'Cooking Up Stars' In Livermore, Changing The World With Fusion Energy

LIVERMORE, CA — In December, Physicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made a tiny star and changed the course of the journey toward controlled fusion energy.

Now, the famed Livermore laboratory is sharing it’s ‘Recipe for a Small Star.’

“All you need to make a star on Earth is a tiny amount of the right material, a really powerful laser, and a fraction of a second,” the scientists wrote in sharing their recipe:

• Take a hollow, spherical plastic capsule about two millimeters in diameter (about the size of a small pea)
• Fill it with 150 micrograms (less than one-millionth of a pound) of a mixture of deuterium and tritium, the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen.
• Take a laser that for about 20 billionths of a second can generate 500 trillion watts—the equivalent of five million million 100-watt light bulbs.
• Use all that laser power to create x-rays that blow off the surface of the capsule.
• Wait 10 billionths of a second.
• Result: one miniature star.

Livermore-based physicist Andrea “Annie” Kritcher is being celebrated for her part in that project as her team continues their efforts toward writing that recipe to make “tiny stars” that they hope will someday generate clean energy for all.

For her efforts, Kritcher was honored as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World at the Time100 Summit and Gala in April at the Lincoln Center in New York City.

She leads a team of scientists inside Livermore’s National Ignition Facility.

It’s an imposing structure, three football fields in length, ten stories high and able to hold one of the most powerful lasers in the world. After decades of attempts at sparking a controlled fusion reaction, Kritcher and her team finally produced a nuclear fusion ignition, creating what they call a “tiny star.” Kritcher’s recipe involves a set of steps she designed that happen in the blink of an eye.

In layman’s terms, they fired 192 lasers simultaneously at a target “smaller than a pencil eraser” and sparked a reaction that created a tiny star for a fraction of a second. It generated more energy than it took to smash the hydrogen isotopes together.

Kritcher accepted the challenge to “squeeze more energy” from the National Ignition Facility’s lasers after an earlier failed experiment. That’s how the idea for her “star recipe” sparked into existence, according to statements from both the laboratory and Kritcher.

The resulting achievement is “the holy grail in physics research that had eluded scientists for decades,” according to Time.com, bringing humanity “another step on the road to fusion power.”

“This facility was built to bring star power to Earth,” a laboratory spokesperson said in a recent video describing the process. “It’s all in the name of searching for sustainable clean energy.”

The process was a team effort and took years to reach this point, Kritcher said.

“Reaching ignition was truly a large effort carried through many decades,” she added. “I am extremely honored to be representing the laboratory and the many people who have worked on this grand scientific challenge to make this a reality, some of whom were working on this before I was born.”

Kritcher is hopeful for the future.

"Humanity is driven and motivated by impossible problems, such as creating a miniature star in the laboratory and harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, that once we start to crack, we can collectively achieve amazing things and make life better for all," she said.