming any sooner, he says. “This isn’t really dancing in the streets. It’s more, ‘Phew, finally we got here.’”

It’s important also to keep in mind the amount of energy that researchers managed to generate. The result of the recent DOE experiment might be characterized as a small explosion, but the 3.15 MJ it outputted is equivalent to the energy content of about a tenth of a gallon of gasoline. Notably, the energy that the lasers input into the reaction, 2.05 MJ, is only a tiny share of the 300 MJ of energy the facility needed to run the experiment. “I don’t want to give you the sense that we’ll plug the NIF into the grid,” said Kim Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, speaking in a press conference on Dec. 13. “That is definitely not how this works.”

The private sector has poured close to $5 billion dollars into commercializing fusion energy, with many companies trying out creative alternate approaches that are different from those being pursued by public research groups at NIF and ITER. Michl Binderbauer, CEO of commercial fusion company TAE Technologies, is much more optimistic about the timeline to potential commercialization than Littlewood—he says commercial fusion power plants could be coming in the next ten years.

“I think for humanity [the NIF experiment] should induce an enormous amount of confidence that we’re going to get there,” Binderbauer says. “It’s an enormous point of validation that we weren’t just chasing ghosts.”

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‘Breakthrough’ as fusion experiment generates excess energy for the first time

by Hayley Dunning , Laura Gallagher 13 December 2022

Scientists have hailed a ‘true breakthrough’ as a fusion reaction has successfully generated more energy than was used to create it.

For over seventy years, scientists have been attempting to harness thermonuclear fusion - the power source of stars - to generate energy.

This is a true breakthrough moment, which is tremendously exciting. Professor Jeremy Chittenden

Fusion has the potential to produce vast quantities of clean energy using few resources, requiring only a small amount of fuel and generating limited carbon emissions. Once a fusion plasma is ‘ignited,’ it will continue to burn for as long as it is held in place.

However, fusion reactions have proven difficult to control and no fusion experiment had previously produced more energy than had been put in to get the reaction going. At a press briefing today, it was announced that a fusion experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US has achieved this ‘holy grail,’ producing more energy than the laser pulse that was used to heat the fuel.

The energy in the laser pulse was 2.05 megajoules – equivalent to the energy of two Mars chocolate bars, or enough to boil six kettles of water. The energy from the fusion reactions was 50% higher than the energy of the laser pulse. It was released in the form of energetic neutrons.

Long sought-after goal

Imperial College London physicists are already helping to analyse the data from the successful experiment, which was conducted on 5 December 2022. Imperial has also produced more than 30 PhD students that have gone on to work at the NIF. The College retains strong links with the facility, and others throughout the world, through the  Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies  (CIFS). Professor Jeremy Chittenden , Co-Director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said: “Everyone working on fusion has been trying to demonstrate for over 70 years that it’s possible to generate more energy from fusion than you put in. This is a true breakthrough moment, which is tremendously exciting. It proves that the long sought-after goal, the ‘holy grail’ of fusion, can indeed be achieved. This brings us closer to generating fusion power on a much larger scale.  “To turn fusion into a power source we’ll need to boost the energy gain still further. We’ll also need to find a way to reproduce the same effect much more frequently and much more cheaply before we can realistically turn this into a power plant. It’s hard to say how quickly we might be able to get to that point. If everything aligns we could see fusion power in use in ten years, but it could take far longer. The key thing is that with today’s results we know that fusion power is within reach.” 

Dr Brian Appelbe , a Research Associate in the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial, said: “As well as being a significant step towards fusion power, this experiment is exciting as it will allow us to study matter at temperatures and densities never previously reached in the laboratory. All sorts of interesting Physics can occur at these conditions, such as the creation of antimatter, and the NIF experiments will give us a window into this world.”

Fusion fuel

The type of nuclear reaction that fuels current power stations is fission – the splitting of atoms to release energy. Fusion instead forces atoms of hydrogen together, producing a large amount of energy, and, crucially, limited radioactive waste.

There are two main ways researchers worldwide are currently trying to produce fusion energy. The NIF focuses on inertial confinement fusion, which uses a system of lasers to heat up fuel pellets producing a plasma – a cloud of charged ions.

The fuel pellets contain ‘heavy’ versions of hydrogen – deuterium and tritium – that are easier to fuse and produce more energy. However, the fuel pellets need to be heated and pressurised to conditions found at the centre of the Sun, which is a natural fusion reactor.

Once these conditions are achieved, fusion reactions release several particles, including ‘alpha’ particles, which interact with the surrounding plasma and heat it up further. The heated plasma then releases more alpha particles and so on, in a self-sustaining reaction – a process referred to as ignition.

Article text (excluding photos or graphics) © Imperial College London.

Photos and graphics subject to third party copyright used with permission or © Imperial College London.

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Celebrating the Milestone of Fusion Ignition

In 2022, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made history by demonstrating fusion ignition for the first time in a laboratory setting. Read about the people, facilities, capabilities and decades of tenacity that made this achievement possible.

Read about our fusion breakthrough

A shot for the ages: Fusion ignition breakthrough hailed as ‘one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century’

In a press conference at the Department of Energy (DOE) headquarters on Dec. 13, DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm announces Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) historic feat of achieving fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility. Granholm called ignition “one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century,” on par with the Wright brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk. LLNL Laboratory Director Kim Budil (far left) and DOE Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and Administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration Jill Hruby look on. Credit: DOE

Call it the shot heard ‘round the world.

The monumental, first-ever demonstration of fusion ignition by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ’s (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) marks a potentially world-changing breakthrough for fusion energy and a key initial step in a decades-long quest for limitless clean energy, U.S. government officials and LLNL scientists said Tuesday.

At an historic press conference held at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) headquarters in Washington, D.C., officials with DOE, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and LLNL announced that scientists performing an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiment at NIF just after 1 a.m. on Dec. 5 produced more energy from the self-sustaining fusion reaction than they put in to create the reaction: a condition known as ignition.

With members of Congress, dignitaries and national laboratory directors in attendance, speakers at the stunning announcement celebrated the achievement as the culmination of 60 years of exploration and experimentation in ICF by generations of scientists at LLNL and collaborators in industry, academia and other DOE national labs, including Los Alamos and Sandia. Officials from DOE and the OSTP congratulated researchers on the milestone and said replicating ignition in the lab could set the stage for fusion to someday become a viable clean-energy option.

“Last week, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, scientists at the National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition — creating more energy from fusion reactions than the energy used to start the process,” said DOE Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm. “It's the first time it has ever been done in a laboratory anywhere in the world — simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21 st century.”

Granholm added that the unprecedented accomplishment will strengthen national security and moves the world closer to the possibility of an abundant, carbon-free energy source for the future.

“It would be like adding a power drill to our toolbox for building a clean-energy economy,” Granholm said. “Today, we tell the world: America has achieved a tremendous scientific breakthrough — one that happened because we invested in our national labs and fundamental research. And tomorrow, we will continue to work toward a future powered in part by fusion energy.”

Earlier this year, DOE unveiled a 10-year strategy for developing commercial fusion energy that included a $50 million funding opportunity to support design of a pilot magnetic fusion plant. Granholm said experts are peer-reviewing applications and may have a decision by early next year.

In accomplishing one of the most complex scientific grand challenges of the last century and completing a long-awaited objective for NIF, officials and scientists confirmed that, for a fraction of a second, LLNL researchers produced 3.15 megajoules (MJ) of fusion energy output using 2.05 MJ of laser energy delivered to the target, demonstrating the fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy. The results were peer-reviewed and verified by outside parties, scientists said.

Hailed by government officials as a watershed moment for fusion energy, the results are a “proof of concept” that a thermonuclear fusion reaction — the same reaction that powers the sun and stars — can be reproduced in the laboratory and result in a net energy gain, opening doors to a new scientific understanding of fusion and technological advancements in national defense and energy production, speakers said.

Following Granholm’s announcement, White House OSTP Director Arati Prabhakar described her brief experience as a summer student working on fusion research at LLNL in the 1970s and congratulated generations of scientists for overcoming decades of struggles and setbacks to accomplish a true “scientific milestone.”

“They never lost sight of this goaI and I think this is such a tremendous example of what perseverance really can achieve,” Prabhakar said. “It took so many different kinds of advances that ultimately came together to the point that we could replicate that fusion activity in this controllable way in a laboratory … The prospect [of fusion energy] now is one step closer in a really exciting way. This is an amazing example of the power of America's research and development enterprise.”

DOE Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby said in achieving ignition, LLNL researchers have “opened a new chapter in NNSA’s science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program,” one that enables scientists to modernize nuclear weapons and explore new avenues of research in nuclear science.

"Unlocking ignition at NIF will allow us to probe the extreme conditions found at the center of nuclear explosions and address significant longstanding stewardship questions,” Hruby said. “The unprecedented nature of reaching ignition confirms what I and previous administrators of the NNSA have been saying for decades: there is no more dedicated or more talented group of scientists in the world. The tireless efforts of thousands of people from around the national security enterprise, and their predecessors are responsible for this breakthrough.”

Following Hruby, NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Marvin “Marv” Adams showed a NIF target capsule and explained the science behind fusion reactions. Adams said ignition will enhance national security by helping NNSA maintain confidence in the nuclear deterrent, advance the country’s non-proliferation goals and increase national security.

“The achievement we celebrate today illustrates that big, important accomplishments often take longer and require more effort than originally thought,” Adams said. “And that these accomplishments are often more than worth the time and effort that they took.”

The press conference concluded with remarks from LLNL Director Kim Budil, who acknowledged that the pursuit of fusion has been an “incredibly ambitious goal” at the Lab, requiring the contributions of thousands of scientists over the years, including noted fusion pioneer and former Laboratory Director John Nuckolls.

Budil said ignition would not have been possible without a “long-term commitment of public investment in fusion science” and will serve to advance national security, demonstrate continued U.S. leadership in science and technology and generate “tremendous excitement in the fusion community,” particularly in the private sector.

“The science and technology challenges on the path to fusion energy are daunting but making the seemingly impossible possible is when we're at our very best,” Budil explained. “Ignition is a first step — a truly monumental one that sets the stage for a transformational decade in high energy density science and fusion research — and I cannot wait to see where it takes us.”

While optimism reigned for the event, Budil cautioned there are still “significant hurdles” and engineering challenges to solve before the commercialization of fusion energy becomes a reality, such as the ability to reproduce ignition many times per minute and making fusion reactions simpler and more efficient.

“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,” Budil said.

Officials and scientists thanked LLNL’s many collaborators on NIF and ICF research and DOE, NNSA and Congressional stakeholders.

Entering a new chapter for fusion energy

Following the press conference, a technical panel of NIF scientists convened to discuss details of the achievement and what ignition might mean for the future of fusion energy. NIF’s Program Director for Weapon Physics and Design Mark Herrmann moderated the panel, providing an overview of NIF and a play-by-play of the historic shot.

Herrmann said on Dec. 5, NIF scientists performed a NIF shot as they always do — firing the facility’s 192 powerful lasers onto a BB-sized target of deuterium and tritium (DT), heavier isotopes of hydrogen. However, in this experiment, the laser energy was upped to 2.05 MJ, and conditions of implosion symmetry, heat and compression were just right, generating the record-breaking energy output of 3.15 MJ.

“There's a race between heating and cooling and if that plasma gets a little bit hotter, the fusion reaction rate goes up, creating even more fusions, which gets even more hot — so the question is, can we win the race?” Hermann said. “For many decades, we lost the race, and we got more cooling out than we got the heating up, so we didn't get to this ignition event. But last Monday, that all changed, and we able were able to win the race and get very significant heating of the fusion plasma up to very high temperatures.”

Considered the “holy grail” of fusion energy research, ignition comes just over a year after NIF reached a then-record-setting 1.3 megajoule shot , which produced about 70 percent of the energy put into the experiment via fusion reaction, planting NIF firmly on the doorstep of the milestone.

Researchers attributed the success after previous near-misses to a combination of improvements in target design, better predictive modeling backed by machine learning and “cognitive simulation,” advances in laser capabilities and other adjustments.

Annie Kritcher, team lead for Integrated Modeling and the principal designer for the experiment, said the shot was part of a new NIF campaign that began in September, where the team introduced a new laser capability and a thicker capsule for the fusion fuel, providing more margin for achieving ignition . The team also made changes to improve implosion symmetry, which were fed to a cognitive simulation design team that determined there was high probability of a “yield gain of at least one,” Kritcher said.

Given the recent advancements and promising models, team members said they had “high hopes” and “good reasons to be optimistic” that the Dec. 5 shot would be extraordinary.

Arthur Pak, team lead for Stagnation Science, said that the team confirmed the net energy yield using multiple independent diagnostics to measure the number of neutrons that escaped the reaction, including radioactive decay and a magnetic spectrometer, giving them “high confidence” in the results.

Pak credited the breakthrough to the “tireless work of technicians and operators” that make observations of fusion plasma with improved diagnostics. Chief Engineer for the NIF Laser System Jean-Michel Di Nicola said the team stood “on the shoulders of multiple generations of optical, material and laser physicists who have designed and optimized ever-increasing performance in terms of laser delivery.” Principal Experimentalist Alex Zylstra, representing the experimental team, said the effort built on knowledge gained from a long history of previous experiments with specialized configurations and new diagnostics.

“All that work led up to a moment just after 1 a.m. last Monday when we took a shot and as the data started to come in, we saw the first indications that we'd produced more fusion energy from the laser inputs,” Zylstra said.

In addition to describing the behind-the-scenes work of the history-making shot to attendees and media, team members shared personal stories of hearing of the news of ignition later that morning.

Kritcher said she’d had “vivid dreams of possible outcomes” prior to the event and awoke to excited texts from Zylstra, informing her of ignition.

“You start looking and you see one diagnostic and you think, ‘well, maybe that's not real.’ And then you start to see more and more diagnostics, rolling and pointing to the same thing,” Kritcher said. “It was just a great feeling.”

Tammy Ma, who leads the Laboratory’s Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) Institutional Initiative, said she was at the San Francisco International Airport waiting to board a plane for Washington when her phone rang. 

“I got a call from my boss saying, ‘I think we got ignition,’ and I burst into tears,” Ma recalled. “I was jumping up and down in the waiting area — the crazy person. And yeah, the tears were streaming down my face.”

Looking to the future, Ma said ignition “lays the groundwork” for the feasibility of inertial fusion energy and creates a roadmap for reaching even higher energy gains and, potentially, a pathway to pilot commercial fusion plants in the coming decades.

“Developing an economically attractive approach to fusion energy is a grand scientific and engineering challenge — without a doubt, it will be a monumental undertaking,” Ma said. “However, the potential benefits are enormous; clean, carbon-free, abundant reliable energy capable of meeting the world's energy demands, and furthermore, providing for the energy sovereignty and energy security of the U.S.”

Ma said that an upcoming DOE Office of Fusion Energy report will set the framework for a new IFE program in the U.S., which is currently at a “divergent point” where more investments are needed to make the technology simpler and more efficient, and to determine the best design for fusion energy.

“Such a program will inevitably require participation from across the community, both the public sector but the private sector as well,” Ma said. “We look forward to working with the Department of Energy to leverage and capitalize on these great results for a fusion energy future. The time is now.”

As impressive as the ignition accomplishment is, researchers said they already have their sights set on future improvements for fusion experiments at NIF. Next summer, Di Nicola said, the team will design experiments and field shots with additional laser energy, providing them with more margins for ignition, and, with more investments, could produce even larger target gains. Target Fabrication Program Manager Michael Stadermann added that the target capsule used in the ignition shot had flaws, which was “very encouraging” for the team.

“This gives us confidence that we can make shells of equal quality and better quality in the future, and that we'll be able to reproduce this experiment or even improve on it,” Stadermann said.

Back in Livermore, the significance of the moment was not lost on the hundreds of Lab employees who watched the live, early-morning press conference as it was simulcast in several auditoriums across the main Lab site, with many viewers expressing pride in their co-workers and in the Lab’s continuing commitment to pushing the boundaries of science.

“It was very motivating, seeing scientific people at the highest level, including the White House science adviser [at the press conference]. It shows how impactful some of the work we do is and how it can shape the movement toward renewable energy,” said engineer Michael Kirby. “Also, our achievements are broadcast to the nation and the world, which is not something I thought I’d ever see.”

“There are very few moments in a generation where you have the opportunity to sit and watch science being made,” added Associate Program Leader Terri Stearman. “This is our moonshot. There will not be another opportunity to be with your fellows at 7 a.m. to watch your boss and all the great women on stage, unapologetically speaking about both themselves and those who came after them.”

To view the press conference, click the link here . To view the technical discussion panel, click here .

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Scientists achieve nuclear fusion breakthrough in historic experiment. How it works.

A dec. 5 fusion test in california yielded more power than it took to produce it, creating a path forward for clean energy..

A breakthrough this week in nuclear fusion could point the way to a future of carbon-free power. In a press conference Tuesday in California, the Department of Energy revealed that at 1:03 a.m. Dec. 5, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility drove atoms together with lasers in a test that produced more energy than was used to create it – a process known as "ignition."

What the process entails

In a process called inertial confinement, Livermore researchers focused 192 lasers into a tiny metal capsule roughly the size of a pencil eraser. The lasers heat a peppercorn-sized fuel pellet containing deuterium and tritium, compressing it to a density and temperature that fuses atoms from the fuel and triggers fusion.

In the Dec. 5 test, the process yielded – in a fraction of a second – an output of 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy, while the lasers consumed only 2.05 megajoules. 

The milestone was built on years of fusion energy research, near-misses and recent successes, like a test that yielded a 1.3-megajoule output in August of last year. Fusion power has frequently been called the "holy grail" of clean energy.

About Fusion energy

Fusion energy releases a tremendous amount of energy when two light nuclei are forced together through intense heat and pressure to form a heavier nucleus. It's a characteristic of stars, like the sun, where pressure from gravity and heat triggers an ongoing fusion. 

Nuclear fusion vs. nuclear fission

While both process deal with changing the nucleus of atoms, fusion – the joining of atoms – is a different process than fission, which involves splitting atoms. The fission process powers nuclear plants, but comes with significant safety drawbacks in the unstable nuclei it generates, producing nuclear waste that can remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years. 

Fusion has long been a more attractive energy source, as it generates almost no radioactive waste and emits no harmful greenhouse gas emissions into Earth's atmosphere. Safety is another benefit, as fusion power doesn't carry the risk of meltdowns associated with fission power plants.

The energy landscape

While commercially viable fusion energy as an established power source is still a long way off, the Livermore breakthrough offers a hopeful path forward in weaning the planet off fossil fuels, which still make up a sizable piece of the country's energy consumption. 

The arrival of commercial fusion reactors that power cities will take years and the work of both public and private researchers, said Kim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“I don’t want to give you a sense that we’re going to plug the NIF (National Ignition Facility at Livermore) into the grid. But this is the fundamental building block” of such work, she said.

Additional reporting by Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY.

SOURCES National Ignition Facility, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; U.S. Dept. of Energy; International Atomic Energy Agency

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US scientists produce first successful nuclear fusion reaction resulting in net energy gain

Energy leaders called the achievement of fusion ignition a 'major breakthrough'.

Scientists produce energy through nuclear fusion advancement

Fox News national correspondent William La Jeunesse details the scientific breakthrough on nuclear fusion and what this means for clean energy on 'Special Report.'

U.S. energy officials announced Tuesday that government scientists in California produced the first successful nuclear fusion reaction resulting in net energy gain.

"This is what it looks like for America to lead, and we're just getting started," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said of the "major scientific breakthrough" during a morning press conference in Washington, D.C.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said the National Ignition Facility's historic achievement, also known as scientific energy breakeven, occurred on Dec. 5.

The experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by laboratory surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output.

US SCIENTISTS MAKE MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN ‘LIMITLESS, ZERO-CARBON’ FUSION ENERGY: REPORT

The milestone, first reported by the Financial Times, came following a decades-long quest to harness fusion, the energy that powers the sun . 

No group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes and fusion happens at temperatures and pressures that are difficult to control. 

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm speaks during the daily press briefing at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 23, 2021.  ((Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images))

It works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat. 

In addition, unlike other nuclear reactions, it doesn’t create radioactive waste.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Kim Budil told reporters that it had taken 60 years of work to reach this point – a point that many said "was not possible." 

"This achievement opens up new scientific realms for us to explore and advances our capabilities for our national security missions," she said. "It demonstrates the power of the U.S. leadership in science and technology and shows what we're capable of as a nation." 

In this 2012 image provided by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a technician reviews an optic inside the preamplifier support structure at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. ((Damien Jemison/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory via AP))

Budil noted that ignition is a first step that sets the stage for a transformational decade in high-energy-density science and fusion research.  

NORTHEASTERN KANSAS OIL SPILL SHUTS DOWN KEYSTONE PIPELINE

It’s a technology that has the potential to accelerate the planet’s shift away from fossil fuels and produce nearly limitless, carbon-free energy .

FILE - This undated image provided by the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shows the NIF Target Bay in Livermore, Calif. The system uses 192 laser beams converging at the center of this giant sphere to make a tiny hydrogen fuel pellet implode.  ((Damien Jemison/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory via AP, File))

While producing energy that power homes and businesses from fusion is still decades away, researchers said it was a significant step.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP  

Previously, researchers at the National Ignition Facility used nearly 200 lasers and temperatures multiple times hotter than the center of the sun to create an extremely brief fusion reaction.

FOX Business' Bradford Betz and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Julia Musto is a reporter for Fox News and Fox Business Digital. 

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