BETHE Highlights

Today, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the first-ever achievement of “scientific energy gain” in a controlled fusion experiment. Scientific energy gain, a term used by fusion researchers, is the condition where fusion energy exceeds the input energy crossing the containment-vessel boundary, which encapsulates the plasma science of the experiment. In the case of the NIF specifically, scientific energy gain and the term “ignition” are used interchangeably (more on that below).

Dr. Ahmed Diallo currently serves as a Program Director for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). His focus at ARPA-E is on potentially transformative research & development to enable commercial fusion energy.

Achieving sufficiently high energy gain is a requirement for the realization of fusion energy. The figures below illustrate progress towards energy gain and are the main results of a peer-reviewed publication [Physics of Plasmas 29, 062103 (2022); free download at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0083990] by ARPA-E Technology-to-Market (T2M) Advisor Sam Wurzel and ARPA-E Program Director Scott Hsu.

April 26-27, 2022 San Francisco, CA The ARPA-E Fusion Annual Meeting featured ARPA-E’s entire active fusion R&D portfolio, spanning 5 programs (OPEN 2018, Exploratory Topic in Fusion Diagnostics, BETHE, GAMOW, and OPEN 2021).

Over the past several years, ARPA-E has funded a number of fusion “capability teams” through the Fusion Diagnostics “Exploratory Topic” (2019) and the BETHE program (2020) to accelerate fusion-energy R&D via public-private partnerships. These capability teams, drawing predominantly from federally funded researchers at U.S.

On August 17, 2021, a New York Times article proclaimed a fusion energy release of 1.3 megajoules from 1.9 megajoules of incident laser energy, achieved at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The announcement of such a significant physics result rocked the fusion world, renewing discussions on R&D to enable commercially viable embodiments of laser-driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF).

Researched and written in support of the Technology-to-Market (T2M) component of the ARPA-E fusion portfolio, this paper [Journal of Fusion Energy 40, 18 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1007/s10894-021-00306-4] is intended to be an informational resource both for ARPA-E fusion performers and for fusion investors, to help them focus on initial markets that can nurture fusion through its early deployments.

At ARPA-E, we’re constantly thinking about what new white spaces we can explore in our mission to change how Americans get, use, and store energy. One key tool that we use to help design exciting focused programs is to issue periodic Requests for Information, or RFIs, which ask the research community to submit to us their best ideas for how we can have maximum impact on a specific technical space. RFIs help our Program Directors’ (PDs) build out their ideas.

Update: July 2022 After raising $27.5 million in their Series B fundraising round in May 2021, Zap Energy recently announced they raised an additional $160 million in follow-on funding. Lowercarbon Capital led their Series C funding round, with additional investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Shell Ventures, DCVC, and Valor Equity Partners. The Zap Energy team also announced a major technical milestone last month. Zap Energy created the first plasma in their FuZE-Q prototype.

ARPA-E's Breakthroughs Enabling THermonuclear-fusion Energy (BETHE) program is kicking off!  All or nearly all BETHE projects are expected to be under contract by the time of this kick-off virtual workshop.  The goal of this workshop is to introduce the BETHE project teams and to focus everyone’s thinking on the program objectives, with the help of some invited perspectives from outside the fusion R&D community.