Transforming Copper Wire into a Cosmic Furnace

Using a novel laser method, scientists mimicked the extreme environments of stars and planets, enhancing our understanding of astrophysical phenomena and supporting nuclear fusion research.

Extreme conditions prevail inside stars and planets. The pressure reaches millions of bars, and it can be several million degrees hot. Sophisticated methods make it possible to create such states of matter in the laboratory – albeit only for the blink of an eye and in a tiny volume. 

So far, this has required the world’s most powerful lasers, such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California. But there are only a few of these light giants, and the opportunities for experiments are correspondingly rare.

A research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), together with colleagues from the European XFEL, has now succeeded in creating and observing extreme conditions with a much smaller laser. 

At the heart of the new technology is a copper wire, finer than a human hair, as the group reports in the journal Nature Communications.     READ MORE...

The Nuclear Fusion Era Has Arrived

In December of 2022, the National Ignition Facility reached an unprecedented milestone in nuclear fusion research: passing the vaunted "breakeven" point.

Now, for the second time and with even better efficiency, more energy was liberated from a fusion reaction than was used to create the fusion reaction: a repeat, verification, and improvement of the original breakthrough.

The old saying of "fusion is 50 years away, and always will be" is no longer the case. But will we invest enough resources in the right places to bring it to fruition?

Last year, on December 5, 2022, an incredible milestone was achieved: for the first time, a nuclear fusion reaction experienced what’s known as a net energy gain. 

This means, remarkably, that the energy liberated from a nuclear fusion reaction exceeded the (useful) energy that was inputted into the reaction. 

This wasn’t achieved by a magnetic confinement fusion reactor, which is where most of the worldwide fusion funding is centered, nor by any among the hundreds of private laboratories dedicated to bringing commercial fusion to the public, but rather by a largely forgotten source: the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

This year, on July 30, 2023, the National Ignition Facility did it again, and in an even superior fashion: repeating their results and achieving an even higher energy yield than in the December prior.

 All of this was achieved despite a paltry amount of funding being directed toward nuclear fusion research by the U.S. government: an average of just half-a-billion dollars per year across all endeavors, combined. 

With this recent confirmation, the path toward developing widespread nuclear fusion as the anchor to a clean, carbon-neutral energy economy is now clearer than ever. 

But in order to truly achieve it, we not only need to be brave and bold, but also focused, as the distractions and pitfalls could truly divert us from the ultimate goal.  READ MORE...

Breakthrough in Fusion Energy

After generations of trying to produce the power of a star on Earth, a successful nuclear fusion ignition happened in the middle of a December night and was over in 20-billionths of a second.

That’s more than 100 billion times shorter than the Wright Brothers’ first, 12-second flight — but a brief, shining moment that could have even bigger implications for humanity.

But while the science teams at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are still buzzing over their Wright-Brothers moment, we only remember that name because their third flight stayed in the sky for 39 minutes.

The nuclear fusion reaction must be repeated, extended and scaled before the comparison sticks. And the race is on to make it work.

“But that’s what makes it so exciting, right?” lead scientist Tammy Ma told CNN. “The potential is so great for clean, abundant, limitless, affordable energy. It will be tough. It won’t be easy. But it’s worth doing.”

Ma’s office is a giant box of lasers the size of three football fields in the corner of a 7,000-acre lab in Livermore. Running across the soaring white ceilings are miles of square tubes holding 192 of the most energetic lasers in the world, all snaking toward a round room at the center.

The very middle of this target chamber becomes the hottest place in the solar system every time they run a fusion experiment, and it is covered with enough gleaming machinery that J.J. Abrams used it to portray the warp core of the USS Enterprise in “Stark Trek Into Darkness.”

With a legacy of delays and cost overruns, the National Ignition Facility was wryly nicknamed the “National Almost Ignition Facility,” or “NAIF,” by critics in Congress. If not for its work studying nuclear weaponry without the need for test explosions, the program might have lost funding years ago.

But now, for the first time since breaking ground in 1997, the National Ignition Facility can finally live up to its name. In December, 192 of the most energetic lasers in the world heated up a tiny pellet of hydrogen atoms with such force, they fused together to create helium and — most importantly — excess energy.

A little more than 2 megajoules of energy going into the target chamber became 3.15 megajoules coming out — a modest gain of around 50%, but enough to make history and allow scientists to call the experiment a true success.

The five attempts since have all failed to repeat it.  READ MORE...

Tech Trends for 2023

At 1:03am on Monday 5 December, the most powerful laser on the planet flashed into life at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, in an experiment that sent shockwaves through the world of physics and beyond.


The laser targeted a fuel capsule, the size of a peppercorn, creating temperatures and pressures which sparked a fusion reaction - the reaction which powers the sun.


The National Ignition Facility (NIF) had done such experiments before, but this time the energy that came out of the reaction, was more than the laser power used to trigger it.


It was a landmark moment for fusion researchers and, while fusion reactors are still a long way from making electricity that we can use, it shows that the physics works.


"We have taken the first tentative steps towards a clean energy source that could revolutionise the world," said LLNL Director Kim Budil.  READ MORE...

Ignition in a Fusion Experiment

A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion has been confirmed a year after it was achieved at a laboratory in California.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL's) National Ignition Facility (NIF) recorded the first case of ignition on August 8, 2021, the results of which have now been published in three peer-reviewed papers.

Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the Sun and other stars: heavy hydrogen atoms collide with enough force that they fuse together to form a helium atom, releasing large amounts of energy as a by-product. Once the hydrogen plasma "ignites", the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining, with the fusions themselves producing enough power to maintain the temperature without external heating.

Ignition during a fusion reaction essentially means that the reaction itself produced enough energy to be self-sustaining, which would be necessary in the use of fusion to generate electricity.

If we could harness this reaction to generate electricity, it would be one of the most efficient and least polluting sources of energy possible. No fossil fuels would be required as the only fuel would be hydrogen, and the only by-product would be helium, which we use in industry and are actually in short supply of.  READ MORE...

Fusion Reaction Creates More Energy Than It Absorbs

A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy.

For the first time, a fusion reaction has achieved a record 1.3 megajoule energy output – and for the first time, exceeding energy absorbed by the fuel used to trigger it.

Although there's still some way to go, the result represents a significant improvement on previous yields: eight times greater than experiments conducted just a few months prior, and 25 times greater than experiments conducted in 2018. It's a huge achievement.

Physicists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will be submitting a paper for peer review.

"This result is a historic step forward for inertial confinement fusion research, opening a fundamentally new regime for exploration and the advancement of our critical national security missions. It is also a testament to the innovation, ingenuity, commitment and grit of this team and the many researchers in this field over the decades who have steadfastly pursued this goal," said Kim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"For me, it demonstrates one of the most important roles of the national labs – our relentless commitment to tackling the biggest and most important scientific grand challenges and finding solutions where others might be dissuaded by the obstacles."

Inertial confinement fusion involves creating something like a tiny star. It starts with a capsule of fuel, consisting of deuterium and tritium – heavier isotopes of hydrogen. This fuel capsule is placed in a hollow gold chamber about the size of a pencil eraser called a hohlraum.  READ MORE...

Ten Quadrillion Power Watts

Scientists used an unconventional method of creating nuclear fusion to yield a record-breaking burst of energy of more than 10 quadrillion watts, by firing intense beams of light from the world's largest lasers at a tiny pellet of hydrogen.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California said they had focused 192 giant lasers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) onto a pea-size pellet, resulting in the release of 1.3 megajoules of energy in 100 trillionths of a second — roughly 10% of the energy of the sunlight that hits Earth every moment, and about 70% of the energy that the pellet had absorbed from the lasers. 

The scientists hope one day to reach the break-even or "ignition" point of the pellet, where it gives off 100% or more energy than it absorbs.  The energy yield is significantly larger than the scientists expected and much greater than the previous record of 170 kilojoules they set in February.

The researchers hope the result will expand their ability to research nuclear fusion weapons, the NIF's core mission, and that it could lead to new ways to harness energy from nuclear fusion — the process that powers the sun and other stars. Some scientists hope that nuclear fusion could one day be a relatively safe and sustainable method for generating energy on Earth.

"This result is a historic step forward for inertial confinement fusion research, opening a fundamentally new regime for exploration and the advancement of our critical national security missions," Kim Budil, the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in a statement.   READ MORE