Inertial confinement fusion is the little-noticed outside runner in the long race for fusion power, but the only one which has actually completed a few laps. Now the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world’s only fusion experimental facility to have ignited a burning fusion plasma, and done it multiple times, has entered a partnership with the Frauenhofer Institute for Laser Technology in Aachen, Germany, to launch the next step toward a sustained, burning fusion reaction through inertial confinement, often called “laser fusion” for short. The partnership was reported Dec. 24 by {Interesting Engineering) after a release Dec. 20 by the National Ignition Facility.
While the NIF uniquely and repeatedly has achieved fusion “breakeven”—fuel compression experiments which produced more power out than power applied to the fuel by the laser system, it has done this only for millionths of a second. The NIF’s powerful but antiquated system of lasers could not achieve this. “’The transition from basic research to power plant development requires the rapid, robust development of rugged new laser systems’ said Tammy Ma, director of [the] Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology (LIFT). ’Fraunhofer ILT’s expertise in industrial scaling of diode-pumped lasers is crucial for accelerating our IFE program.’”