Progress toward Ignition and Burn Propagation in Inertial Confinement Fusion

Abstract

For the past four decades, scientists throughout the world have pursued the dream of controlled thermonuclear fusion. The attraction of this goal is the enormous energy that is potentially available in fusion fuels and the view of fusion as a safe, clean energy source. The fusion reaction with the highest cross section uses the deuterium and tritium isotopes of hydrogen, and D-T would be the fuel of choice for the first generation of fusion reactors. (See the article by J. Geoffrey Cordey, Robert J. Goldston and Ronald R. Parker, January, page 22.) Development of an economically viable fusion reactor would literally give us the energy equivalent of oceans of oil. Because seawater contains about 40 g of deuterium and 0.1 g of lithium per tonne, every barrel of seawater contains the energy equivalent of almost 30 barrels of oil in deuterium fuel and about one-fifth of a barrel of oil in D-T fuel (where tritium is obtained from neutron reactions on lithium). A volume of seawater equal to the top meter of the Earth's oceans would yield enough fuel to supply D-T fusion reactors for thousands of years of electricity production at today's rate of usage. The two primary approaches to developing fusion are magnetic confinement fusion, reviewed in the January issue of PHYSICS TODAY, and inertial confinement fusion, 1 reviewed in this article and the article by William J. Hogan, Roger Bangerter and Gerald L. Kulcinski on page 42. Significant elements of the work presented here were carried out under classified Department of Energy programs and have been only recently declassified. In its review of ICF 2 carried out in 1990, the National Academy of Sciences found the DOE classification guidelines for ICF

Experimental investigation of cylindrical converging shock waves interacting with a polygonal heavy gas cylinder

“…Si, T. Long, Z. Zhai and X. Luo theoretically and numerically by Richtmyer (1960) and then confirmed experimentally by Meshkov (1969). From then on, the RM instability has been widely studied due to its extensive applications in scientific and industrial fields such as inertial confinement fusion (ICF) (Lindl, McCrory & Campbell 1992), supernova explosion (Arnett et al 1989) and mixing of fuels in the scramjet (Yang, Kubota & Zukoski 1993). In the process of the RM instability, baroclinic vorticity will be generated in the flow field because of the misalignment between the density and pressure gradients, resulting in interpenetration and mixing between two fluids.…”

An experimental investigation of mixing mechanisms in shock-accelerated flow

“…In this case, there is a deposition of vorticity by the shock wave associated with the baroclinic term in the vorticity equation, ∇ρ × ∇p, if the density gradient (associated with the interface) and the pressure gradient (from the shock) are misaligned. RMI appears in a wide range of problems, including the collapse of supernovae (Arnett et al 1989), implosion of inertial confinement fusion capsules (Lindl, McCrory & Campbell 1992), and supersonic combustion (Yang, Kubota & Zukowski 1993).…”

Stopping, straggling, and blooming of directed energetic electrons in hydrogenic and arbitrary-Zplasmas

“…protons, α's, etc. ), either in the context of heating and/or ignition in, for example, inertially confined plasmas (ICF) [3][4][5][6][7]; or the use of these particles for diagnosing implosion dynamics [8].…”