Historical research guide · 1059 · 1991

Status and plans for inertial confinement fusion

Marshall Sluyter · Roger O. Bangerter · J. Pace VanDevender · S. Nakai · William Hogan · Guillermo Velarde

In one minute

In September 1991 the Journal of Fusion Energy printed a panel discussion in which six of the people running the world’s inertial confinement fusion effort said, on the record, where the field stood and where it was going next. Marshall Sluyter spoke from the U.S. Department of Energy, which paid for the American programme; Roger Bangerter from the heavy-ion accelerator work at Lawrence Berkeley; Pace VanDevender from the light-ion machines at Sandia; S. Nakai from the glass lasers of Osaka’s Institute of Laser Engineering; William Hogan from Livermore, where the case for inertial fusion as an electricity source was being assembled; and Guillermo Velarde from the Madrid programme. It ran directly before the matching magnetic-confinement panel in the same issue, and that pairing is the point: squeezing a fuel capsule with a driver was being argued as one of the two mainline roads to a power station, with hardware already running, rather than as an exotic alternative.

Connection

Chapter 12 treats fusion as the energy substrate the rest of the site is built on, and this panel is the moment the inertial route was put on the record as a power-plant programme with named machines and named people rather than a physics experiment. Chapter 9 takes the other half: every approach argued here works by driving matter into an extremely dense, short-lived plasma state, which is the same regime the site’s plasmoid material lives in.

From the source

The inertial route is presented as a mainline fusion-energy programme with a status and a forward plan, not as a side option. The paper is titled and framed as status and plans, and it is printed as one half of a pair, immediately before the matching status-and-plans panel for magnetic confinement in the same issue of the same journal.Title and article type, Panel Discussion; Journal of Fusion Energy volume 10 issue 3, pages 221 to 234, printed before pages 235 to 252
The programme being reported is plural in its drivers and international in its institutions. The six people on the panel are drawn from the funding agency, the U.S. Department of Energy; the heavy-ion beam line at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; the light-ion pulsed-power line at Sandia National Laboratories; the glass-laser line at the Institute of Laser Engineering, Osaka University; the inertial fusion energy work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and the programme at the Polytechnical University of Madrid. Several independent driver technologies were being carried forward at once.Authors and affiliations, as printed with the article
The argument is an energy argument, and the supporting literature shows it. The panel’s references are reactor-engineering references rather than target-physics ones: Pfirsch and Schmitter in Fusion Technology on the technology of a fusion plant, Perlado and Sanz in the Journal of Nuclear Materials on the activation of materials, and an ITER technical note by Vieider and Shatalov on the components that face the plasma. Those are the questions you ask when you intend to build a power station.Reference list, items 1 to 3
Direct drive was live in the discussion, in its most demanding form. The panel cites Hora and colleagues on pulsation-free direct drive, presented at Monterey in November 1989 — the approach that illuminates the capsule with the driver beams themselves rather than converting them first into x-rays inside a cavity, and that stands or falls on how smoothly the drive can be made.Reference list, item 5
The United States half of the status rests on the programme’s own documentation. The panel cites Storm and colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy as its source for the American position, in a volume that also carries the Fusion Policy Advisory Committee’s final report and Koonin’s formal review of the Department of Energy’s inertial confinement fusion programme.Reference list, item 4; same volume, pages 127 to 156 and 157 to 172

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01885458

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

SOURCE NOT REACHED IN FULL, AND THERE IS NO ABSTRACT TO QUOTE. The item is a Panel Discussion in the Journal of Fusion Energy volume 10, issue 3, pages 221 to 234, September 1991, copyright Plenum Publishing Corporation and now distributed by Springer. It is closed at the publisher and offered only for purchase. Checked on 2026-09-08: OpenAlex and Unpaywall both record it closed with no repository copy; Crossref carries no abstract; Semantic Scholar reports the abstract field elided by the publisher; OpenAIRE holds no description; Springer’s live article page answers automated retrieval with a bot challenge. A report version was looked for at the Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information and none was found under this title — the nearest OSTI title match, record 1141660, is a different and much later work, Matzen, Status and Plans in the United States Inertial Confinement Fusion Program, Sandia report SAND2007-5747C. Because the article carries no abstract, this page is held at summary-only rather than abstract-only, and no text of the panel is reproduced here. WHAT WAS ACTUALLY READ. The Internet Archive capture of the SpringerLink record for this article, taken 13 June 2018, which carries the article type, the pagination, the authors with their affiliations, the copyright line and the panel’s complete reference list. Every claim locator below points to that front matter or to that reference list, never into the body of the panel. AUTHORS AND AFFILIATIONS AS PRINTED. Marshall Sluyter, U.S. Department of Energy; Roger O. Bangerter, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; J. Pace VanDevender, Sandia National Laboratories; S. Nakai, Institute of Laser Engineering, Osaka University; William Hogan, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Guillermo Velarde, Polytechnical University of Madrid. The archived record gives Velarde’s country as USA, which is a slip in the publisher’s data — the Instituto de Fusión Nuclear he founded is in Spain. Given names are printed as the journal printed them, so Nakai stays initialled rather than expanded from memory. THE PANEL’S OWN REFERENCES AS PRINTED. Pfirsch and Schmitter, Fusion Technology volume 15, page 1471, 1989; Vieider and Shatalov, ITER report ITER-TN-PC-8-9-1; Perlado and Sanz, Journal of Nuclear Materials volume 176, 1990; Storm and colleagues, U.S. Department of Energy; Hora and colleagues, Pulsation free direct drive, Monterey conference, November 1989. CONTEXT FROM THE SAME VOLUME, read from Crossref. This panel is printed immediately before its magnetic-confinement counterpart, Davies, Kishimoto and Kadomtsev, Status and plans for magnetic confinement fusion, pages 235 to 252; the same volume carries the Fusion Policy Advisory Committee final report at pages 127 to 156 and Koonin’s Review of the Department of Energy’s inertial confinement fusion program at pages 157 to 172.

How to cite it

Marshall Sluyter, Roger O. Bangerter, J. Pace VanDevender, S. Nakai, William Hogan, Guillermo Velarde (1991) Status and plans for inertial confinement fusion doi:10.1007/bf01885458

Where it sits in the curriculum

Fusion machines: pinches, focus devices and inertial drivers