28.5 Million Dollars! U.S. Department Of Energy Supports SLAC in High-power Laser Fusion R&D

Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's research and technology development efforts in plasma physics and fusion energy have received up to $28.5 million in support and advancement from LaserNetUS.
The $28.5 million allocated by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science for the advancement of discovery science and inertial fusion energy is reported to include a three-year grant for the development and operation of the Matter under Extreme Conditions (MEC) instrument at the SLAC Linear Accelerator Coherent Light Source (LCLS).
MEC has been home to high-intensity laser experiments since 2012 and joined the LaserNetUS network as a founding member in 2018. The new U.S. Department of Energy funding puts an additional focus on building the science and technology needed to develop inertial fusion energy.
Last year, a fusion breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility established the potential for inertial fusion energy. In this type of energy, net energy can be generated by heating and compressing fuel particles with powerful lasers.
Since then, scientists in the field have come together to identify the most important basic research needs for realizing this potential future energy source, said Gilliss Dyer, MEC division head and chief scientist. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Symposium published the IFE Basic Research Needs Report on this topic.
For the first time, MEC will emphasize priority research on inertial fusion energy through capability and configuration development, through LaserNetUS outreach, and by allocating dedicated facilities for such research," Dyer said. The goal is to provide up to 50 percent of the MEC beam time for experiments related to inertial fusion energy."
Networking activities at MEC and other facilities will also lay the groundwork for a major upgrade of MEC through the development of a new generation of hotter, denser plasma diagnostics.
In addition to inertial fusion energy science, high-power, high-intensity lasers have a wide range of applications in basic research, manufacturing and medicine. For example, they can be used to generate high-energy particle beams for cancer treatment and to detect trace elements in the environment.
SLAC's MEC instrument also makes possible unique studies of the extremely hot, dense material found at the centers of stars and giant planets. The instrument's optical lasers - one for studying hot, dynamic plasmas and the other for driving shock waves in materials to study high pressures - combined with LCLS's world-leading X-ray laser beams have yielded many scientific results, published in some of today's leading journals.
LaserNetUS was established by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science's Fusion Energy Science Program. It provides researchers in the U.S. and abroad with open and free access to the most powerful lasers at universities and national laboratories throughout the U.S. and Canada. The network currently has more than 1,200 members.Management of LaserNetUS is centralized at SLAC in 2021, and SLAC scientist Chandra Breanne Curry has been appointed as the consortium's first coordinator.