In August 2021, after decades of effort and advances, an experiment at NIF reached the threshold of fusion ignition. The indirect-drive inertial confinement fusion approach was pioneered primarily at NIF, which is steadily advancing the field. Unlike most fusion startups around the world, who are devoted to magnetic confinement fusion, which taps magnetic and electric fields to heat and compress hydrogen plasma, Focused Energy’s approach is direct-drive proton-fast ignition.ĭirect-drive proton-fast ignition involves directly imploding fusion fuel with lasers by focusing long-pulse lasers onto the pellet to compresses it, blasting it with a 150 kJ short-pulse laser, and then hitting a nearby target to produce a burst of protons that ignites the pellet. 1).ĭitmire is one of four co-founders of Focused Energy, which also has significant operations in Darmstadt, Germany. “2029 is admittedly a very aggressive timescale, but the pressure is coming from the growing realization we need a carbon-free solution that has capacity well beyond standard solar, wind, hydro methods,” says Todd Ditmire, a physics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the director of the Center for High Energy Density Science, which houses the Texas Petawatt Laser (see Fig. and the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) Beamlines project in the Czech Republic. Why? It’s a promising avenue for clean energy production because it’s safe, environmentally friendly, and efficient.Ī startup fusion company, Focused Energy (Austin, TX), is working on an ambitious project to field a credible ignition experiment by the end of 2029-drawing inspiration from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) in the U.S.
The race to help save the planet by producing clean energy is on and high-intensity lasers using chirped-pulse amplification are being explored for fusion energy.
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