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Practical Fusion Energy Targeted at Sandia and Rochester LLE


by Walter Salm


Albuquerque, NM— A two-year, $3.8 million award has been received by Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Rochester’s Labora- tory for Laser Energetics (LLE) to hasten the day of low-cost, high-yield fusion reactions for energy purposes. High-yield means much more


energy emerging from a fusion reac- tion than is put into it. The award, announced by the


Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), seeks to build upon recent successes of Sandia’s Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion (MagLIF) con- cept. “Liner” is the technical term for “cylinder” and “inertial” refers to the immobility of the target object.


Laser-Heated Fuel Originally proposed in a 2010


Sandia theoretical paper, the concept uses a laser to heat fusion fuel con- tained in a small cylinder as it is compressed by the huge magnetic field of Sandia’s massive Z accelera- tor. A secondary magnetic field im-


pedes energy from escaping from the ends of the cylinder, which would lower the temperature of the fuel and reduce the fusion output. “Creating a high-output reac-


tion in a MagLIF plasma at Z should demonstrate the promise of the broader field of research we call mag- neto-inertial fusion — a potentially inexpensive form of fusion,” said project lead and Sandia manager Dan Sinars. “We hope that the re- sults of our research will motivate more efforts in this area.” “The ARPA-E award will fund


research that will benefit from the existing strong collaborative effort between Sandial National Laborato- ries and LLE,” said Professor and LLE Director Robert L. McCrory. “LLE, with its 60-beam OMEGA and four-beam high-energy OMEGA-EP lasers, andSandia, with the world’s largest pulsed power machine at Z, provide unique capabilities to ex- plore a range of fusion parameters previously unexplored.” The collaboration will study fu-


sion in a relatively unexplored inter- mediate density regime between the lower-than-air density of magnetic confinement fusion goal of the ITER project in southern France, and the greater-than-solid density of laser- driven inertial confinement fusion at the National Ignition Facility at Law - rence Livermore National Laboratory.


OMEGA Laser The LLE’s OMEGA laser, fund-


ed and operated as a national user facility with more diagnostics than Z’s Beamlet laser, is expected to greatly speed the work. “OMEGA can fire 12 times per


day and can also provide better diag- nostic access,” said Jonathan Davies, a research scientist and leader of the effort at LLE. “The ARPA-E project will bring together the resources of Sandia and LLE to work on the same project— the coupling of laser energy and fusion fuel — with completely different techniques.” “These experiments allow us to


study MagLIF on a much smaller size and at a faster rate than on Z,” said Davies. “If the small-scale MagLIF ex- periments are successful and accu- rately modeled, we will have demon- strated magneto-inertial fusion princi- ples over a very broad range of energy, space and time scales.” An advantage of laser heating is


that ideas involving lasers can be test- ed on multiple facilities across the country, allowing a much larger num- ber of tests per year than is possible on the unique Z facility. “It should easily be possible to do


more than 200 laser experiments a year split among the Z-Beamlet, OMEGA and OMEGA-EP facilities, in contrast to the two dozen or so inte- grated MagLIF experiments a year re- alistically possible on Z,” Sinars said. In addition, integrated experi-


ments where some of OMEGA’s lasers are used to actually compress the liner itself, as well as the heated and mag- netized fusion fuel it contains, are also part of the ARPA-E program. “With this collaboration, we will


apply our expertise to explore a new path in fusion research,” said Davies.


Parallel Tracks The work will consist of several


parallel tracks: performing scaled- down MagLIF experiments at the LLE Omega facility; improving perform- ance of full-scale MagLIF experiments on Z through optimized laser pre-heat- ing and improved axial magnetic field hardware; and validating simulations against experiments. Said Sinars, “The overall grant


objective is to ultimately improve tech- niques to compress and heat interme- diate-density, magnetized plasmas, as well as provide insights into relevant energy losses and instabilities.” The combined heat and pres-


sure, created by the laser preheating and liner imploding over a hundred or so nanoseconds, already have been shown to force fuel to fuse. What’s wanted is a reaction that will force it to fuse more efficiently and, at the same time, allow researchers to learn more about important subsidiary processes. ARPA’s bet, and Sandia’s and


Rochester’s with it, is that a more ef- ficient coupling of the laser energy to the fusion fuel would increase the number of neutrons produced, the gold standard in judging the efficien- cy of the fusion reaction. As it happens, scientists at the


LLE over many years have developed techniques to “smooth” laser beams, a prerequisite for delivering more en- ergy to fusion fuel. “By smoothing the beam,” said


Sinars, “we eliminate hot spots in the laser beam that waste laser energy and potentially alter the beam path of some of the light. This altered path can disintegrate portions of the liner or other surrounding material. Some of that material then may contami- nate the fuel and increase radiation losses, causing the fuel temperature to collapse below that needed for fu- sion reactions to occur.”


Other Experiments Other laser experiments will in-


clude changing the beam’s intensity, its distance to the liner’s entry port and the size of the liner hole through which the beam must pass. If the beam entrance hole is too small, not enough energy gets through to the target, but if too large, too much en- ergy escapes. The process, when optimized,


should allow fusion reactions to occur at 1 to 2 percent of the density and pressure required in traditional iner- tial confinement fusion, which has used either laser-created X-ray puls- es or direct laser illumination to spherically compress a pea-sized cap- sule containing fusion fuel. Nuclear fusion joins small


atoms like hydrogen, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process. Unlike nuclear fission, which splits large atoms such as uranium, the dream of fusion is that it eventually could provide humanity unlimited energy from sea water and from such abundant elements as lithium. Sandia National Laboratories is


a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Mar- tin Corp., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, NM, and Livermore, CA, Sandia has major R&D responsi- bilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness. Web: www.sandia.gov r


July, 2015


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