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Review of the Department of Energy's Inertial Confinement Fusion Program The National Ignition Facility (1997) / Chapter Skim
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1 Background
Pages 7-11

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From page 7...
... 103-160) called on the Secretary of Energy to "establish a stewardship program to ensure the preservation of the core intellectual and technical competencies of the United States in nuclear weapons." In August 1995, President Clinton made an additional statement concerning the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: 1 One of my administration's highest priorities is to negotiate a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to reduce the danger posed by nuclear weapons proliferation.
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From page 8...
... The SBSS program is one element of the Stockpile Stewardship Management Program designed to ensure that the no-testing regime remains robust into the future and that the United States will not have to invoke its "supreme national interests" option and resume nuclear testing.3 Its central challenge is to maintain a continuing capability to anticipate, detect, and evaluate actual and potential problems related to aging in the enduring nuclear stockpile and to plan for refurbishment and remanufacture as required.4 Meeting this challenge requires the development of increased technical understanding of weapons and weapons-related technologies, including the underlying science, to permit confident prediction, without nuclear testing, of the effects of aging on the safety and performance of weapons. This responsibility includes preserving the core intellectual and technical competencies of the DOE weapons laboratories.
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From page 9...
... relevant to weapons. These laboratory-level experiments permit studies of equations of state, opacities, radiative transport, and hydrodynamics that are necessary, together with substantial increases in computational power, to eventually construct predictive computer models of nuclear weapons.
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From page 10...
... Beyond the primary SBSS role discussed in this report, the NIF has relevance to fission energy: even though a flash-lamp-pumped glass laser is too inefficient to be the driver in a prospective inertial fusion energy plant, achievement of ignition with the NIF would help establish design requirements for commercially relevant drivers and other components of an eventual inertial confinement fusion power plant. The NIF is also expected to contribute to basic science and to attract scientists worldwide through its unique ability to provide experimental conditions relevant to atomic, nuclear, and stellar physics, supernova explosions, and cosmology.
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From page 11...
... at the nominal laser energy is about 6. The shape of the yield curve is cliff-like, in that fusion yield increases very rapidly, from near zero to its full value, over a relatively small range of incident laser energy.
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Key Terms

  • comprehensive test
  • test ban
  • national ignition
  • stockpile stewardship
  • ignition facility

  • inertial confinement
  • ban treaty
  • confinement fusion
  • laser energy
  • stewardship program

  • direct drive
  • science based
  • technical competencies
  • core intellectual
  • indirect drive

  • fusion energy
  • supreme national
  • based stockpile
  • fusion yield
  • nuclear weapon

  • stewardship management
  • technical understanding
  • nuclear test
  • energy incident
  • energy national

  • glass laser
  • capsule surface
  • sbss program
  • design target
  • predicted nominal


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