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Updated: Mar 15, 2026

Laser-heating and Radiance Spectrometry for the Study of Nuclear Materials in Conditions Simulating a Nuclear Power Plant Accident
Published on: December 14, 2017
Core conditions for alpha heating attained in direct-drive inertial confinement fusion
A Bose1,2, K M Woo1,2, R Betti1,2
1Fusion Science Center, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14623, USA.
Abstract:
It is shown that direct-drive implosions on the OMEGA laser have achieved core conditions that would lead to significant alpha heating at incident energies available on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) scale. The extrapolation of the experimental results from OMEGA to NIF energy assumes only that the implosion hydrodynamic efficiency is unchanged at higher energies. This approach is independent of the uncertainties in the physical mechanism that degrade implosions on OMEGA, and relies solely on a volumetric scaling of the experimentally observed core conditions. It is estimated that the current best-performing OMEGA implosion [Regan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 025001 (2016)10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.025001] extrapolated to a 1.9 MJ laser driver with the same illumination configuration and laser-target coupling would produce 125 kJ of fusion energy with similar levels of alpha heating observed in current highest performing indirect-drive NIF implosions.
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