In this episode I’m starting to explore another interesting scientific topic that has recently made a big media splash—nuclear fusion.  For decades the promise of nuclear fusion has been held out as the ultimate in clean energy sources—the same energy as the sun, with no transuranic radioactive waste stream.  Just fusing hydrogen together to make helium and boundless energy.  The problem is that it is very difficult to simulate the sun.  Even in the core of the sun where temperatures are measured in millions of degrees, and the pressure is higher than anywhere in the solar system, fusion is not a fast or efficient process.  I guess that’s good for us.  If it were the sun would rapidly burn out in a huge supernova.  As it is, the sun will happily burn hydrogen for about 10 billion years before it starts running short. A proton in the core of the sun can bounce around freely for billions of years without ever getting fused to another proton.  It is this challenge that researchers on earth have been trying to solve for the past 50 years, without much success. Today I’m going to be interviewing a team of researchers working on this problem to find out just how close we are to practical fusion.

Omar Hurricane is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Omar received a Ph.D. in Physics from UCLA in 1994, staying on as post-doc until 1998. Omar is a Designer at LLNL, working on topics of stockpile stewardship and High Energy Density Physics, and became Chief Scientist for the Inertial Confinement Fusion Program. In 2009, Omar was awarded the U.S. Department of Energy Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for National Security and Nonproliferation. Omar became a Fellow of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics in 2016 and in 2021 was awarded the Edward Teller award and medal from the American Nuclear Society for leading efforts to obtain fuel gain, alpha heating, and a burning plasma in the laboratory.

Dr. Alex Zylstra received his bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in 2009 and his Ph.D. in plasma physics from MIT in 2015. From there he joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Reines Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow working on developing novel inertial fusion concepts. He joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2018 as the experimental lead for the “Hybrid E” campaign, which subsequently produced the first laboratory burning and ignited plasmas.

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