Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94551, USA.
Sci Rep. 2013;3:1453. doi: 10.1038/srep01453.
Recent progress towards demonstrating inertial confinement fusion (ICF) ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) has sparked wide interest in Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) for carbon-free large-scale power generation. A LIFE-based fleet of power plants promises clean energy generation with no greenhouse gas emissions and a virtually limitless, widely available thermonuclear fuel source. For the LIFE concept to be viable, target costs must be minimized while the target material efficiency or x-ray albedo is optimized. Current ICF targets on the NIF utilize a gold or depleted uranium cylindrical radiation cavity (hohlraum) with a plastic capsule at the center that contains the deuterium and tritium fuel. Here we show a direct comparison of gold and lead hohlraums in efficiently ablating deuterium-filled plastic capsules with soft x rays. We report on lead hohlraum performance that is indistinguishable from gold, yet costing only a small fraction.
最近在国家点火装置（NIF）上实现惯性约束聚变（ICF）点火的进展，引发了人们对激光惯性聚变能（LIFE）用于无碳大规模发电的广泛兴趣。基于 LIFE 的发电厂有望实现清洁能源发电，无温室气体排放，且热核燃料来源几乎无限且广泛可用。为了使 LIFE 概念具有可行性，必须将目标成本降至最低，同时优化目标材料效率或 X 射线反照率。NIF 上的当前 ICF 目标利用金或贫铀圆柱形辐射腔（空心），中心有一个包含氘和氚燃料的塑料胶囊。在这里，我们用软 X 射线直接比较了高效烧蚀填充氘的塑料胶囊的金和铅空心。我们报告了与金几乎无法区分的铅空心的性能，但成本仅为一小部分。
