Inertial confinement fusion

Assembled from 37 blocks · 3 evidence · 28 related

1. Story
2. Inertial confinement fusion compresses a millimetre-scale capsule of deuterium-tritium fuel so violently and so fast that the fuel's own inertia holds it together for the nanoseconds in which it burns. At the National Ignition Facility this is done indirectly: 192 laser beams deposit ultraviolet light inside a gold hohlraum, which re-radiates X-rays that ablate the capsule surface and drive the implosion inward. There is no magnetic field and no steady state; confinement time is set by how long the compressed fuel takes to fly apart, of order 100 picoseconds. The bet is the opposite of the magnetic one: extremely high density for an extremely short time, rather than low density for seconds. Inertial confinement produced the first laboratory demonstration of target gain above unity, on 5 December 2022.
3. Knowledge
4. Inertial confinement fusion
5. Fusion triple product (n·T·τ_E)
6. Tritium
7. Connections
8. Tritium
9. Fusion triple product (n·T·τ_E)
10. National Ignition Facility
11. NIF exceeds the Lawson criterion for ignition
12. NIF achieves target gain greater than unity for the first time
13. NIF repeats target gain and raises the yield to 3.88 MJ
14. NIF achieves ignition for the sixth time
15. NIF reaches 8.6 MJ yield and a target gain of 4.13
16. Tokamak (toroidal magnetic confinement)
17. Inertial confinement fusion
18. ITER
19. Tritium breeding blanket
20. Private fusion sector
21. JET's DTE1 campaign sets the first deuterium-tritium fusion power record
22. JET's DTE2 campaign releases 59 MJ in a single pulse
23. NIF achieves target gain greater than unity for the first time
24. JET sets the single-pulse fusion energy record of 69.26 MJ
25. JET ceases plasma operations after 105,842 pulses
26. ITER's declared target date for the start of deuterium-tritium operation
27. Tokamak (toroidal magnetic confinement)
28. Inertial confinement fusion
29. Wendelstein 7-X
30. Lawson criterion
31. NIF exceeds the Lawson criterion for ignition
32. EAST sustains a high-confinement plasma for 1,066 seconds
33. Wendelstein 7-X sets a triple product record for long-duration plasmas
34. Evidence
35. On 5 December 2022 a NIF indirect-drive implosion achieved a target gain of 1.5, with 2.05 MJ of 351 nm laser light producing about 3.1 MJ of fusion yield and significantly exceeding the Lawson criterion for ignition
36. Sets out the physics design changes — reduced coast time and maximised hot-spot internal energy — behind the first laser indirect-drive experiment to exceed target gain of unity, and frames the result explicitly as scientific breakeven
37. The 8 August 2021 NIF shot produced about 1.35 MJ of fusion yield and exceeded the Lawson criterion for ignition without reaching target gain above unity