Making energy out surpass energy in

摘要

Last October the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF), which houses the largest laser in the world, achieved an important step towards the commercialisation of fusion energy - for the first time a fuel capsule gave off more energy than was absorbed by the fuel. This isn't quite the goal of 'ignition', whereby the fusion reaction generates as much energy as is put in to the whole system, but it's getting close. By the end of 2014, a very similar facility, the Laser Mégajoule (LMJ), will start experiments at the Commissariat à l'énergie Atomique's Cesta Centre, near Bordeaux, France, although its prototype Ligne d'intégration laser (LIL) has been open to the scientific community since 2005. Gareth Jones, CEO of Gooch and Housego, and Professor Roland Smith, head of Plasma Physics at Imperial College London, both agree that once the proof-ofconcept has been achieved by one or other of these projects, Laser Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) which is the technique used by both facilities, will be all over the front pages and become of critical importance to both governments and to industry.