NIF falls short of ignition

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will not meet its goal of igniting a fusion plasma before the end of September, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore, CA) said on Friday. A spokeswoman says Livermore "will continue working toward achieving ignition." The laser is delivering the desired energy, but the target shots are not yielding the expected fusion energy.

NIF was declared complete on March 31, 2009, after it had delivered 1.1 MJ pulses at 355 nm. The 192-beam system was designed to deliver 1.8 MJ pulses, which simulations indicated would be sufficient to ignite a pellet of deuterium-tritium fusion fuel, producing fusion reactions that yielded more energy than the input pulse. The Department of Energy set a target of reaching ignition by September 30, 2012--the end of the fiscal year.

Wary of optical damage, Livermore ramped pulse power and energy slowly. The first 1.8 MJ pulse was not fired until March of this year. On July 5, NIF delivered peak power of 500 tW to a target for the first time in a 1.85 MJ pulse. From outside, it looked like NIF should be closing in on ignition.

But now NIF has become the latest in a long list of fusion lasers that yielded experimental results well short of predictions. A news story in the September 21 issue of Science magazine reports that although computer models predict NIF shots should achieve ignition, the yield of fusion energy from NIF experiments has so far reached only 0.1 of the ignition level.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has already begun studying its options. The first draft of a report is due October 1, with a final report due to Congress on November 30.

Meanwhile, NIF continues firing shots that can produce temperatures and pressures far beyond anything previously possible on the surface of the Earth. Livermore fusion researchers will keep pressing for ignition, and NNSA weapon scientists will get additional shots for their simulations of nuclear explosions as part of the agency's Stockpile Stewardship program.

NIF's laser bay, showing 96 of the 192 beamlines.