LASER FUSION

This is Part 3 in my series on fusion.  My favorite option is laser fusion, probably because after gaining my PhD building a tunable laser before one could be purchased, I went on to become a faculty member of the University of Hawaii, spending my first summer assignment forty years ago at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as a staff member of the laser fusion team under Edward Teller.  LLNL is a science lab, where physicists dominated.  As an engineer, I was a second class citizen, for we were there to serve the masters.  Back in those days no one could yet envision what type of laser would be used for the ultimate commercial facility.  Four decades later, they still have no firm idea on this important detail.  

It can be said that our nation is covering ourselves by participating in the ITER magnetic confinement effort (see previous posting), while harboring hopes for the National Ignition Facility (NIF, above) at LLNL.  Here is the fusion budget:

It cost $3.5 billion to construct NIF, with 192 laser beams.  However, for fiscal year 2013, the project will receive only $84 million, $26 million less than last year.  In short, the Feds have warned LLNR, get net positive this coming year or face further cuts.  This is an important point I haven't yet mentioned:  NO FUSION TECHNOLOGY HAS YET ATTAINED NET POSITIVE ON PLANET EARTH.  This will become the first...if it succeeds.  Project staffers are hopeful that this epochal achievement will happen this (coming?) year.  When I last year predicted that the Higgs Boson would be found in August of this year, I also indicated that LLNL would succeed last month.  Let me adjust my wild guess by giving them until January 2013, thus beating ITER by about a dozen years.

What will NIF do?  It will zap a tritium droplet (1 mg, with a diameter less than human hair) for a few trillionths of a second.  The temperature created will exceed 100 million Kelvin (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) and density 100 billion times as we currently face on the surface of our planet.  You thought those ITER conditions were extreme?  Here, because crucial inertial confinement requirements must be made, the pressures are extraordinary.  This special environment has only previously been attained by the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago and the centers of exploding H-Bombs and stars.  Still, NIF does not have enough oomph to create a Black Hole.

I should add that there are several other countries advancing laser fusion development.  To be commissioned any day now is the French Megajoule near Bordeaux (left), about the same power, with 240 beams.  The Russian version is still a decade away, but will be at least 50% larger than the LLNL laser.  China, South Korea and Japan also have active programs.  I love the names picked:  Divine Light (China), Orion (U.K.) and Gekko (Japan).  

One more facet of laser fusion is that in some countries (you can guess which ones), the nuclear weapons potential of this Death Ray is obvious.  In our country, this now goes by the term, nuclear stockpile stewardship.  It is possible that the primary motivation of laser fusion might well still be related to military needs.  However, it might be fortunate that there is some defense component to laser fusion, for this support only advances the potential for the peaceful applications of fusion.  Plus:

For a good few years now, nuclear fusion has looked like offering a solution to the problem. For every 100 tonnes of coal we burn, fusion has the potential to deliver the same amount of energy, without any carbon dioxide emission, using a small bath of water and the lithium contained in a single laptop battery. Moreover, it would be inherently very safe and would not produce any significant radioactive waste. Lest there be any confusion, the science behind this way of harnessing the energy locked away inside the atomic nucleus is entirely different from that used in current nuclear fission reactors. It almost seems too good to be true … but it isn't.

Like ITER, NIF is just a step towards commercialization.  The next one will be a Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE, right) demonstration in the 2020's, firing 10-15 shots per second (NIF can only do 3 shots/day).  However, tritium is rare, not like deuterium, so LIFE will breed it's own tritium as part of the process.  The next step is expected to be 500 to 1000 MW commercial power plants by 2030.  While this is ridiculously optimistic, who knows, this is not impossible.

Let me end by editorializing on the budget of the U.S. Department of Energy.  Approximately $4 billion goes to energy R&D.  FISSION gets a little more than 41%, FUSION 21%, and the renewables 19%. However, energy is only 16% the budget of the USDOE.  Nuclear weapons dominate.  What is particularly depressing is that the Obama nuclear weapons budget, including inflation, is 15% higher than during the Reagan days while the Cold War was still on.  Finally:

There are two types of fusion: magnetic confinement (that donut or torus shaped machine, as being developed as ITER in France at a cost that is now expected to exceed $20 billion, just for the prototype), and inertial confinement, epitomized by laser experiments at our national laboratories. Both of these methods have undergone more than half a century of intensive research at a cost of more than $22.4 billion...and only in the USA. Look at it this way, we will spend three times more on the Stealth bomber just this coming year and this amount is only 72 days of the war in Afghanistan. Or, get this, $22.4 billion is one-fifth of Wall Street executive bonuses this past year!

This quote comes from one of my Huffington Post articles written just about a year ago:  Starpower for Humanity--heavy-ion fusion, the focus in Part 4 of my fusion series.  Are we, as a nation, taking Peak Oil and Global Warming seriously?  No.  The budget for WAR overwhelms.

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Tropical Storm Jelawat at 50 MPH seems to be headed straight for the Philippines at this point, but models predict a turn northward, increasing to at least a Category 3 typhoon by the middle of next week, skimming the northeast coast of the country, then a track towards Taiwan.

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LASER FUSION FINALLY ATTAINS NET POSITIVE....NOT!!!

The ultimate energy is fusion, a process which combines hydrogen or its isotopes to produce energy and helium.  All the stars in the Universe use this mechanism.  Depending on the parameter, hydrogen is from 70 to 90% of known matter.  However, this might not mean much, for scientists have determined that only 4% of what we see and can measure is known:  dark energy and matter take up 96% of the Universe.

Nevertheless, I was so intrigued about the prospects of man-made fusion that, soon after gaining my PhD building a tunable laser, forty years ago, I found myself working for Edward Teller at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNR) on laser fusion.  Alas, I was disappointed that the type of laser to accomplish the commercialization of fusion was way beyond the capability of science, and I wrote this option off as a real prospect during my lifetime.

As some background, there are two types of fusion:

• Magnetic confinement schemes generally use a torus or donut.  This is the design of the 500 MW ITER (once known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), an $18 billion partnership of 35 nations (the USA contributes $200 million/year) to build such a facility at Cadarache, France for initial testing in 2027.  This concept was selected because in 1997 the British Joint European Torus produced 16 MW from an input of 24 MW, 65% of the way to net positive.  Nothing like some optimism, for the European Union already is planning for DEMO, a 2000 MW fusion facility to produce continuous power by 2040 for commercialization by 2050.  From what I've seen, don't hold your breath for this particular system to make it.

• Inertial confinement, usually using a laser, as is being developed by LLNR National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Livermore, California.  The cost is coasting to $5 billion, using 192 lasers to compress a BB-sized capsule of deuterium-tritium (the two isotopes of hydrogen):

Three years ago I posted on Star Power for the Huffington Post.  Last year, it was reported that the NIF produced almost twice the amount of energy as was inputted, and ignition was attained.  Breakthrough?  Well, good, but not terrific, as the laser shot represented only 1% of the energy that was used to produce the beam.  Thus, the ratio remained under one, or, something close to 2% efficiency.  Remember that the 1997 European donut produced 65% of net positive.

There is another pathway:  Heavy Ion Fusion.  Read the details by the president of Fusion Power Corporation, Charles Helsley:

So where are we on man-made fusion power?  Sixty years ago, controlled fusion was 30-40 years away...or we should have gotten there by the year 1995.  Today, the prospects for commercialization remain 30-40 years away.  The ITER option is further along because more money is being spent for that option than at Livermore.  Much more.

What about Cold Fusion?   It remains on the fringe, with little real government interest, but there are a few opportunities.   Intriguing stories now and then pop up, like Italian Leonardo Rossi's Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat).  The concept appears to be losing support, and Forbes last week leaned in the clownerie direction.  Read the Cold Fusion Times.  This mechanism is now referred to as Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.

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STAR POWER FOR HUMANITY

Nearly a dozen years ago I wrote an article for The Huffington Post on Star Power for Humanity.  The latest June issue of Scientific American featured Star Power: What is the future of fusion energy?  You can click on that link for the full article.  I'll summarize:

• This past December, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNR) claimed a breakthrough in attaining net positive with their laser fusion system.  No one had ever done that before.

• 
  As an aside, I worked there in the 1970's on that project, and left because I could not envision the laser that would accomplish this task.  Can you believe that was around half a century ago?
• The bad news is that net positive is a long way from commercialization.  And certainly, that intriguing ultimate laser has not yet been invented.

• 
  Well anyway, this article was written by Philip Ball, a British science writer who is my same age.  He has a PhD in physics from Bristol University.  Easy to read Sci Am article with no equations.

• 
  His next book will be How Life Works, which has not yet been released.
• Says Ball, commercial fusion is 20 years away, or maybe 30 or 50...or more.
• But fusion is the answer to global warming.  The question is whether it will arrive in time.
• Enrico Fermi, who built the foundation for the first atomic bomb, envisioned a future for fusion reactors.

• 
  This I again add.  I worked for Edward Teller at LLNR.  He invented the Hydrogen Bomb.  That is also star power, but uncontrolled.
• Says Omar Hurricane of that lab, We're basically making stars on Earth.

• 
  The most popular fusion design does not use a laser,  A Tokamak reactor is currently being pursued by ITER in France.  Stands for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and, appropriately enough, this acronym in Latin means "the way."  But the magnetic confinement process (a laser uses inertial confinement, which minimizes materials issues) is awesomely difficult to develop and there has been a series of delays.  A remarkable international alliance proceeds, but I don't see commercialization until after 2050, if ever.  That other pathway using a laser has the USA as the clear world leader.

• 
  Various private initiatives are also in the running, but with minimal funding.
• The Father of the Tokamak, Soviet fusion visionary Lev Artsimovich, once said that the world will have nuclear fusion when it decides it needs it.  

• 
  More recently, Ian Chapman of the UK has said, when we realize what climate change will do as an existential threat, the delivery of fusion will accelerate enormously.

So on the one hand we have fission power using heavy elements like uranium and plutonium which is rapidly gaining obsolescence for cost and a range of unknowns ranging from terrorism potential to radioactive waste storage to accidents.  Chernobyl and Fukushima feed those fears.

If only the U.S. government had chosen to develop thorium for power, we might not today be troubled by these problems.  More than a decade ago I had dinner with the undisputed champion of this pathway, Kirk Sorensen.  Watch his TED talk on this subject.

Then, on the other hand, we have Star Power, or fusion, which is inherently safer with fuel said to be available for many centuries, if not forever.

• But commercialization will take time...maybe too long.  

• 
  Further, there is the controversy about fuel availability.  
• Stars use hydrogen (also called protium) to produce energy.  
• Humanity cannot currently attain the conditions in the middle of these hot bodies, and require a combination of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen.  

• 
  Tritium might not be so readily available.  
• However, sufficient funds have historically been allocated to develop both forms of fusion, so those who know must be comfortable with the ultimate availability of the fuel for fusion.  
• I'm accept that viewpoint.
• 
  In any case, I still have not written off cold fusion, which remains sufficiently intriguing.
• Plus there can still be the Hydrogen Economy, a world someday operating with a combination of green electricity and hydrogen.  This gaseous fuel will especially be crucial for next generation aviation, articulated in my HuffPo of 14 years ago.

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WHAT IS THE STATE OF FUSION TODAY?

Wednesday is sci-tech day for this blog site.  But before getting into that, first, a comment about viewership.  

• Google runs my blog.
• This is why, in my transition to being replaced by Artificial Intelligence, I turn to Google AI.

• I have two daily sites with the same posting.
• The original one began 17 years ago and ran out of links to the internet:  This blog site initially focused on renewable energy and the environment. But that was SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth. My next book, SS for Humanity, opened the subject area to everything else, including SETI, the afterlife, travel and cuisine. However, I still provide, now and then, SIMPLE SOLUTIONS.
• Thus, a few years ago I in parallel started another blog site with the same posting of the day:  New SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for PLANET EARTH AND HUMANITY: This blog site derives from the original version of Planet Earth & Humanity, but will be more WE than ME. The coverage will remain similar, but perhaps these postings will seem to come from a parallel universe, or maybe even Purgatory. But truth and reality will prevail, with dashes of whimsy and levity to help make your day.
• 
  Since the beginning, the combined sites have averaged a little more than 500 viewers/day, and have reached 211 countries.  More than the number in the United Nations because domains like Antarctica have their own address.

• 
  This blog site began with a focus on science and technology, reflecting my book on SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth.
• A year later, I published SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity, which covered topics new to me, like religion, education and the like.
• Feedback was such that people who read this blog more liked my travel postings than the scientific ones.

• 
  I thus expanded the site to write about what was on my mind when I went to the computer each morning.
• When we began our monumental Orient trip in November of 2025, a journey that took two months, like in the past, viewership went up to 5,000/day.
• Yesterday, it shot passed 16,000.  I guess Elvis is popular.
• Read about The Resurrection Elvis in the original format.
• Or the new one.

About President Donald Trump's State of the Union talk last night.

• Missed it?  Here is the entire speech, breaking the record with longest State of the Union Address in history.  How long?  1 hour and 47 minutes, exceeding his own record set last year.
• How good or bad was this effort?  Depends on who remarks.
• I thought it was boring, but okay. Brought in emotional glories.  Yes, I watched the whole thing.
• From Google AI:

President 

Donald Trump

 delivered his first official State of the Union address of his second term on Tuesday, February 24, 2026. Lasting approximately one hour and 48 minutes, it set a new record as the longest State of the Union address in modern history. 

Key Highlights and Themes

• The Economy: Trump declared the U.S. economy to be in a "golden age" and a "turnaround for the ages," claiming inflation is "plummeting". He touted his 2025 tax cuts and argued that his tariff policies would eventually replace the federal income tax.
• Immigration: He defended a hardline immigration agenda, citing the "strongest and most secure border" in history, while sparring with Democrats over enforcement tactics.
• Domestic Proposals: Trump called for a permanent ban on institutional investors buying single-family homes to address housing costs and proposed a plan for the tech industry to provide its own power for AI data centers to lower community utility bills.
• Foreign Policy: He touched briefly on Iran, vowing to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons, and praised a "new partnership" with Venezuela following recent military interventions there. 
• Notable Moments
• Honoring Heroes: The address featured several emotional tributes, including awarding Purple Hearts to National Guardsmen and recognizing the gold medal-winning U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team.
• Partisan Tension: The atmosphere was highly combative. Approximately 73 Democrats boycotted the event, and those in attendance often sat in silence. Rep. Al Green (D-TX) was escorted out early for protesting.
• Supreme Court: Trump addressed the court directly, calling a recent ruling that struck down his emergency tariffs "unfortunate" and "totally wrong"
• Reactions
• Viewership Polls: A CNN/SSRS poll found that 64% of speech-watchers had a positive reaction, though this audience leaned 13 points more Republican than the general public.

• Democratic Response: Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger delivered the Democratic rebuttal, accusing the president of lying and "scapegoating" rather than solving the "affordability crisis".

I then asked Google AI, what did the FOX streaming news channel say about the address:

• In summary, Fox News coverage framed the 2026 State of the Union as a resoundingly successful and high-energy speech that solidified Republican enthusiasm while contrasting sharply with the opposition.
• Praise for a "Home Run" Speech: Conservative commentators and hosts, including those on Fox Business, labeled the address a "home run" and a "colossus" of an "amazingly patriotic speech".
• There was more.

Interesting, but I asked Google AI what MS Now said about Trump's speech.  No matter how I asked, my query was ignored.  So I went to a state of Washington NBC local station in Yakima:

MS NOW: Rachel Maddow Blasts Trump’s ‘Wound Up & Weird’ SOTU Speech

Here is a You Tube video of the above.  An NBC article fact-checking of his speech.  Haven't seen a Nielsen poll on the address last night, but with an increasing population, these State of the Union talks are losing the public's interest.

My professional career covered all the renewable energies, plus nuclear fusion.  I spent two assignments at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on laser fusion, and ran the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii, where I had researchers focus on cold fusion.  My PhD dissertation involved building a tunable laser for a bioreactor.

First, some science for fusion vs fission:

• Fission occurs with the splitting of heavy elements like uranium and plutonium to produce energy, a good example is the Atomic Bomb, as was used twice on Japan near the end of World War II.  Watch the 2023 Oppenheimer, rated 93/91 by Rotten Tomatoes. All nuclear power plants today use this process.

• 
  Fusion is the merging of hydrogen molecules to produce helium and energy, as the Hydrogen Bomb.
• The most powerful A-Bomb was Fat Man over Nagasaki at 21 kilotons.
• The most powerful H-Bomb was the Russian Tsar Bomba, exploded in 1962, at 50,000 kilotons.
• In all stars, like our Sun, four hydrogen protons are combined to form helium and immense power.  
• The typical core temperature range is between 10-15 million Kelvin.
• Zero Kelvin equals -273.15 Celsius.
• 
  On Earth, researchers, such as for ITER in France, heat hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, to over 100 million K, creating a plasma state where atomic nuclei overcome repulsion to fuse and release energy using magnetic confinement, or something like a Tokamak reactor, which is donut shaped.  
• Net-positive energy is  expected in 2035, but this is widely optimistic.
• Could cost $65 billion to do that.

• 
  A competing fusion concept, inertial confinement, is used at the Lawerence Livermore National Laboratory, employing intense laser beams to inertially confine droplets of these two isotopes.
• Energy breakeven (net-positive energy) was attained on 5December2022 using 192 lasers, producing an energy output of 3.15 MJ.
• Cost to attain that goal was $3.5 billion.
• I worked at the Lawrence Livermore Lab twice on this project in the 1970s.  I left the field because I thought the laser for commercialization was not close to being developed.  Note, this was HALF a Century ago.
• A neodymium-doped phosphate glass laser system was used at LLNR.
• It is speculated that the eventual commercial laser will likely rely on diode-pumped solid-state, krypton fluoride gas, short-pulse petawatt-scale or an advanced Nd-glass system.
• In other words, they still don't know.
• 
  Which fusion process is more promising?
• ITER might reach net-positive from 2035-2039 at a cost of $65 billion.
• A commercial laser fusion plant is projected to cost $5 billion.
• Maybe I'm prejudiced, but laser fusion seems more promising than ITER fusion.

Something more has happened in this field.  From Google AI:

The global industry is rapidly accelerating the development of nuclear fusion, shifting from purely scientific research to commercial engineering, with over 

$9.7 billion in private investment attracted as of July 2025. Companies are now building pilot plants, developing high-temperature superconducting magnets, and applying artificial intelligence to achieve net-energy fusion and deliver power to the grid by the 2030.

Several leading startups have announced specific dates for grid-ready power: 

• Helion Energy: Plans to bring a 50 MW fusion plant online by 2028 through a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Microsoft.
• Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS): Aims to turn on its SPARC demonstration device in 2027 and a commercial 400 MW plant (ARC) in Virginia by the early 2030s.

• 
  TAE Technologies: Recently announced a plan to merge with Donald Trump's social media company to accelerate development.
• General Fusion: Developing a magnetized target fusion plant in the UK, aiming for commercial operation by the early 2030s

How are these firms being funded?

• Sam Altman: Invested over 
  

  $\$1$
   billion in Helion Energy, which has a contract with Microsoft to provide power by 2028.

• 
  Bill Gates: Backs Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), which is building the SPARC net-energy fusion plant in Massachusetts, and Type One Energy, which is working on stellarator technology.

• 
  Jeff Bezos: Through Bezos Expeditions, he has invested in General Fusion, a Canadian company building a commercial fusion power plant.

• 
  Peter Thiel: Invested in Helion Energy through Mithril Capital Management.
• Other Investors: Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, and Dustin Moskovitz are investors in CFS.
• These moguls seem to more like magnetic confinement.  I asked Google AI:  Is there any hope for cold fusion to some day attain reality.

• 

Whether cold fusion (now often called Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions, or LENR) will ever become a reality is a subject of intense debate, sitting on the boundary between fringe science and a possible "hidden" breakthrough. While the scientific community generally regarded the 1989 claims as a failure, a small, dedicated group of researchers and some private funding have kept the field alive.

 

One final 2026 Winter Olympic note, this from The Loop, Stanford Alumni Association and STANFORD magazine.

On the final day of the 2026 Winter Olympics, Eileen Gu and Zoe Atkin, both ’26 (mostly means they both began as freshmen in 2022, but they had major leaves of absence, so 2027 would be a more accurate year for graduation), took gold and bronze, respectively, in the women’s freeski halfpipe. The medal was Gu’s third of these Games and sixth overall, making her the most decorated freeskier in Olympic history.

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