Big Ideas Lab - Inertial Fusion Energy

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

What if we could harness the same energy that powers the stars to fuel our world? Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are working towards turning this vision into reality.In this episode, we explore how fusion works, why it’s fundamentally different from today’s nuclear energy, and how the groundbreaking achievement of ignition at the National Ignition Facility is paving the way for future fusion power plants. Join us as we discuss the challenges, breakthroughs, and the global race to bring fusion energy to the grid.-- Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series. Executive Produced by Lacey Peace and Levi Hanusch.Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Daniel Brunelle. Story Editing by Daniel Brunelle. Audio Engineering and Editing by Matthew Powell. Narrated by Matthew Powell. Video Production by Levi Hanusch. Guests featured in this episode (in order of appearance): Tammy Ma, Lead, Inertial Fusion Energy Institutional Initiative, LLNLIssa Tamer, Laser Scientist, LLNLBrought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Deep in the wilderness, the sun is long gone, and dusk feels like a cool blanket. You're dimly aware of the sense of wood smoke and earth, while glowing campfire embers cast flickering shadows on trees. You toss another log onto the flames. The fire crackles as small sparks float among the stars and then burn out. You're left viewing the stars which have been burning since before humans and will continue to burn long after we're gone. Now imagine bottling the energy source that powers those stars, whose light is powerful enough to reach us from deep in the cosmos. Harnessing it, refining it, making it clean, safe, and limitless.

What if it could power homes, businesses, industries, even entire cities without polluting the air or depleting resources. That's the promise of fusion. Harnessing the power of the stars to meet Earth's growing needs. And thanks to groundbreaking work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we're making significant progress towards making that a reality. Today, we're diving into one of humanity's greatest and most promising scientific challenges, fusion energy. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab, your weekly exploration inside

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear 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. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is opening its doors to a new wave of talent. If you're driven by curiosity and a desire to solve complex challenges, the lab has a job opening for you. Currently, there are 139 open positions.

These include opportunities in science, engineering, business, administration, and the skilled trades. From enhancing national security to pioneering new energy sources and advancing scientific frontiers, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is where you can make your mark on the world. Today's open roles include lead power grid engineer, laser modeling physicist, postdoctoral researcher, OCEC program leader, and chief data architect. But the list doesn't end there. Explore all available positions at LLNL.gov forward slash careers. Each opportunity comes with a comprehensive benefits package tailored to your lifestyle and future.

Join a workplace that champions professional growth, fosters collaboration, inspires innovation, and drives the pursuit of excellence. If you are ready to contribute to work that matters, visit LLNL.gov forward slash careers to explore all the current job listings. That's LLNL.gov forward slash careers. Your expertise could very well be the highlight of our next podcast interview. Don't wait. The study of nuclear fusion dates back to the 1930s when scientists began to unravel

the mystery of why stars shine so brightly for billions of years. Researchers discovered that stars are powered by tiny hydrogen atoms fusing together to form helium, releasing an incredible amount of energy in the process. By the mid-20th century, scientists began exploring ways to replicate fusion on Earth. In 1960, the invention of the laser, a groundbreaking tool that would become a cornerstone of fusion research, paved the way for new ideas. One of these was inertial fusion, which proposed using lasers to generate the extreme heat and pressure needed to trigger fusion. Tammy Ma leads the

inertial fusion energy institutional initiative at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Fusion is one of those grand scientific and engineering challenges of humankind. Everybody looks up in the sky and sees the sun and the sun is what basically powers everything on Earth, makes life possible, right? And so the idea that we can bring star power to Earth, recreate the sun's reactions in the laboratory and be able to control that and harness that energy is just such an amazing challenge. At the heart of our sun lies a massive fusion reaction that has been continuously sustained for billions of years. In the sun's core, lighter atoms are fused together to make a heavier atom releasing energy in the process. Creating fusion on Earth requires a combination of immense heat, pressure, and precision to

force atoms to collide and release energy. Achieving sustained thermonuclear fusion reactions in a controlled environment and developing methods to harness that energy could unlock a clean, safe, and virtually limitless power source. Fusion is clean. We would not generate any carbon in the reaction. It does not generate any high-level nuclear waste. And fusion is very flexible energy.

Fusion operates in a fundamentally different way from conventional nuclear power. Fusion is actually inherently safe. On the NIF we're using a hundred and ninety two lasers. These are the most energetic lasers in the world. All the lasers have to be co-timed, precisionly pointed. It's really hard to make the fusion happen. But the cool thing about fusion is in order to make the little star in the laboratory, you first have to deliver a large amount of energy to get your atoms to fuse. So if you ever want fusion to stop, you just cut off that initial energy

source. You turn off the electricity so the lasers don't fire. And if they don't fire, you don't have fusion. The conventional nuclear energy we know today comes from fission. Fission works by splitting heavy atoms like uranium into smaller ones. This process releases energy but also creates long-lived nuclear waste and carries the risk of a meltdown if not carefully controlled. Now of course fusion is actually a nuclear reaction, right? We are playing directly with the nucleus of atoms. However, the risks are very different from fission. With fusion, we do not generate high-level nuclear waste.

Fusion relies on two key fuels, deuterium and tritium, both isotopes of hydrogen, often referred to as heavy hydrogen. It's very abundant because the fuel that we need for fusion you can either get from seawater or from breeding tritium, which we know how to do very well. Approximately one in every 6,500 water molecules contains deuterium instead of regular hydrogen. Tritium is slightly heavier, produced by bombarding lithium with neutrons. Remarkably, with these fuels, the energy locked in our planet's seawater could sustain fusion reactions for an estimated 30 billion years. This abundance of fuel, combined with decades of scientific innovation, has brought

us close to unlocking the potential of fusion energy. The breakthrough moment came in 2022 when scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility, or NIF, achieved a milestone once thought impossible. Fusion ignition. For the first time, researchers created a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it took to start. NIFS' purpose is to provide the experimental basis for the science-based stockpile stewardship program, which eliminated the need for underground nuclear weapons testing. Achieving ignition provides unprecedented capability for this critical mission. As the only place on Earth where fusion ignition has been achieved

in a laboratory, NIF established the U.S. as the worldwide leader in this field. With the demonstration of ignition on the National Ignition Facility, what we were able to do at Lawrence the Rumor was demonstrate the basic scientific feasibility of fusion as a viable energy source for the future. We always knew that there was this potential and we've actually been able to generate fusion in the laboratory quite easily for a long, long time. What we were able to do with ignition was actually show that we could get more energy out of a fusion reaction than the energy that went in to actually drive the reaction. And this was an enormous breakthrough. It's like lighting a match and that turns

into this enormous bonfire of energy that you can then harness. So today, with one of our best experiments on the NIF, we've been able to get over twice as much energy out than the energy that went in to start the reaction. So what does achieving ignition mean practically? Issa Tamer is a laser scientist at Lawrence Livermore. We can produce much more energies in the interaction than the laser energy that we put in. And so that's where you can imagine

using this as an energy resource in the future to meet our energy demands, which will certainly be there. Fusion becomes energy efficient when the output energy exceeds the input, making it scientifically feasible and practical as a large scale energy resource. This principle is key to designing future fusion power plants where the energy generated would sustain the fusion process and power entire communities. It is the holy grail of energy. You often hear us call it limitless. So let's jump into the future a bit. How would a fusion power plant actually work? The current experiments on the NIF, we've achieved gains of 2.3. So 2.3 times more energy out than we put in. For a commercial power plant, you need gains of 50 to 100.

So there's still a bit more work we need to do to figure out how to make our targets better and to get us to those gains. A fusion power plant would need to shoot at about 10 times per second. Right now on the NIF we are an experimental facility so we only do experiments once every couple of hours or so. Gain refers to the ratio of energy produced by a reaction compared to the energy required to drive it.

At NIF a gain of 2.3 means the reaction produces 2.3 times the energy input from the lasers. So you might think, well, that's a really big jump from 2.3 to 50 to 100, and it is. There are many challenges that have to be resolved, but over the past decade, we've improved the gains on NIF by a factor of a thousand. And so we're excited in the next few years to continue increasing our gains, getting closer and closer to those numbers. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory invites you to join a diverse team of professionals. The lab is currently hiring for a lead power grid engineer, a laser modeling physicist, postdoctoral researcher, an OCEC program leader, a chief data architect, and 139 other positions for scientists, engineers,

IT experts, administrative and business professionals, welders, and more. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, your contributions are not just jobs. They're a chance to make an impact, from strengthening U.S. security to leading the charge in revolutionary energy solutions and expanding the boundaries of scientific knowledge. The lab values collaboration, innovation, and excellence, offering a supportive workspace and comprehensive benefits to ensure your well-being and secure your future. Seize the opportunity to help solve something monumental. Dive into the wide variety of job openings at LLNL.gov forward slash careers. This is your chance to join a team

dedicated to a mission that matters. That's LLNL.gov forward slash careers. Your expertise might just be the spotlight in our next podcast interview. Don't delay. NIF is a high-energy density physics experimental facility. It was not designed to be efficient in the way that a fusion power plant would need to be. The requirements for a fusion power plant are very different. An IFE power plant would have to fire about 10 shots a second or greater. And so not only do we have to have those much higher gains, you have to shoot much faster. While that's not possible on the NIF right now, it is still the only facility in the world where we can experiment at the fusion scale right now.

So it's very valuable and it allows us to learn and to explore some solutions to these challenges on our pathway to a fusion power plant. While fusion power plants may be a few decades away, the idea is ingenious. Once the plant is up and running, the energy it produces would sustain the fusion process itself, eliminating the need for an external power source. At the same time, it would generate enough electricity to power homes, businesses, and entire cities. You can eventually generate enough energy that you could keep the power plant itself

running and you wouldn't actually have to pull energy off the grid to fire up your lasers anymore, and you would have enough energy to actually feed out energy off the grid to fire up your lasers anymore. And you would have enough energy to actually feed out to run the grid. And so that's the idea of a fusion power plant. There are a lot of draws for an IFU power plant. One is that there will be an increase in demand of electricity in the next decade, and this will continue as we advance in society. And the energy sources that we have right now might not be able to keep up. So we need a new energy source that's ideally limitless. And what I mean by limitless is that we're not reliant on external environments, we're not reliant on other power sources.

This idea of a limitless energy source addresses one of the biggest challenges of current energy systems and their limitations. Their reliance on external factors like weather or geographic location. We can have reliable, continuous energy source that's not dependent on the weather, on the environment of where it's being placed. I think that's one of the major draws. So what you would see as the energy source becomes more abundant, there would be a decrease in the cost of electricity.

But the important part is that these types of power plants can be placed everywhere. You can imagine having much more reliable energy sources that don't shut down. Building a fusion power plant is a significant challenge and requires scientists to overcome many hurdles to transition from single fusion reactions to a continuous energy generating process. As we've discussed in previous episodes, scientists at the National Ignition Facility can produce a single fusion reaction in a tiny fuel pellet, where extreme heat and pressure created by powerful lasers trigger the reaction. The key to turning fusion into a practical and reliable energy source is to transition

from creating isolated reactions to sustaining them continuously in a controlled environment. The lasers that we have today still require more development in order to get them to be more efficient. As in, when you plug a laser into the wall and you draw energy off the grid to run that laser, how efficiently can you convert that energy into actual laser energy that you can use to compress your target?

So we need more efficient lasers. We need to bring down the cost of these lasers. And then there's a bunch more R&D that needs to be done to make sure that our optics can actually survive because our lasers are so energetic. Fusion energy is a global race. From government programs to private companies, Momentum is building to bring

fusion energy to the grid. We are hopeful that fusion will continue to get good support in Congress to fund the R&D. And right now, the Department of Energy is leaning hard into public-private partnerships, because we do realize that while the vast majority of the fusion expertise sits at the national labs and universities right now. We do need the private sector to come in and help us to transition these technologies to market, test out new ideas, accelerate and bringing in all these technologies together and turn it into a viable fusion power plant. Government and private sector collaboration is critical to turning fusion energy from a scientific achievement into a practical energy source. The U.S. government has spent over six decades investing in fusion research.

Now the focus is on building on that progress by working with both public and private sectors to drive innovation. This investment has gone into making the drivers for fusion better. In our case, we use lasers, but there are all kinds of different drivers that you can use for fusion to develop the technologies like target manufacturing, materials research, and to improve our computational models and how we use modeling and simulation to understand our fusion plasmas. Tammy is referring to the technologies used to create the extreme conditions needed for

fusion reactions. High heat, immense pressure, and precise control. At the National Ignition Facility, lasers are the driver of choice. But lasers aren't the only approach. Other drivers include magnetic confinement systems like Tokamaks, which use powerful magnetic fields to contain and compress plasma, and pulsed power systems which use intense bursts of electricity to generate the necessary conditions for fusion. Each of these methods offers unique benefits and challenges and together they represent

a diverse toolkit for advancing fusion research. Over the decades, there has been a buildup of enormous expertise at the national labs and universities that has been government funded. And now what we're looking to do is grow the fusion ecosystem and figure out how we can transfer out some of the technologies that have been developed here at Lawrence Livermore and in the public sector to support these private companies as they explore many different approaches to fusion and building fusion power plants. There's many thousands of researchers around the world working on these different approaches

to fusion across national labs, universities, private companies. I would say that in terms of understanding and controlling the physics of fusion, Lawrence Livermore and the inertial confinement fusion approach is the farthest along. We are the only ones in the world that have now achieved ignition and these states of plasmas that we call burning plasma. Burning plasma is a critical milestone in fusion research. It refers to a state where the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining, meaning the energy generated by the fusion process itself is enough to maintain the extreme conditions needed for the reaction to continue.

Scientists at the NIF have repeatedly reached this state, a significant advancement in developing fusion as a reliable energy source. The breakthroughs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are a glimpse into a future where fusion energy transforms the way we power the world. Fusion has the potential to provide clean, abundant energy and to meet the growing demands of an ever-advancing population. Fusion energy could become a cornerstone of a sustainable, equitable energy future, helping the nation achieve energy independence

and drive global progress. The same way the stars have lit humanity's past, fusion promises to eliminate a brighter, more sustainable future. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is opening its doors to a new wave of talent. Whether you're a scientist, an IT professional, Livermore National Laboratory is opening its doors to a new wave of talent. Whether you're a scientist, an IT professional, a welder, an administrative or business professional,

or an engineer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has an opportunity for you. From enhancing national security to pioneering new energy sources and advancing scientific frontiers, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is where you can make your mark on the world. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's culture is rooted in collaboration, innovation, and the pursuit of excellence. We offer a work environment that supports your professional growth

and a benefits package that looks after your wellbeing and future. Are you ready to contribute to work that matters? Visit llnl.gov forward slash careers to explore current job openings and learn more about the application process. Don't miss the chance to be a part of a mission-driven team working on projects that make the impossible possible. Visit LLNL.gov forward slash careers now to view the current job listings. Remember that's LLNL.gov forward slash careers now to view the current job listings. Remember, that's LLNL.gov forward slash careers.

Your expertise could be the highlight of our next podcast interview. Don't wait. Explore the possibilities today. Thanks for listening.