Preparations for a European R&D roadmap for an inertial fusion demo reactor

Abstract

A European consortium of 15 laboratories across nine nations have worked together under the EUROFusion Enabling Research grants for the past decade with three principle objectives. These are: (a) investigating obstacles to ignition on megaJoule-class laser facilities; (b) investigating novel alternative approaches to ignition, including basic studies for fast ignition (both electron and ion-driven), auxiliary heating, shock ignition, etc.; and (c) developing technologies that will be required in the future for a fusion reactor. A brief overview of these activities, presented here, along with new calculations relates the concept of auxiliary heating of inertial fusion targets, and provides possible future directions of research and development for the updated European Roadmap that is due at the end of 2020. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Prospects for high gain inertial fusion energy (part 2)'.

Keywords: IFE Roadmap; auxiliary heating; fast ignition; high-energy density plasma physics; inertial confinement fusion; inertial fusion energy.

Figure 1.

A schematic of the proposed auxiliary heating scheme, pictorially indicating the orthogonal crossing of relativistic electron beams (blue/left beams) driven by intense short-duration lasers pulses (red/right beams) in a dense plasma.(Online version in colour.)

Figure 2.

(a) The schematic of the wetted foam target design as used for NIF shot 160421 and (b) the density profile of this target at peak compression, as calculated from xRAGE simulations. (Online version in colour.)

Figure 3.

xRAGE simulations with NIF shot 160421 parameters showing the relative amplification of the fusion yield due to auxiliary heating versus (a) the total energy deposited into the background electron for a deposition 150 ps before the bang time and (b) the offset between the deposition time and the bang time for a total deposition of 4 kJ.