Historical research guide · 0927 · 1996

Light ion driven inertial confinement fusion

J. P. Quintenz · D. D. Bloomquist · R. J. Leeper · T. A. Mehlhorn · C. L. Olson · R. E. Olson · R. R. Peterson · M. K. Matzen · D. L. Cook

In one minute

Inertial confinement fusion works by squeezing a tiny fuel capsule so hard and so fast that it ignites. The question is what does the squeezing. Lasers are the famous answer. Sandia National Laboratories spent two decades on a different one: intense beams of light ions — lithium nuclei — fired from pulsed-power machines that are far cheaper per joule than a laser. Quintenz and eight Sandia colleagues wrote this sixty-page review as the programme’s own status report. Their case is that light ions can reach the high-gain implosions that both the defence mission and a future power plant need, and that the beam physics had finally started to cooperate: better understanding of how the beams are generated and focused had produced record intensities, and those beams had been used to heat the first hohlraums ever driven by ions, a small radiation oven around the capsule. The results answered key questions about how ion beams deposit energy in matter favourably. The review then sets out the limits still in the way.

Connection

Chapter 12 is about finding a small source of very large energy, and this is the pulsed-power branch of that search: a Sandia programme built around cheap stored electrical energy rather than lasers. Chapter 9 gets the beam-and-plasma physics — how you generate, focus and transport an intense charged-particle beam through a plasma channel — which is the same toolkit as the wire-array and Z-pinch work that this programme turned into.

From the source

Inertial confinement fusion driven by intense beams of light ions offers the possibility for high gain target implosions.Abstract, first sentence
High gain implosions are required both to meet the United States’ defence applications for inertial confinement fusion and to make an inertial fusion energy power plant an economically viable option for energy production in the twenty-first century.Abstract, second sentence
Progress in understanding the generation and focusing of intense light ion beams had, by the time of writing, resulted in record beam intensities.Abstract, third sentence
Those beams were used to heat the first ion-driven hohlraums, and the results provided favourable answers to key questions about the interaction of these beams with matter.Abstract, fourth sentence
The review sets out the present state of the light ion programme, its current limitations and the prognosis for future advances, and states the payoff plainly: a successful research programme would lead to a commercially attractive fusion power plant.Abstract, closing two sentences

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1016/0149-1970(95)00083-V

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

WHICH WORK THIS IS. The identifier the corpus recorded, 10.1016/0140-6701(96)88655-3, is not a paper. It is an entry in Fuel and Energy Abstracts, volume 37, issue 3, page 190, May 1996 — an Elsevier abstracting journal that reprints the abstracts of papers published elsewhere. The entry is credited to J. P. Quintenz alone and carries the title Light ion driven inertial confinement fusion. IDENTIFICATION OF THE UNDERLYING PAPER. A Crossref search returns one work of that exact title by that author in that window: J. P. Quintenz, D. D. Bloomquist, R. J. Leeper, T. A. Mehlhorn, C. L. Olson, R. E. Olson, R. R. Peterson, M. K. Matzen and D. L. Cook, Light ion driven inertial confinement fusion, Progress in Nuclear Energy, volume 30, issue 2, pages 183 to 242, 1996, DOI 10.1016/0149-1970(95)00083-V — a sixty-page Sandia National Laboratories review with ninety references. That is the work this page describes, and it is the work the page cites. A Crossref search of Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion for 1994 to 1996 returned no Quintenz paper of this title, so the Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion 37, A21 candidate recorded in the working notes is not confirmed and is not cited here. WHAT WAS READ. No open full text was reachable: the review is closed at Elsevier, and a search of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information returned no Sandia report copy of it — the nearby Sandia records are different documents, notably SAND-92-0806C by D. L. Cook and colleagues and SAND-94-0977C, IAEA-CN-60/B-1-I-6, by Quintenz, Mehlhorn and colleagues, whose own catalogued abstract reports the first lithium-driven hohlraum experiments at 1400 terawatts per gram and a lithium beam intensity then limited to about 1.4 terawatts per square centimetre by beam divergence and available lithium power. Because no United States Government report of this review itself was read, the page is not promoted to public domain. The abstract reproduced below is the review’s own abstract as deposited by Elsevier, retrieved through OpenAIRE and confirmed against the identical text carried by colab.ws. The summary and claims were written from that abstract and from the bibliographic record; nothing here comes from the body of the review. RELATED PAGES on this site: the light ion beam driver proposed for the Laboratory Microfusion Facility at /library/stm-d123f3cb8a, and the Sandia pulsed-power line this programme became — microfabricated wire arrays at /library/stm-98d874080d, the Z-pinch dynamic hohlraum at /library/stm-22f335be63, PBFA II ion diode theory at /library/stm-a14b16230b, and magnetized liner inertial fusion on the Z facility at /library/stm-57d0076dfb and /library/stm-d11937cf2a.

How to cite it

J. P. Quintenz, D. D. Bloomquist, R. J. Leeper, T. A. Mehlhorn, C. L. Olson, R. E. Olson, R. R. Peterson, M. K. Matzen, D. L. Cook (1996) Light ion driven inertial confinement fusion doi:10.1016/0149-1970(95)00083-V

Where it sits in the curriculum

Fusion machines: pinches, focus devices and inertial drivers