Panel on Fusion as a Solution for the Greenhouse Effect or Global Warming, and, to Help Further that Goal, Inertial Fusion Targets for Deeply Penetrating Beams

Abstract

The U.S. and other countries are expected to spend Trillion dollar sums to build hundreds of new electric; power plants in the next few decades. Just in the coming decade, the U.S. oil and natural gas productions are expected to decline, and the whole world supply of sililar vital commodities will also be depleting rapidly. We do have abundant supplies of coal, but because of concerns raised by meteorological and geophysical scientists, a panel was convened to emphasize the potential relation to our fusion community. After presentations by Prof. |G.^Miley and Prof. |C.^Yamanaka as well as other distinguished panelists, including himself, Prof. |N. G.^Basov concluded that the relation between Greenhouse Effect or Global Warming and the need for fusion energy is sufficiently important that a full session should be convened at the next conference.

In the spirit of contributing to inertial fusion energy as a solution to these issues, we also added, as part of our discussion, an outline of a series of targets that use for advantage deep ly penetrating ( intense ) beams (DPB) for Hybrid—drive and direct-drive. By DPB we refer to intense beams that can penetrate through 0.15-0.20 g / cm of target material, or deeper. Particularly for Hybrid-drive (Refs. 1-4), it was earlier announced in Ref. 1 that the concept can provide advantages for both lasers and particle beams, in combination or separately (see Section III).

We suggest a new strategy for making a less costly inertial fusion reactor by using smaller drivers and reactor chambers. Towards this goal, we propose to use the lower beam energy and power, more spread out illumination geometry, and lower target yields of Hybrid-drive or direct drive to facilitate smaller drivers and chambers. We also suggest a new conservative programmatic approach to usage of direct drive advantages through Hybrid-drive , assisted by a new approach to direct drive symmetry through judicious use of Sufficiently Short Pulses (SSP) of beam energy on target. We can start with Hybrid of indirect and direct drives (Ref.6).