Decades ago, America’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) began work on a scientific breakthrough that only became a reality on December 5, 2022. That day, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. This development, which promises to radically change power generation capacity, among other things, was made public on December 13, 2022 by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). United States Bureau Chief OLUKOREDE YISHAU, who was part of a briefing on the breakthrough, breaks down this potential path to a fusion power energy plant which can staggeringly alter for good America’s one trillion watts electricity generation capacity.
As the Programme Director for the Weapon Physics and Design (WPD) Programme at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Mark Herrmann is one of exceptional thousands of people behind a major scientific breakthrough that is a potential path to a fusion power energy plant capable of seeing America multiplying its one trillion watts electricity generation capacity to 500 trillion watts. Herrmann, who leads LLNL’s weapon science research and development, including focused experiments, integral hydrodynamic and subcritical experiments, high-energy-density (HED) experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), was guest at a briefing organised by the Department of State Foreign Press Center on the import of the breakthrough.
Herrmann said an experiment on December 5th, 2022, on the National Ignition Facility exceeded the threshold for fusion ignition. “The amount of energy that was released by fusion was greater than the amount of energy we put in, demonstrating that fusion is – in the laboratory is a possibility for generating very extreme environments and potentially someday generating more energy out than goes in, and a potential path to a fusion power energy plant,” he said.
The NIF laser with 192 beams, he said, can generate about 500 trillion watts of power. “So you’re used to power in terms of 100 watt lightbulb, or we can talk about the electrical generating capacity of the United States. It’s about 1 trillion watts. So at any point in time, all the electricity from all the power plants in the U.S. is about 1 trillion watts. So this laser generates 500 times that and deposits it into that little tiny target, but it only does it for a very short amount of time – four billionths of a second.
“And when the laser goes into that target, it heats it up to a few million degrees. But that’s not extreme enough to create the fusion conditions. In fact, we have to squeeze that fusion fuel up and reach temperatures; in this experiment, we reached temperatures as high as 130 million degrees – so very, very high temperatures. The plasma gets very small; it’s about the size of a human hair at the most extreme conditions. And when we – in this experiment, the fusion reactions took place in about one-tenth of a billionth of a second. So – and the power that was generated, the fusion power that was generated, is greater than 30,000 trillion watts. So much more than the power that was generated by the laser, very extreme,” he said.
Putting it in perspective
According to Herrmann, the sunshine hitting the Earth at one point in time is about 170,000 trillion watts. “So for a tiny amount of time, this little thing the size of a human hair in our laboratory generated about a fifth the power of all the sunlight hitting the Earth. So it’s incredible extreme conditions. Of course, we generate those and study those because that is the same level of energy and power that’s operating in our nuclear weapons.”
Work on the breakthrough, he said, started in the 1950s with the first ideas, and shortly thereafter the laser was invented in 1960. The laboratory then began building a series of bigger lasers to try and achieve the extreme conditions required to do fusion ignition. “Along the way, we were maintaining our nuclear deterrent through the 1990s with underground nuclear weapons testing to maintain the confidence in our deterrent. But in 1992, we made the decision to stop our underground nuclear weapons testing and we stood up something we call the Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship Program to maintain our deterrent and our confidence in it without the need for further underground testing. And that involved capability – development of capabilities like high-performance computers, experimental testing facilities, including building the National Ignition Facility, which allows us to access those extreme regimes that are found in nuclear weapons.
“Along the way, we did many different scientific experiments. NIF has done almost 4,000 different experiments and across many fields of science. It’s not just fusion. We study the behaviour of material at very high pressures and temperatures. We study the transport of radiation in complicated geometries. There are many different elements of physics we study with the NIF, and there are almost a thousand scientific publications that have been published,” Herrmann explained.
This breakthrough, according to him, has a potential to be a carbon-free baseload energy source for humanity. “And right now, having more approaches, different ways of being able to provide carbon-free baseload energy in the future is something that would be great to have. We don’t have just one silver bullet that’s going to solve what our long-term energy – carbon-free energy needs are for the planet and so this is one possible approach to that.”
Implications
Herrmann explained that the fusion has implications for energy security, national security and science. “Now, sometimes people look at it and say, well – and again, this was an experiment supporting our nuclear deterrent, but it does have implications for energy security if you could turn it into an energy plant. Some people look at it and say this is about national security, but it’s also about science, right, so it’s really about all of these things. It’s actually what makes in my mind fusion such an interesting thing to study because it has implications for all these different areas and certainly why we’ve been working on it for so long – why it’s been such a long-term goal for our laboratory. So I think it’s a – it’s one of those things that it’s not just one or the other, but it touches on all of these things.”
He added that there are concerns about how to pursue energy based on this. “This is something actually that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has studied. There was a report released in 2013, looking at both what research programmes should be done in inertial fusion energy. And what they said at that time is that the time for really pursuing that would be after fusion ignition was achieved, and obviously we’ve achieved that. So that’s something that – that report is very relevant to where we are today in terms of pursuing inertial fusion as an energy source.”
Applications of this important breakthrough in the development of weapons and defense systems
Herrmann said the programme is committed to the responsibility of maintaining nuclear deterrent without using underground nuclear weapons testing. “And we haven’t done an underground nuclear weapons test for almost 30 years. But nuclear weapons are complicated, and we – when we stopped our underground nuclear weapons testing, we didn’t understand all the elements that go in – that go into it,” he said, adding: “And so we’ve been embarking on a programme for this entire time to understand the science of our nuclear weapons so that we can maintain them so that as they age, we understand how we have to respond to things we find as the weapons are aging, as we currently are modernizing our nuclear deterrent so that it will be safe, secure, effective, and reliable into the foreseeable future. And these fusion experiments allow us to create the very extreme conditions that allow us to really understand all the elements of the science that are going on in our nuclear weapons. So it’s a key advance in enabling us to maintain our deterrent.”
The progrmme, he said, does about 400 experiments a year. About 20 of them, he added, are experiments of this type. Herrmann said: “We’re working right now on how do we incorporate what we’ve learned from this experiment to both repeat this experiment but be – go beyond it. We have plans to make the laser even more energetic. We have plans to make the little targets that the laser hits even better. And we want to really explore how do we get even more energy out than the three megajoules – can we get five or 10 megajoules out, which the more we get out, the more extreme the conditions, the better the fidelity of the experiments we’re doing. We also want to understand how do we make it easier, right – if you were ever going to do energy, you’d like to not have to build a laser the size of three football fields. So how – if we could really understand it, once you have a tool and it’s working, then you can think about oh, can I take a shortcut here, can I take a shortcut there. How do I drop the requirements and make it easier to do, right, so that’s another thing that we’re trying to do. And then we’re using the output – this tremendous blast of X-rays and neutrons that come from these experiments – to study their interaction with materials for our nuclear weapons applications. So we also are going to use the output of this to do further studies as well.”
The side effects of this breakthrough
Herrmann said every fusion system needs to be handled with care. “When this blast is taking place, people have to be far away. We have a – we have a facility and we have the doors and things like that that we have to close, and we keep people out of it, and we have to wait for a period of time before we go back into it. So we’re very careful about that. Safety is a very important consideration.
“People have looked at fusion and the potential it may have for proliferation. We think that the concerns associated with that, that’s something that was studied before we built the National Ignition Facility to make sure that any concerns along the lines of proliferation were manageable. I mean, the main concern is that fusion neutrons are very energetic and so they could be used to convert uranium into plutonium. And so, but that would be managed if you had a fusion energy economy, and that’s something that the IAEA and other agencies are thinking about.
“I think – I’ve seen – again, we’re many decades away from putting power on the grid with this approach, but if you did have a lot more energy available to you, that could be good because we think that the biggest determination of how – the more energy that – there’s a strong correlation between energy usage and GDP per capita and people’s standards of living, so that’s a good thing if we could generate more energy. But having unlimited energy may not be a great thing in terms of what the implications would be for the environment and things like that. Again, I’d say we’re a long way away from that, but it’s something that people are thinking about as they work to develop fusion as an energy system,” he explained.
Working with other labs internationally
No nation or organisation knows it all so the American lab has collaborators in the atomic weapons establishment in the UK and the CEA in France. “In fact, France is building a facility that’s similar to our National Ignition Facility called the Laser Mégajoule. So we have strong collaboration there centered around our defense missions. But we also have university collaborators at institutions around the world who are interested in the very extreme environments that can be created in our laboratory, so we work with universities and labs all over the world,” he said.
