Last month, the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) fired its lasers up to full power for the first time since December, when it achieved its decades-long goal of ‘ignition’ by producing more energy during a nuclear reaction than it consumed. The latest run didn’t come close to matching up: NIF achieved only 4% of the output it did late last year. But scientists didn’t expect it to.
Building on NIF’s success, they are now flexing the programme’s experimental muscles, trying to better understand the nuclear-fusion facility’s capabilities. Here, Nature looks at what’s to come for NIF, and whether it will propel global efforts to create a vast supply of clean energy for the planet.
What was the goal of the latest experiment?
NIF, based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, is a stadium-sized facility that fires 192 lasers at a tiny gold cylinder containing a diamond capsule. Inside the capsule sits a frozen pellet of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The lasers trigger an implosion, creating extreme heat and pressure that drive the hydrogen isotopes to fuse into helium, releasing additional energy.
Recent Comments