A group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has announced the first yield of thermonuclear neutrons from an inertial-confinement fusion scheme that does not involve lasers. At the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Philadelphia, Ramon Leeper reported that he and his colleagues had performed an experiment at Sandia’s pulsed-power “Z Machine” (see Physics Today, June 1998, page 56) that produced some 3 × 1010 thermonuclear neutrons in the implosion of a small, spherical capsule of deuterium gas.
Thermonuclear weapons are powered by the fusion of deuterons with tritium nuclei. For almost half a century now, physicists have been seeking to harness DT fusion for the production of electric power. But the creation of a confined DT plasma hot and dense enough to ignite a self-sustaining burn remains an elusive goal.
The fusion reaction
