Contributions on Laser Driven Inertial Confinement Fusion

Abstract

The following modified preprint of a chapter in the forthcoming book by Guillermo Velarde and Natividad Carpintero Santamaria <i>Inertial Confinement Nuclear Fusion: A Historical Approach by its Pioneers</i> with personal comments is presented here as an example about the long years difficult developments towards the aim for producing unlimited, safe and clean nuclear energy in the same way as it is the energy source of the sun. There are arguments that the most recent developments with the plasma block ignition using petawatt-picosecond laser pulses may lead to a fusion power station with a highly simplified operation such that the cost of electricity may be three or more times lower than any energy source on earth, opening the golden age with dramatic consequences for human life and the environment. Applied sciences in all fields, economics and politics may be stimulated just by considering these consequences though these new results on Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) need to be further examined and developed on a broad basis

Distinguished celebration for Professor Georg H. Miley by the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, USA

“…In order to pioneer this Miley had a chance to use the experiments with relativistic electron beams at Cornell University, aimed for another fusion direction by Norman Rostocker and Hans Fleischmann. Electron beam pumping of uniform semiconductors for laser emission experiments were reported before by Hurwitz et al (1964) where the electron beam flux threshold and the necessary sample geometry was identical with the predicted calculations published at a colloquium at the Siemens Research Laboratory in Munich in April 1964 and distributed by Benoist de la Guillome at the semiconductor conference in Paris, June 1964 (see Hora, 2005). In contrast to this, the CO 2 laser was from the beginning based on gas discharges, but to apply electron beam excitation was first done by Miley and subsequently led to his pioneering excitation of excimer lasers by e-beam irradiation of noble gases mixed with fluorine (Miley, 1972).…”

Volume ignition of 3He pellets

“…Over three decades ago, taking into account the losses by fuel depletion and bremsstrahlung and also heating by the (partial) reabsorption in the pellet, and including the reheat effect of charged particles and with some more improvements in former model of inertial fusion, a theoretical model based on self-similarity dynamics was discovered and introduced to simulate the ignition conditions in fusion fuel microspheres and this model was named as 'Volume Ignition' [1,8,9]. Twenty years ago Institute of Laser Engineering at Osaka University demonstrated that fusion gains from laser irradiated pellets result when central shocks (associated with Central Spark Ignition Model) are avoided, and an ideal volume compression (associated with volume ignition model) is achieved [10][11][12].…”

New aspects for fusion energy using inertial confinement

“…This paper is an extension of my contribution to the Pioneers Session at the ECLIM conference in Madrid, Spain, June 11-16, 2006~Velarde & Santamaria, 2006Hora, 2005a!. I have included additional general remarks by Cartridge ~2006!…”

“…This is similar to the ignition by very intense sub-relativistic ion beams ~Osman et al., 2004;Hora et al, 2005!, where the observation of the very anomalous laser-plasma interaction of ps-TW laser pulses ~Zhang et Badziak et al, 1999!, by avoid-ing relativistic self-focusing ~Sauerbrey, 1996! could be explained as a skin layer process ~Hora et Hora, 2003Hora, , 2005aBadziak et al, 2003Badziak et al, , 2004Badziak et al, , 2005aBadziak et al, , 2005b Due to personal reasons, my paper was presented at the ECLIM Conference by Professor Milan Kalal, Technical University Prague, whose kind endeavors are acknowledged with great thanks.…”