Advanced Fusion Fuel for Inertial Confinement Fusion

The realization of an ideal volume compression of laser-irradiated fusion pellets opens the possibility for an alternative to spark ignition; this has been proposed for many years for inertial confinement fusion. Using a detailed volume ignition computation of sources of reheat in deuterium-deuterium (D-D) reactions (alpha, proton, and tritium reheat), the result of the calculations show that D-D pellets can be utilized in the same way as in the deuterium-tritium reaction if higher compression can be achieved. Fusion gains of more than 80 are obtained with an initial temperature of only ∼3.0 keV, input energies close to 2.4 GJ, and initial compression at 30 000 times the solid-state density.