Wed., November 28, 2012 5:45pm (EST)

A Short Fuse For Fusion As Ignition Misses Deadline
By Amy Standen
Updated: 1 year ago

A hydrogen-filled target called a hohlraum is displayed inside the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., on May 29, 2009.

NIF, as it's called, is a $5 billion, taxpayer-funded super-laser project whose goal is to create nuclear fusion basically a tiny star inside a laboratory. But so far, that hasn't happened.


The idea behind NIF is to direct a laser the size of a football field 192 lasers, actually at one tiny capsule the size of a peppercorn filled with hydrogen. It would create degrees of heat and pressure never before achieved in a lab.

"We will raise the temperature of the target to a hundred million degrees," Moses says. "That's higher temperature and more pressure than exists at the center of our sun."

That's so hot that the hydrogen atoms would enter into a state of controlled nuclear fusion. This is not nuclear fission, where energy is generated by splitting atoms that happens every day in nuclear power plants. It's the opposite fusion smashing them together.

And it's important to realize this concept, controlled nuclear fusion, is one of the most fabled dreams in science, something that's eluded generations of physicists.

So when NIF opened, there was a lot of excitement.

"I cannot wait for this to become a reality here," said California's then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was at NIF's dedication in 2009. George Miller, then the head of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where NIF is based, was there too. Everyone seemed to believe ignition that moment the fusion chain reaction begins was right around the corner.


Now, fast forward three and a half years.

"We just haven't gotten it to burn yet," Moses said last month. He has been doing a lot of these interviews lately, because Oct. 1 was a deadline, set by the agency that oversees NIF the National Nuclear Security Administration for the project to have achieved fusion. But they just can't get the conditions right.

And Moses doesn't put too much stock in deadlines.



For Christopher Paine, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, it'll be a giant "I-told-you-so" moment.


Why, in other words, are we doing this?


Reason No. 1: Clean energy.



Reason No. 2: Global security and weapons testing.






"It's not grand challenge science if you know the answer before you start," he says, "and this is exactly that."


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