An Energy Revolution Needs LIFE

SINCE its founding in 1952, Lawrence Livermore has successfully harnessed the creative powers of science and technology to meet critical national security challenges. Our accomplishments have been based on innovative approaches that combine the expertise of many scientific and engineering disciplines and a systems approach to design optimization and project delivery. Today, the national security challenge of ensuring abundant supplies of clean, safe, sustainable, and cost-effective energy requires our creativity, innovation, and multidisciplinary skills.

As the article Igniting Our Energy Future describes, we are leading a national effort to address this challenge of delivering an enduring energy solution capable of meeting the global need. The Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) effort aims to change the paradigm for fusion by tackling these long-standing challenges. This effort takes advantage of Livermore’s world-class expertise in lasers, fusion, materials science, large-scale supercomputer simulation, and experience from the National Ignition Facility (NIF). It is a challenge ideally suited to the capability, character, and history of the Laboratory.

Development of LIFE began more than 50 years ago. Shortly after the invention of the laser in 1960, several Laboratory scientists worked with early fusion design codes to study the possibility of using powerful laser pulses to compress and ignite a small quantity of deuterium–tritium fuel to the point of achieving self-sustaining fusion burn, thereby creating a net source of energy. Since then, the U.S. government has made substantial investments in the field, culminating in the planned demonstration of fusion ignition and energy gain on NIF. Demonstration of ignition will provide the required basis for applying laser fusion to commercial power generation.

Experiments to date on NIF give us confidence that we will demonstrate ignition conditions in deuterium–tritium targets in the near future. The next step is an integrated technology development program leading to the construction of a demonstration plant in the 2020s. This demonstration plant would be capable of well over 1-gigawatt thermal power output and would provide the foundation for the subsequent rollout of a commercial fleet.

The design of the LIFE power plant has been developed in close consultation with the electric utility industry, a wide range of vendors, licensing experts, environmental groups, and our national and international technical partners. It adopts a highly modular design concept that allows for off-site factory manufacture of principal subsystems and an operational model that can deliver high plant availability. The design takes advantage of substantial prior development of key technologies by other industries, such as the semiconductor market. Importantly, the system architecture allows for the use of conventional materials, and NIF provides full-scale performance data for the fusion engine. Together, these attributes significantly reduce technical risks and mean that decades can be saved compared to other approaches to fusion. By adopting pragmatic solutions using known technologies, the LIFE approach allows fusion energy to be delivered soon enough to make a difference to the world’s energy and environmental challenges.

The benefits of a fusion energy economy have been well known for many years. Following the successful demonstration of ignition and plant operations, LIFE could provide a substantial contribution to meeting the demand for an environmentally sustainable, secure, and commercially attractive source of baseload electricity. The plants would produce no carbon-based or other noxious emissions. In addition, the LIFE design addresses key drawbacks of fission-powered plants, such as nuclear proliferation concerns, the need for nuclear fuel enrichment and reprocessing, and the generation and storage of high-level, long-lived nuclear waste. With LIFE, no possibility would exist of a runaway reaction or a core meltdown because the engine contains only tiny amounts of fuel at any given time.

LIFE is about transforming our energy future. We are poised to deliver a profound solution based on the capabilities of the Laboratory and its partners. These are exciting times.