"Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes"

Source: Jason Palmer, BBC News, 28 January 2010.

The National Ignition Facility (Nif) was completed in 2009, and is now reporting initial results of its experiments seeking to produce nuclear fusion in a way that will potentially lead to commercial fusion reactors.

• 192 laser beams are focused through holes in a target container called a hohlraum
• Inside the hohlraum is a tiny pellet containing an extremely cold, solid mixture of hydrogen isotopes
• Lasers strike the hohlraum's walls, which in turn radiate X-rays
• X-rays strip material from the outer shell of the fuel pellet, heating it up to millions of degrees
• If the compression of the fuel is high enough and uniform enough, nuclear fusion can result

Experimenters report that using 192 lasers the facility poured 669 kilojoules of energy into a tiny target in a little more than 10 billionths of a second. This bested previous records by a factor of 20. They also reported surprising ease in managing the plasma created by the laser blast.

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Comment: As far as I can guess, nuclear fusion is necessary for the long term success of civilization. Renewable energy sources don't seem adequate to support the continued growth of the population and the increasing per capita energy use required for a technological civilization. We will eventually run out of fossil fuels, and even if we did not we would not want to do the environmental damage that fueling future civilization with fossil fuels would require. The same is true of energy from nuclear fission. Of course these sources are the short term solution to civilization's energy needs, but in a couple of hundred years we will need fusion. So this result is very good news for mankind. JAD