With more than 40 fusion development companies announcing plans and funding, it’s hard for a newcomer to stand out, but Pacific Fusion is giving it a try. The company, based in Fremont, Calif., was founded in summer 2023 and emerged from “stealth mode” last Friday with $900 million in committed funding from investors, a team that includes people directly involved in the successful ignition experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), and a technical paper that makes a case for a pulsed magnetic fusion approach to fusion energy.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has achieved fusion ignition at least five times, each time by directing its 192 high-powered lasers on a capsule containing a tiny, 2-millimeter target filled with hydrogen fuel. Not every shot achieves ignition, however. Tiny imperfections in the targets can mean fizzle, not fusion. But each of the targets used in successful experiments to date have something in common: they were characterized and selected by the 4Pi Integrated Metrology System, a new measurement system developed by General Atomics. Now, the team behind that system is being recognized.

GA announced last week that its Metrology Research and Development team had won the 2024 "Team of the Year" R&D 100 Professional Award from R&D World. The magazine that each year announces the R&D 100 awards that have been dubbed the “Oscars of Innovation” also selects just one “Team of the Year” and announces that award together with four other professional awards.

Lynne Degitz

Public and private sectors are actively advancing research and development and concepts to realize a path to practical, clean, safe fusion energy. New fusion performance records continue to be set around the world, including at the National Ignition Facility (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), which demonstrated fusion ignition in 2022 and 2023.

However, significant obstacles for practical fusion remain. One challenge is to create and sustain a fusion power source. That is the mission of the international ITER project and the fundamental reason ITER is so valuable to the United States and the other ITER members (China, Europe, India, Japan, Korea, and Russia). Now under assembly in France, ITER is an experimental facility that will provide essential data and experience while also reducing risk for other fusion concepts. ITER will deliver unprecedented self-heated fusion performance, including fusion gain of up to 10 times greater power out of the plasma than the power into the plasma, fusion power of up to 500 megawatts, and long durations of hundreds to thousands of seconds.

The National Nuclear Security Administration has issued the fiscal year 2023 results of the performance of its managing and operating (M&O) partners in meeting the agency’s expectations.

The same high energy density that makes nuclear energy a clean and efficient source of power could make it a good alternative to defend the planet against catastrophic asteroid impacts. NASA demonstrated the world’s first planetary defense technology in September 2022 by deliberately crashing a “kinetic impactor”—a heavy, box-like spacecraft—into an asteroid. Now, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have developed a new tool to model how a nuclear device could deflect—or even destroy—an asteroid threat to Earth in a more efficient and controlled way.

The Department of Energy recently announced that it was establishing three inertial fusion energy (IFE) hubs and funding them with a total of $42 million over four years. The leaders of the three hubs selected by competitive peer review—Colorado State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of Rochester—all issued press releases touting the attributes and plans of their facilities and their research collaborators on the same day—December 7.

One year ago today, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved a record shot at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) that set the world talking about the potential of fusion energy. And the buzz hasn’t stopped. Fusion energy is getting its most significant attention yet on the world stage at COP28 in Dubai, UAE, where John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, delivered a keynote address today titled “An inclusive fusion energy future,” followed by a panel discussion.

Focused Energy and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have signed a strategic partnership project agreement that will allow LLNL—home of the National Ignition Facility (NIF)—to help the company develop and assess isochoric compression target designs for inertial fusion energy. Focused Energy announced the news on November 7.

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has published a notice of a final sitewide environmental impact statement for continued operation of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL SWEIS).

The notice was published in the Federal Register on November 3.

Through its Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program (MSIPP) and Tribal Education Partnership Program (TEPP), the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded five grants totaling $2.5 million to minority-serving institutions (MSIs) and tribal colleges and universities (TCUs).

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory hosted current and former staff, government officials, and media on May 8 to celebrate the lab’s achievement of fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) on December 5, 2022. Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm and undersecretary for nuclear security and National Nuclear Security Administration administrator Jill Hruby were in attendance, and Granholm took the opportunity to announce funding of up to $45 million to support inertial fusion energy (IFE) research and development. The Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE-SC) wants to establish multiple IFE Science and Technology Innovation Hubs (IFE S&T hubs), with total funding for 2023 of up to $9 million for projects lasting up to four years in duration.

Physicist Andrea “Annie” Kritcher’s dedication to fusion target design has earned her a spot on the TIME100 Most Influential People list for 2023. Today, Kritcher and 99 other individuals on that list—among them Elon Musk, King Charles, Judy Blume, Patrick Mahomes, Beyoncé, Lionel Messi, Janet Yellen, and MrBeast—are being honored at the TIME100 Summit and Gala at the Lincoln Center in New York City.

Fusion energy research has seen exciting recent breakthroughs. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has achieved ignition,^1,2 and in the United Kingdom, the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy’s Joint European Torus (JET) has produced a record 59 megajoules of fusion energy.³ Against this backdrop of advances, we provide an account of the earliest fusion discoveries from the 1930s to the 1950s.* Some of this technical history has not been previously appreciated—most notably the first 1938 reporting of deuterium-tritium (DT) 14-MeV neutrons at the University of Michigan by Arthur Ruhlig.⁴ This experiment had a critical role in inspiring early thermonuclear fusion research directions. This article presents some unique insights from the extensive holdings within Los Alamos National Laboratory’s archives—including sources typically unavailable to a broad audience.

“Star Power” is the name 60 Minutes producers gave their interpretation of the recent experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) that achieved fusion ignition and net gain. Views from inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory captured by TV cameras and aired Sunday, January 15—of some of NIF’s 192 lasers, banks of capacitors, target assembly labs, and even the remains of the target assembly blasted in the December 5 breakthrough—are well worth the watch for those of us who are unlikely to visit the site in person.

On December 5, researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved fusion energy breakeven. It was a gain for stockpile stewardship that also—as headlines gushed prior to the Department of Energy’s December 13 announcement—boosted the prospects of inertial fusion energy (IFE). The timing of the landmark achievement may have been especially welcome to private fusion companies with inertial or hybrid magneto-inertial confinement concepts, because it occurred as the DOE was getting ready to consider applications for $50 million in funding for fusion pilot plant design work.

It’s official: Early in the morning on December 5 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), the laser-triggered implosion of a meticulously engineered capsule of deuterium and tritium about the size of a peppercorn yielded, for the first time on Earth, more energy from a fusion reaction than was delivered to the capsule. The input of 2.05 megajoules (MJ) to the target heated the diamond-shelled, spherical capsule to over 3 million degrees Celsius and yielded 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output. The achievement was announced earlier today by officials and scientists representing the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration, the White House, and LLNL during a livestreamed event.

LA GRANGE PARK, Illinois – American Nuclear Society (ANS) President Steven Arndt and ANS CEO and Executive Director Craig Piercy issued the following statement:

"The American Nuclear Society and the Fusion Energy Division of the American Nuclear Society congratulate the National Ignition Facility (NIF) team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for their achievement in reaching the scientific energy breakeven milestone for fusion ignition.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Oregon State University (OSU) have developed a promising new method to isolate and study some of the rarest elements on Earth. Focused first on curium, they have identified three new complexes containing curium ions and revealed the molecules’ 3D structures, as well as previously unknown features.

Just over one year ago, on August 8, 2021, researchers achieved a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) for the first time, achieving scientific ignition and getting closer to fusion gain.

The scientific results of the historic experiment were published exactly one year later in three peer-reviewed papers: one in Physical Review Letters and two (an experimental paper and a design paper) in Physical Review E. In recognition of the many individuals who worked over decades to enable the ignition milestone, more than 1,000 authors are included on the Physical Review Letters paper.

Operators at the Savannah River Site’s Solid Waste Management Facility can now characterize and certify newly generated TRU waste through the use of a real-time radiography unit that uses an X-ray system to examine the contents of waste containers. The equipment was recently installed to meet updated requirements set by the Department of Energy’s National TRU Program that involve evaluating the containers for chemical compatibility and oxidizing chemicals.

The shipments of TRU waste from SRS, in South Carolina, are sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), in New Mexico, for disposal.