Over the millennia, humans have tamed fire to light the night. Captured wind to cross the seas. Harnessed steam and internal combustion to power the Industrial Revolution, and wielded the energy of the atom with nuclear fission power. What's next? Fusion. Fusion. Previously on Big Ideas Lab, we met the scientists, engineers, and innovators working at one of the most remarkable facilities in the world, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
We left the Lawrence Livermore team as they struggled to move the needle toward achieving a scientific first. Fusion Ignition. The team at the National Ignition Facility had the tools, the talent, and the drive. But creating the ideal conditions to enable ignition was proving to be a Herculesian, possibly impossible task.
When we finally turned the laser on at Full Scale in 2009, we started what was called the National Ignition Campaign, fully anticipating that within the first two years of running the facility we would get ignition. So we did not even get close. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab, your weekly exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Here, untold stories, meet boundary-pushing pioneers, and get unparalleled access inside the gates.
From national security challenges to computing revolutions, discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow today. The National Ignition Facility, also known as NIF, is a ten-story tall building that runs the length of three football fields. Inside are two parallel laser bays, each containing 96 beam lines for a total of 192 of the world's highest energy lasers. Which one, over a foot wide?
Located on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory campus, construction of the facility began in 1997 and finished in 2009. And since operations began, one of its primary purposes has been to achieve fusion ignition. Fusion ignition refers to a condition in nuclear physics where the energy generated by the fusion process itself produces more fusion energy than the amount of laser energy delivered to the NIF target.
These experiments represent not only the initial strides toward a potentially infinite source of clean energy, but also generate crucial data that ensures the reliability, safety, and security of the United States' nuclear deterrent. As Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's director Kim Budell mentioned at the top of this episode, after NIF began experimentation, the expectation was that ignition would be achieved within a few years. A decade later, and they were still coming up short.
So what was in their way? Variable? The laser energy is so high that if you design the target wrong, you can actually bounce light into areas where it shouldn't go and in between shrapnel and stray light, damage optics or glass or other expensive pieces that we don't want to damage. After variable. Super computing is essential.
The ICF program uses modeling and simulation to drive their understanding of design forward, but that experimental loop also informs the code, so you can't really do one without the other. After variable. There are probably around 10,000 what we call large optics and around 30,000 or so smaller optics. When I say large optic, we're talking about half meter scale and larger. You usually don't have components of that scale, but we have 10,000 components that are of that size.
A facility like NIF involves virtually all types of teams within Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A combination of expertise and technologies brought together in hopes of finding that elusive ideal environment for ignition. There's many disciplines that come to play in order to make a successful experiment. What's your town is the lab's associate program director for inertial confinement fusion science. That starts with code development.
We develop the code that we then use to simulate and make predictions of the experiment. There's the laser builders themselves. There's target fab, you have to assemble these precision targets. We have to fuel these targets. We have to put Guterium, Tridium, Inbot. How do we get that in that? To drill this tiny hole, say the Nihima. Then we have to attach a filter to that. We have a guy who does that. Just impressed. I can't see the filter. He works day in, day out.
Then there's all the support people that go into making the laser function. There's all the infrastructure that goes on delivering that very tailored condition, build cross-limits, technicians, physicists, computer scientists, the list is analysts. There is a big multidisciplinary, multilibratory effort that goes into making an experiment so successful. How exactly do all these teams come together to make an experiment at Nihif successful?
First, highly advanced computer simulations and models are used to design the experiment. Based on these specs, a target is made. This target is a small capsule about the size of a peppercorn, containing a mixture of hydrogen isotopes, Duterium, and Tridium. To say that this target has to be precisely made is an understatement. The quality requirements on a target for it to function properly are extreme.
Michael Staderman, program manager for target fabrication at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, explains the role of target design in the process, and why small things are needed to produce big results. When we start building the capsule, the capsule has to sit within 20 microns of a 1mm canister, and then that canister gets centered to do within better than 50 microns inside the facility. And then the components themselves have to be of a very high quality to.
Right now, that's a primary challenge, so the capsule, for example, has to be almost perfectly round. It has to have an almost perfectly uniform wall thickness. And the margins by which that difference can exist are we're closer to talking about atoms than we're talking about hair diameters. The hair dimers about what 80-toned microns, and the wall thickness non-uniformity that were allowed to have is about 200 nanometers, so it's 2,000s of a hair, if you will.
This small target is placed inside the target chamber in NIF. This target chamber is a 10-meter-diameter sphere, surrounded with port cutouts for the 192 laser beams to get in and strike the target. Diagnostics are then positioned inside the target chamber to capture the data and measurements of what happens during the experiment. Once everything is set, NIF's laser system is active. A weak laser pulses released and guided through the facility.
This single laser beam is energized and split several times until there are a total of 192 laser beams. These beams then begin oscillating back and forth in the facility through laser amplifier glass to increase their energy. Starting optics to direct and shape them, these laser beams are fired simultaneously at the target capsule. This process from initial laser release to target impact takes 20 billions of a second.
In that time, the lasers have increased in energy by a factor of 10 billion and traveled 4,900 feet. In impact, the lasers compress the capsule to extremely high densities and the capsule is heated to several million degrees, simulating the conditions in the core of the Sun. Under these extreme forces, the deuterium and tritium nuclei fuse together, releasing energy.
The resulting fusion reaction and energy output are measured and analyzed, and computer simulations are updated to reflect this new data. Once the energy output from fusion exceeds the energy input from the lasers, then fusion ignition has been achieved. If the target isn't perfectly uniform, the experiment will fail. If it doesn't compress spherically, it will fail. If the laser doesn't deliver the energy with unimaginable precision, it will fail.
If the simulations aren't accurate or the diagnostics don't capture the data needed to further refine experiments, then fusion ignition will forever remain elusive. Even with that facility, our critics and detractors said that it would be impossible. John Michel de Nicola is the lab's program co-director for laser science and system engineering.
First of all, because the laser would never work, it would never produce the energy that was needed to accomplish ignition conditions, or that the beams would be degraded. We have had over the past 60 years, at Lawrence Loumore, multiple generations of laser facilities ranging from a few hundred joules to kilojoules, so a thousand joules to megajoules class, a million of joules, and we were closer and closer. And then, a leap in improvement that no one expected.
Niff recently announced a record-breaking energy yield of 1.3 megajoules in a single shop. On August 8, 2021, a standard ignition experiment produced 1.35 megajoules of energy after delivering 1.9 megajoules of laser energy. This record is 8 times what they achieved previously this year, 25 times greater than their previous record in 2018, and almost a thousand times better than what they started with in 2011. Well we first exceeded the megajoules and saw this house legs.
It was actually a dramatic improvement over any result that we had before, and it was somewhat unexpected that it would be this much better, and that we are actually this close already to an ignition step. They were at the threshold of ignition, but this outcome wasn't all celebration. After the excitement died down, they were left with even more questions.
We had a full batch of 20 shells that to our eye looked all the same and they all looked good, and then we did repeat experiments after that shot and found that they all didn't perform it as well as the original experiment, which causes of course to go back and look at more of the capsule data, and then we discovered that there were flaws that we weren't accounting for beforehand.
By doing those deliberate systematic repaints, we could pull apart and figure out what do we need to do to type the next step. So on that we found, yep, we have to pay more attention to the symmetry of the implosion, work more on the capsule quality, and look for designing proof. So one of the design improvements is to use a bigger hammer, putting it crudely.
Myth was already looking and exploring to see if they could increase beyond their current performance linole, turn that dial up to be violent. So they went back to the drawing board and did just that. From the dial up to 11. After the experiment on August 8th, 2021, the NIF team spent more than a year piecing together what had caused such a dramatically improved yield.
They increased the laser's precision and energy delivered to target, improved the target quality, and fine-tuned the experimental design to maximize the impact of these changes. In the late night hours of December 5th, 2022, they set in prepared for a normal shot, just like they had done dozens of times before. The control room did final checks.
The immense facility, systems humming at the ready, lasers towering above like cathedral pillars, all their might trained on the tiny flawless capsule that rested at the point where the lasers would soon meet. With a deep breath, they hit go on the impossible one more time, hoping for a breakthrough they would forever change the future of science. We only had to say one word. The team had produced 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy with 2.05 megajoules of laser energy.
They had produced more energy than was delivered by the laser. In other words, they had achieved fusion ignition. December 5th, 2022 was the first time this has ever been done in the laboratory anywhere on Earth, making it one of the most historic scientific achievements of the 21st century. It was just an amazing moment. Taya B. Seratwala is the program director for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Optics and Material Science and Technology Team. We met in the auditorium.
That's when we had formally announced that we had achieved ignition and some people were in the lab. The mood was so positive and everyone stood up and clapped and it was just an amazing moment. One thing that was kind of cute during that event is all the managers. They played that song, that 80 song, the future so bright and got to wear shades. So playing that as a background music and seeing your managers all put on sunglasses while that was going on.
And that was just really cute and such a memorable moment for the team. The optimism and the pride in the code teams themselves was the highest I've ever seen it. Teresa Bailey, the Associate Program Director for Computational Physics in the Weapons Simulation and Computing Team, explains her team's excitement. I was very happy to see the code teams congratulating each other. I was very happy that they felt a stake in this accomplishment and I think it really made the careers of many people.
It was a really important accomplishment for them because a lot of those people have spent most of their adult life working towards this goal and trying to develop tools that help us get towards this goal. So this was a really big deal for all of the code developers involved in this mission space. And of course, Lab Director Kim Bu-Dell was there as it unfolded. I think initially it was sort of surreal. There was a lot of immediate and palpable excitement in the air.
There were a lot of texts swirling around after that shot. We had some big successes where we made big steps toward ignition, not quite getting there but really getting much closer than we had been before. When we actually got over that threshold, there was a little bit of disbelief because of how long we have been on this trail, it's just a very strange feeling to finally arrive at your destination like that.
But after about a day or two when the initial shock wore off and the data analysis had proceeded enough that we were really quite confident where we were, that was pretty exciting here. The first ever controlled fusion ignition. We're majorly forward in our search for a source of limitless and clean energy that could be. This region ignition is the result of more than 60 years of war. Holy Grail and physics reached. One day end our dependence on fossil fuels.
The same process that gives our sun its energy. So what happens post ignition is equally as interesting as what happened leading up to it. For the lab, innovation never stops. In the weeks after the ignition shot, while worldwide press was still ablaze, the teams at NIF were back at their desks, analyzing, planning, and looking forward to the next experiment. Since first achieving ignition in December 2022, the lab has successfully repeated the achieved ignition multiple times.
And many other experiments have taken place, supporting national security and exploring our universe. New ignition experiments are testing out a different set of target capsules, manufactured to reduce the defects that limited the performance of earlier shots. We can only do this every few days. But actually we couldn't do this once a day, but that's not enough. That's not enough at all. Kelly Han is an experimental physicist and diagnostician at the lab.
We've got to be able to do this over and over and over and up very, very high rep rate so you can keep the energy going. This is hard to fowl them doing that in a facility where we destroy the target itself. So you've got to have a target that somehow stays together or we can constantly replenish it and be able to continue these high pressure conditions and keep things assembled and working.
Additionally, operators intend to boost the laser's energy to try and recreate the ideal balance for ignition. This brings new sets of challenges to the optics team who will have to continue to develop materials that can sustain damage and be reused. There's more that we can do with this kind of facility. We don't have to necessarily build another facility to get that. And that will hopefully enable even higher yield experiments than what we're doing right now. Think of it like this.
We're running a factory where we are pulling off optics and repairing the damage sites that the laser is creating when we take all these laser shots. If we make optics improvements, we reduce the amount of laser damage that occurs and that means the rate at which we have to run the recycle loop can slow down. Researchers and collaborators are now making plans for sustain and even higher yields to enable new stock power stewardship and basic science applications at NIF.
So now we're talking about, can we upgrade the power on NIF in some way in order to get better results, more effective results, a more efficient machine, let's say. And you know what they're using to do that? Experiments of course, but they're also using modeling and simulation and high performance computing to make projections into the future about what's possible with an increased size of machine.
And I think a lot of people are engaged in adding features to codes to help people take a look at different types of ICF facilities and what it's going to take to take a next leap in that space. The story of achieving fusion ignition isn't just about the result. It's about a tireless decades-long journey of some of science's leading minds and how one brief reaction will benefit the world. There's a large number of people who contribute over the decades to make this happen.
People who do both the processes to make the target, people who made the laser or the laser is today, and so many people contributing thousands of people contribute over the decades to make this achievement. We always want grand challenges, right? We want to see this great thing, right? Kennedy with the power wing landings said, hey, we're doing this because it's hard, not because it's easy. Whatever they do, they are driven to excellence.
It's this contagious fuel that I think everybody feeds off of. You just put a really tough problem and you get these people around it and you create the right culture. You're going to solve it. As of April 2024, the highest energy yield achieved in a successful ignition test is approximately five megajoules. That is enough energy to power a single 100 watt light bulb for a little over 13 and a half hours.
Clearly, the world is a long way from building the first fusion power plant, but before you can run, you must walk. And ignition is that crucial first step in our journey towards much bigger goals. It sets the stage for a transformational decade to come in high energy density science and fusion research to support national security. And it is the catalyst of a potentially endless supply of clean, sustainable fusion energy, all led by the team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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