Researchers at the US National Ignition Facility created a reaction that made more energy than they put in.
“It's an incredible accomplishment,” says Mark Herrmann, the deputy director for fundamental weapons physics at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which houses the fusion laboratory. The landmark experiment follows years of work by multiple teams on everything from lasers and optics to targets and computer models, Herrmann says. “That is of course what we are celebrating.”
“There were a lot of people who didn’t think it was possible, but I and others who kept the faith feel somewhat vindicated,” says Michael Campbell, former director of the fusion laboratory at the University of Rochester in New York and an early proponent of NIF while at Lawrence Livermore lab. “I’m having a cosmo to celebrate.”What did NIF achieve?
The experiment safely qualifies as ignition, a benchmark measure for fusion reactions that focuses on how much energy went into the target compared to how much energy was released. However, while the fusion reactions may have produced more than 3 megajoules of energy — more than was delivered to the target — NIF’s 192 lasers consumed 322 megajoules of energy in the process.
Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many steps on the path to laser fusion energy. “NIF was not designed to be efficient,” he says. “It was designed to be the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research programme.”To achieve ignition, NIF scientists made multiple changes before the latest laser shot, based in part on analysis and computer modelling of the experiments conducted last year.
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