Shortly after the House and Senate united to protect the Department of Energy’s inertial confinement fusion program from some proposed austerity next fiscal year, the program’s emblematic National Ignition Facility shattered its own record for neutron yield.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the milestone Tuesday, about a week after the Aug. 8 shot in which a 1.9 megajoule (MJ) pulse of the National Ignition Facility’s (NIF) laser array created a fission reaction inside of a tiny capsule that yielded 1.3 MJ, the lab wrote in a press release.
The fusion energy output achieved was 25 times greater than the previous NIF record of 54 kilojoules, the lab said.
New NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby hailed the milestone in the Livermore press release and, around the same time the release hit, banner stories popped up in publications such as the New York Times, Physics Today, and Science, the in-house magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Word of the NIF milestone also leaked out of Livermore on Monday, if not before, following an internal email from lab Director Kim Budil.
It was a media firestorm for NIF, which had all but completed its big pivot to nuclear weapon support from fusion energy research.
The facility was heading into the coming fiscal year with a mandate from the National Nuclear Security Administration to focus on a recommendation from the Government Accountability Office that NIF begin “acquiring information at the current scales to justify cost, scope, and schedule for any future investments in experimental capability.”
In combination with supercomputers, NIF and other inertial confinement fusion facilities across the civilian nuclear weapons complex can help weapons designers and stockpile stewards study nuclear-weapon components and materials under conditions similar to a thermonuclear explosion.
The Joe Biden administration had proposed a $530 million budget for the entire fusion portfolio in 2022, a $5 million trim compared with 2021 under which the program would have used leftover funding from this year to pay for experiments next year.
The Senate Appropriations Committee in July, like the full House before it, declined to go along with the administration’s plan and instead penciled in a $5 million year-over-year increase for inertial confinement fusion in 2022, to $580 million.
