Livermore Scientists Share Experiences Leading Up to Historic Breakthrough | Livermore News

LIVERMORE – The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) brought the world closer to harnessing the power of stars on earth when it conducted a fusion experiment on Dec. 5.

The US Department of Energy shared details of the experiment on Dec. 13, describing how the facility’s 192 lasers controlled a nuclear fusion reaction that, for the first time in history, produced more energy than the lasers put in.

The achievement paves the way for advanced weapons research and the use of fusion as a clean, bountiful power source free of fossil-fuel encumbrances.

Thousands of people, many from the Tri-Valley, worked several decades to reach this point. The Independent recently had the opportunity to talk to a few about the historic milestone.

John Lindl joined Livermore’s Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) program in 1972 and has since played a central role in designing the targets that hold the reaction fuel and receive the laser pulses. Among many other achievements, Lindl became the leader of the Laser Target Design Group in 1978 and ICF Scientific Director in 1994. Beginning in 2000, he led LLNL’s newly combined magnetic and inertial fusion energy programs and served as NIF Programs Chief Scientist from 2006 to 2013 .

Lindl, who also presented the original proposal for NIF to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989, recalled how the Academy only gave the project a 50-50 chance that it would actually work.

“I would say that, by far, the majority of the scientific community was very skeptical, if downright dismissive, of the likelihood that we would succeed,” he said. “But there have been enough people who believed we could do it and sustained the support for what we’ve been doing that got us to this point… Fortunately, we were on the positive side of the 50-50 proposition.”

Construction of NIF, the world’s largest and most energetic ICF laser system, was started in 1997 and completed in 2009. NIF began setting records for fusion yields in 2017 and has steadily broken its own records since then.

“I don’t think anybody sees NIF who doesn’t come away sort of amazed at the complexity and the level of effort that it took to build the facility,” said Lindl.

Although NIF focuses on creating fusion environments suitable for nuclear weapons research, the Dec. 5 achievement also invites more people to take commercial fusion power seriously, according to Lindl.

“Having now achieved a target gain greater than one, people are now seriously (asking,) ‘Alright, how do we make the next step?'” he said.

In addition to his current role at LLNL, Lindl, a Livermore resident, enjoys backpacking in the Sierras and exploring the Livermore wine country with his family.

And 50 years after joining the lab, he remains excited as ever about the future of ICF.

“I like to think of human knowledge as sort of a tapestry that you’re working on,” said Lindl. “You have a giant puzzle, where you have a few pieces, and you’re trying to figure out where the next piece should go and what is it going to look like when it’s all done.”

“In our case,” he continued, “you actually have to make the pieces. You don’t just have a box where you’re trying to put them together. You actually have to make the pieces and try to figure out whether you got it right or not — whether it fits — and that whole tapestry is weaving … [a] clearer picture of how to move forward to a goal.”

Bruno Van Wonterghem first heard about Livermore’s lasers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, where he was a visiting researcher. One of LLNL’s directors gave a seminar there about The Nova Laser Fusion Facility — NIF’s predecessor — and Van Wonterghem was hooked.

“I started reading about what fusion was trying to achieve — the lasers, the diagnostics — and I thought that this was an incredible system, and I said, well, this is the place I want to be,” he said. “It’s such an incredibly compelling experiment and an experimental goal. It was considered, basically, achieving the holy grail of physics, replicating the sun using lasers inside the tiny little target.”

He moved to the region and joined LLNL in 1992, working on the Beamlet Demonstration Project, which explored the use of some 200 laser “beamlets” to deliver energy to a fusion target.

“(The Tri-Valley) was an incredibly exciting area,” said Van Wonterghem, remembering the windmills on Altamont Pass that kept changing in design. “There was a relatively small-town feeling and, at the same time, there’s the high-technology inside the laboratory. Knowing that you had the world’s most advanced nuclear weapons laboratory located in this little town environment, that was always, to me, something special.”

After the beamlet project, he went on to become a commissioning manager during NIF construction and then operations manager in 2009.

The Dec 5 experiment, said Van Wonterghem, “opens up the whole field of inertial fusion energy as a clean energy source to provide energy security in decades to come. … It would never have been possible without thousands of people — scientists, engineers, technicians — in Livermore and in other nuclear weapons laboratories and academia.”

He expressed great satisfaction at achieving NIF’s original goal, but also believed even greater gains await experiments at the facility.

“We are nowhere near the end of our journey,” he said.

Confinement Fusion (ICF) Program

Dave Schlossberg’s involvement with the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is twofold: He is the science lead for the NIF Nuclear Diagnostics group, and a co-investigator for the Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) program.

“In the first role, I oversee the team of approximately a dozen physicists responsible for measuring, analyzing, and reporting nuclear measurements from experiments on the NIF, including the neutron yield cited in the recent ignition experiment,” said Schlossberg. “In the second role, I propose and execute experiments on the NIF geared toward improving and understanding ICF processes. In these two capacities, my experience with the recent ignition results was somewhat unique.”

On Sunday Dec 4, Schlossberg had been monitoring the status of the experiment long into the night and was communicating with lead experimentalist, Alex Zylstra. He told Zylstra to call him if anything interesting happened.

“Well, my phone rang at about 1:30 am and it was Alex, quite excited,” Schlossberg said. “The first neutron data from this experiment was rolling in, and it indicated higher performance than we’d ever seen before … In the pitch black of my living room from 2-4 am Monday morning, I quickly confirmed the validity of these results and continued communicating with Alex. More data rolled in from other diagnostics, and we excitedly realized this was a momentous event. The next seven days, through Monday Dec. 12, were perhaps the longest week in the history of NIF. And for me!”

Schlossberg went on to describe the tremendous effort put out by the entire NIF team during that week, adding that the Lab does not operate in isolation and is greatly supported by the larger Livermore community.

“The feedback and excitement from the community have been palpable and exhilarating,” he said. “Perhaps one moment to remember came while out in the community. On Friday night during a brief reply, several of us headed out to Altamont Beer Works to celebrate, taking a brief break from vetting and calculating final values. A half dozen of us gathered at a table near the back, and sat changing stories and projections for what lay next … (when) in walks a fellow LLNL scientist, Dan Casey, with his 3 year-old son Drake in tow. Dan says, ‘Hey Dave, Drake has a question to ask you.’ Up at me looks Drake, with his baby eyes and innocent face, and with all the seriousness of a determined child says, ‘Dave, what’s the yield?’”