Reply To: Focus Fusion Rail Gun

[Ivy Matt]

LLNL has made an official announcement:

LIVERMORE, Calif. – Ignition — the process of releasing fusion energy equal to or greater than the amount of energy used to confine the fuel — has long been considered the “holy grail” of inertial confinement fusion science. A key step along the path to ignition is to have “fuel gains” greater than unity, where the energy generated through fusion reactions exceeds the amount of energy deposited into the fusion fuel.

Though ignition remains the ultimate goal, the milestone of achieving fuel gains greater than 1 has been reached for the first time ever on any facility. In a paper published in the Feb. 12 online issue of the journal Nature, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) detail a series of experiments on the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which show an order of magnitude improvement in yield performance over past experiments.

The paper (or the abstract, for those who haven’t paid for access to the full article), “Fuel gain exceeding unity in an inertially confined fusion implosion”, can be found here.