New Aspects for Low Cost Energy by Inertial Fusion Using Petawatt Lasers

The prospect of generating clean, safe, virtually unlimited, everywhere accessible and low cost energy from nuclearfusion has cost many billions of dollars over the last fifty years. the aim is to confine hydrogen isotopes deuteriumd and tritium t and hold them in this state for a sufficient length of time at temperatures of dozens of million degreesfor the nuclei to fuse into helium. the predominant method used is the confinement of the reacting plasma bymagnetic fields (mcf, magnetic confinement fusion) or the confinement by the inertia of a fuel pellet after extremelyfast heating and compression such that much more fusion energy is produced than one needed for this ignition(icf, inertial confinement fusion). for this very fast ignition of the controlled fusion reaction, the laser was immediatelyconsidered as the preferred tool as suggested by teller (1960) and sakharov (1961).