From your perspective, what makes fusion such a difficult problem? Why is it so hard to model, and then why is it so hard to control the experiment?The thing that makes it so difficult to control and model is that we need extreme conditions. We need extreme temperatures. In ICF inertial confinement fusion we also need extreme densities. We're reaching pressures that are more than two times the center of the Sun, and temperatures that are more than five times the center of the Sun, in our experiments. We're making the most extreme plasma state that you can make on Earth. As you can imagine, since that's not been done before, there's quite a bit we don't know about the materials science. In these experiments, laser beams enter and hit the inside of a hohlraum a hollow cylinder made of heavy atoms such as gold or depleted uranium and create a very intense radiation bath. We have to be able to model that condition, and then we also have to model the plasma conditions of the implosion as it's imploding. Inside this intense radiation bath sits a spherical capsule, and in our experiments it's made out of diamond. And inside of that spherical capsule sits deuterium and tritium fuel two hydrogen isotopes.
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