I've worked for over 40 years in fusion research
and I have the privilege right now of working
at the Naval Research Lab and leading the
plasma physics division.
Of all the fusion schemes I've seen, magnetic,
and inertial, and alternative, I believe that
the inertial confinement fusion through direct
drive and lasers is the one that has the greatest
promise for inertial fusion energy.
I'm a research physicist here at the Naval
Research Laboratory's space physics simulation
chamber, of where we try to create plasmas
to mimic the environment found in the Earth's
ionosphere and magnetosphere.
We've studied plasmas, which are the fourth
state of matter.
You take a solid, you heat it up you get a
liquid, you heat that up you get a gas, you
heat that up and you get a plasma.
It's where the ions and electrons have separated
and now they have this collective behavior...and
they're found everywhere.
So you can do a variety of things with plasmas
anywhere from modifying materials to synthesis
of materials and also to be able to explore
different areas of biomedicine and bioscience.
Electra was built to develop the krypton fluoride
components for repetitive operation.
if you want to operate for more than year
you need 150 to 300 million shots.
The limiting factor is mainly the switches.
Old systems use gas switches or spark gaps,
whereas this technology is using thyristors,
and these thyristors have been operating right
now already for more than one billion shots.
You have here the 1-gigawatt level, all solid-state
pulse power system, and we were able to operate
this system for more than ten million shots
continuously.
Inertial confinement fusion will be the most
energy efficient way of using laser energy
to try to compress the fuel to the extreme
conditions that exist in the center of the
Sun to initiate the fusion reaction.
Inertial confinement fusion means that we
create for a very short time, we create very
high temperature, very high-density plasma
by compressing spherical target.
This one doesn't do it.
This one studies what's going to happen when
targets are not perfect.
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We want to be able to accelerate these uh,
targets to high velocities and thereby compress
them to very high densities and thereby heat
them to very high temperatures to generate
the fusion reactions that we're after.
Uh, and in the process if you don't do it
right, it's uh, the target's breakup due to
instabilities, so we look at ways to do it
carefully enough and accurately enough to
uh, to be able to compress the target without
them breaking up.
Right now we're doing very interesting experiment
to look at uh, if the laser beams transfer
energy between each other, so being able to
do those experiments here and see the physics
effects of that is very exciting, and could
be very important for, uh, experiments elsewhere
where closer to achieving implosions.
The ultimate purpose is to study high-energy
density physics by illuminating targets, uh,
tiny targets with extreme high-energy density,
uh, and therefore watch what happens when,
to matter when, very, very high energy is
applied to it.
It is challenging in the technology and the
science, uh, it's very long term, it's in
the same class as any effort in physics.
The difference is that it has practical application,
and if you do succeed you can have a very
positive influence on the future of mankind.
When you see something that is very similar
to what is going on in the universe, because,
science is everywhere, I mean physics is everywhere,
plasma is everywhere, so the beauty of this
excites me very much.
All human life, all bio-power derived from
solar power.
And what is the source of Sun's power?
It's fusion.
So in essence we are living on a planet that
is the beneficiary of a fusion energy source
that's located one astronomical unit, which
is the distance from the Earth to the Sun,
away from us.
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