Sometime during the next two years, physicists are expecting to achieve a long-sought milestone in fusion research: ignition and high energy gain. That breakthrough won’t be happening at ITER, the international collaboration that is building a reactor in France, but at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) for nuclear weapons–related experiments that was completed two years ago at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
In the quest to develop nuclear fusion as a bountiful source of clean energy, the inertial confinement route, in which high-powered lasers implode tiny capsules of fuel to fuse heavy isotopes of hydrogen, has long been seen as the underdog. The magnetic confinement approach, in which powerful magnetic fields are used to bottle up plasmas of deuterium and tritium that are heated to more than 100 million K, has been pursued for decades by the US and other industrialized nations in the hope that it will become a...
