Dr. Conca reports that the science of nuclear fusion took a major step forward today. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the U.S. Department of Energy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory blasted a small amount of deuterium and tritium (two isotopes of hydrogen in a hohlraum target super-cooled to minus 426 F) with lasers fed with 500 megajoules of electricity over a hundred millionth of a second, about ten trillion times the entire electrical output of America over that short time period. The target then produced more energy than it absorbed (USA Today).
But before you get your Star Trek boots on, the actual breakthrough was more of a baby step. A key step on the way to ignition [of nuclear fusion] is to have the energy generated in an inertially-confined fusion plasma exceed the amount of energy deposited into the deuterium-tritium fusion fuel and hotspot during the implosion process, resulting in a fuel gain greater than unity. NIF achieved this using a manipulation of the laser pulse shape in a way that reduces instability in the implosion. These experiments show an order-of-magnitude improvement in yield performance over past deuterium-tritium implosion experiments. We also see a significant contribution to the yield from a positive particle self-heating and evidence for the bootstrapping required to accelerate the deuterium-tritium fusion burn to eventually run away and ignite.
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