BETHE Highlights

Zap Energy and their collaborators at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California, San Diego, and University of Washington published a peer-reviewed article in Physical Review Letters this month demonstrating electron temperature greater than 10 million degrees (approximately 1 keV, the unit of temperature favored by fusion scientists) in a sheared-flow-stabili

On February 8, 2024, Thea Energy announced a $20 million Series A funding round led by Prelude Ventures with participation from 11.2 Capital, Anglo American, Hitachi Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Mercator Partners, Orion Industrial Ventures, and Starlight Ventures. In addition to their Series A funding, they were selected as part of the Department of Energy’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program.

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-dri

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.