In a major breakthrough, scientific researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility on Aug. 8 used an array of powerful lasers to heat and compress a tiny pellet containing deuterium-tritium, to yield a record 1.35 megajoules of energy in one ten-billionth of a second. This energy output is around 70% of the 1.9 megajoules level that would be needed for “ignition,” wherein the energy released by the fusion device exceeds the energy input through the NIF’s laser.
“This is a huge advance for fusion and for the entire fusion community,” Dr. Debbie Callahan, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore, told BBC News Aug. 17. “This result is a historic step forward for inertial confinement fusion research,” said LLNL Director Kim Budil. “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.” It represents one of the most significant steps since serious work on inertial confinement fusion started in the 1960s.
To appreciate the development: This experiment’s yield of 1.35 megajoules is eight times the NIF’s previous record yield of 170 kilojoules, established only six months ago in February 2021, and 25 times the yield from experiments carried out in 2018.
