NIF’s Laser Fusion Experiment’s Energy Gain Passes Peer Review

February 9, 2024 by Maya Posch 53 Comments

Back in December of 2022, a team of researchers at the USA’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) announced that they had exceeded ‘scientific breakeven’ with their laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) system. Their work has now been peer-reviewed and passed scrutiny, confirming that the energy put into fusing a small amount of deuterium-tritium fuel resulted in a net gain (Q) of 1.5.

Laser Bay 2, one of NIF's two laser bays — Laser Bay 2 at the NIF.

The key take-away here of course remains that ICF is not a viable method of producing energy, as we detailed back in 2021 when we covered the 1.3 MJ yield announcement, and again in 2022 following the subject of this now completed peer review. The sheer amount of energy required to produce the laser energy targeting the fuel capsule and loss therein, as well as the energy required to manufacture each of these fuel capsules (Hohlraum) and sustaining a cycle make it a highly impractical proposition for anything except weapons research.

Despite this, it’s good to see that the NIF’s ICF research is bearing fruit, even if for energy production we should look towards magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), which includes the many tokamaks active today like Japan’s JT-60SE, as well as stellarators like Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X and other efforts to make MCF a major clean-energy source for the future.

Fusion Ignition: What Does The NIF’s 1.3 MJ Yield Mean For Fusion Research?

August 30, 2021 by Maya Posch 37 Comments

Earlier this month, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced to the world that they had achieved a record 1.3 MJ yield from a fusion experiment at their National Ignition Facility (NIF). Yet what does this mean, exactly? As their press release notes, the main advancement of these results will go towards the US’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

This pertains specifically to the US’s nuclear fusion weapons, which LLNL along with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and other facilities are involved in the research and maintenance of. This traces back to the NIF’s roots in the 1990s, when the stockpile stewardship program was set up as an alternative to nuclear weapons testing. Much of this research involves examining how today’s nuclear weapons degrade over time, and ways to modernize the existing arsenal.

In light of this, one may wonder what the impact of these experimental findings from the NIF are beyond merely ensuring that the principle of MAD remains intact. To answer that question, we have to take a look at inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which is the technology at the core of the NIF’s experiments.

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