In a world first, the National Ignition Facility has generated a “burning plasma,” a fusion reaction on the cusp of being self-sustaining.
Nuclear fusion could potentially provide abundant, safe energy without the significant production of greenhouse gas emissions or nuclear waste. But it has remained frustratingly elusive as a practical technology for decades. An important milestone toward that goal has now been passed: a fusion reaction that derives most of its heat from its nuclear reactions themselves rather than the energy pumped into the fuel from outside.
Nuclear fusion, the process that fuels stars and that is triggered explosively in hydrogen bombs, requires extreme heat and pressure to give atoms enough energy to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between their positively charged nuclei so that they can fuse and release energy. The usual fuel for producing controlled fusion in reactors consists of a mix of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, which may unite to make helium.
Although inertial-confinement fusion does not have to solve the problem of maintaining a hot, wobbly plasma inside a tokamak, it does require tremendous inputs of energy to trigger the fusion process. The NIF team used 192 high-power lasers, all focused into a chamber called a hohlraum that is about the size and shape of a pencil’s eraser and contains the fuel capsule of deuterium and tritium.
Of the experimental runs that the NIF researchers have reported, four conducted in 2020 and early 2021 exceeded the threshold fusion output for a burning plasma. The most recent of these were in February 2021, so “it clearly took some time for them to convince colleagues of the validity of their results,” says Vladimir Tikhonchuk, a plasma physicist at the University of Bordeaux in France, who was not involved with the work. But they have evidently done so.
Lancaster is optimistic about that. “We are now in a regime where modest improvements can create massive gains in output energy,” she says. “We have definitely moved from an ‘if’ to a ‘when’ for ignition.”
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