Creating Stars, Powering the World - Here Comes Fusion!

Fusion power, clean and limitless, long elusive to scientists,
may be headed our way sooner than many suspected thanks to a
breakthrough experiment in early December at the Lawrence
Livermore National Lab (LLNL) in California. In this episode of
Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Annie Kritcher, the
physicist who designed the successful experiment that recreated
the energy source of the sun.


She explained: “What we’re doing here is essentially creating a
miniature star in a lab about the size of a human hair to half
the size of the human hair. We have 192 giant lasers and when we
say giant, that means that the whole system that is used to
create this laser energy and all the details associated with it,
it’s the size of three football fields when you put all of the
192 laser beams together.”  


Fusion research has been going on for decades, but the December
experiment is a significant breakthrough and represents a new
approach. 


“The thing that’s different this time is that for the first time
we’ve actually demonstrated in the laboratory that we can achieve
fusion energy gain in a controlled way. Before that, we’ve never
actually generated fusion energy output that was controlled in a
laboratory setting. This result motivates and is a proof of
principal for all the different approaches out there,” said
Kritcher.


That increases the likelihood of success.


“There’s also a huge resurgence in the number of people working
in this area and the different approaches that are being looked
at and when you have that many people looking at a problem, the
progress is highly accelerated.”


Dr. Annie Kritcher is the design lead within the Inertial
Confinement Fusion (ICF) team as part of the National Ignition
Facility at LLNL. Dr. Kritcher started at LLNL as a summer intern
in 2004. 


She earned a PhD in Nuclear Engineering and Plasma Physics and a
MS Nuclear Engineering from the University of California,
Berkeley. Annie earned her BS in Nuclear Engineering and
Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan.