Longview Fusion Energy Systems
🇺🇸 Livermore, US · Founded 2021 · Active
Longview Fusion Energy Systems is a company in Livermore, California, designing a power plant around laser inertial fusion, the method the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used to reach ignition in December 2022. The company says it was founded by the team that designed, built and ran NIF, and its chief executive is a former NIF director. Its plan replaces NIF's flashlamp-pumped lasers, which fire about once a day, with diode-pumped lasers that it says can fire 600 times a minute, and surrounds the fusion chamber with a lithium blanket to capture heat and breed tritium fuel. Longview describes a 500 MWe entry plant, engineered under contract with Fluor, and says it plans to deploy its first plant in 2033. It has not built a fusion device of its own: the gain results on its website are NIF's.
- Sector
- Fusion
- Technology
- Laser ICF, indirect drive
- Fuel
- Deuterium–tritium
- Role
- Fusion developer
Terms
- Laser ICF, indirect drive
- Laser energy is converted to X-rays inside a small gold or uranium can (a hohlraum), and the X-rays drive the capsule. The NIF configuration. Only about a tenth of the laser energy ends up absorbed by the capsule, most of the rest heating the hohlraum wall, which is the main efficiency cost indirect drive carries relative to direct drive.
- Deuterium–tritium
- Lowest ignition threshold; 80% of energy in 14.1 MeV neutrons. The reference fuel for every near-term net-gain claim.