Fusion by 1990: the Sandia ion beam program can do it

Recent experimental results at Sandia National Laboratories demonstrate that light ion beam accelerator devices can deliver considerably more than the power necessary for achieving high-gain fusion energy - millions of joules at power densities of 10,000 trillion watts/cm2. This means that commercial fusion energy with an inertial-confinement fusion device can be realized by the 1990s, despite the general curtailment of the US fusion research budget over the past eight years. Dr. J. Pace VanDevender, pulsed power sciences director at Sandia, and Professor Ravindra N. Sudan, director of the Cornell University Laboratory of Plasma Studies, discussed the experimental and theoretical advances underlying this happy prognosis at the April 17-19 conference at the Rochester University for Laser Energetics. Sudan showed that experiments with high-current ion beam pulses over the past decade have demonstrated that such pulses, instead of diffusing, tend to self-focus nonlinearly to higher power densities. Second, weak magnetic fields do not interact and change the trajectory of such high-current beam pulses. At the Rochester meeting, VanDevender reviewed experiments on Sandia's Proto I device in which 1.5 trillion watts per square centimeter were delivered to a target in May 1984. This spring, Sandia's Particle Beam Fusion Accelerator I, PBFA I, delivered an 8-trillion watt pulse onto a spot 4.0 to 4.5 millimeters in diameter. This demonstrated that the Sandia light ion beam focusing process maintains itself as the current is increased. 3 figures