New Aspects for Low Cost Energy by Inertial Fusion Using Petawatt Lasers

The prospect of generating clean, safe, virtually unlimited, everywhere accessible and low cost energy from nuclear fusion has cost many billions of dollars over the last fifty years. The aim is to confine hydrogen isotopes deuterium D and tritium T and hold them in this state for a sufficient length of time at temperatures of dozens of million de- grees for the nuclei to fuse into helium. The predominant method used is the confinement of the reacting plasma by magnetic fields (MCF, magnetic confinement fusion) or the confinement by the inertia of a fuel pellet after ex- tremely fast heating and compression such that much more fusion energy is produced than one needed for this igni- tion (ICF, inertial confinement fusion). For this very fast ignition of the controlled fusion reaction, the laser was im- mediately considered as the preferred tool as suggested by Teller (1960) and Sakharov (1961).