Prospects for high gain inertial fusion energy: an introduction to the second edition

Abstract

Part II of this special edition contains the remaining 11 papers arising from a Hooke discussion meeting held in March 2020 devoted to exploring the current status of inertial confinement fusion research worldwide and its application to electrical power generation in the future, via the development of an international inertial fusion energy programme. It builds upon increased coordination within Europe over the past decade by researchers supported by the EUROFusion Enabling Research grants, as well as collaborations that have arisen naturally with some of America's and Asia's leading researchers, both in the universities and national laboratories. The articles are devoted to informing an update to the European roadmap for an inertial fusion energy demonstration reactor, building upon the commonalities between the magnetic and inertial fusion communities’ approaches to fusion energy. A number of studies devoted to understanding the physics barriers to ignition on current facilities are then presented. The special issue concludes with four state-of-the-art articles describing recent significant advances in fast ignition inertial fusion research. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Prospects for high gain inertial fusion energy (part 2)’.

Energy gain of wetted-foam implosions with auxiliary heating for inertial fusion studies

“…These simulations focused on subignition implosions, and suggested that this technique could potentially be an effective way at improving the fusion performance of these implosions. While [16] considered directdrive implosions, similar results have previously been demonstrated for indirect-drive implosions [27]. An ongoing collaboration between IBM Research and the University of Oxford aims to develop a multi-scale modeling capability to improve simulations of this technique, through the use of multiple different codes [28].…”