Harnessing the Power of the Sun | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

Fusion as an energy source is very attractive. It would be a carbon-free energy source that could power mankind forever. The challenge is making fusion work at the National Ignition Facility. What we're trying to do is overcome a natural barrier that nature has set up for atoms to fuse together.

The idea behind fusion is that the two atoms that you try to put together have the same charge, and they repel one another, just like the two parts of a magnet tend to repel each other. One of our main goals is to achieve thermonuclear fusion, to start a fusion fire in the laboratory, like the process that's going on in the Sun.

In order to create those conditions on Earth, we have to concentrate a tremendous amount of energy in a very tiny volume. So, we built the world's biggest laser. This facility is the size of three football fields; it's filled with lasers, and we concentrate all those lasers into a tiny target, you know, about the size of the tip of your pinky.

So this is an “if” target, where this is the thing we put at the center of the chamber in order to do an experiment. All hundred and ninety-two beams hit this target, 96 beams coming from the top, 96 beams coming in from the bottom, and all that energy ends up in this little tiny target in order to start the fusion reaction.

If we do that in just the right way, we have calculations that say we should be able to get more energy out than we put into this implosion in the light of a fusion fire that could actually power power plants and put energy on the grid.

So where we are today on the National Ignition Facility with regard to ignition is we're creating a lot of fusion events. We take atoms and we force them together, and we see the energy released. It's kind of like a sparking match being applied to a bonfire; you haven't yet caught the fuel on fire in such a way that the whole thing burns.

What we're getting are isolated events happening within the bonfire stack. So, we see the beginnings of the sparks, but we're not there yet with the bonfire. We were successful in showing fusion is feasible. From my point of view, it would be a defining moment, much like the demonstration flight with the Wright brothers' plane.

In a similar way, if we get ignition, we can harness the same processes that power the Sun. So we will have the opportunity before us to move from the very first beginnings of fire, where we hid stones together to make sparks, to harnessing the power of the Sun. That's an exciting possibility for humanity.