Responsibility for developing the extremely powerful optics required for the PriFUSIO project, part of the Fusion 2040 research programme for a fusion power plant, will fall to Laseroptik.
Ten selected partners will provide assistance to the PriFUSIO research project, initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), including seven industrial partners and three research institutes. And one of those partners, Laseroptik, has revealed more about its role in the project.
Led by the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology (ILT), other industrial suppliers the project will bring together include Schott and Heraeus Group, suppliers of optical glass and coating materials; Layertec and Laseroptik, who will be involved in the processing and coating of optical components and Trumpf, who will provide additional support on the complex high-powered lasers.
Inertial fusion energy - clean and safe
Clean, safe and abundant energy may sound like a dream, especially during humanity’s current struggles to return to carbon neutrality, but laser-driven inertial fusion energy (IFE) could offer a viable solution, with one gram of fusion fuel generating as much energy as burning 11 tons of coal, and without producing the long-lived, highly radioactive waste and the danger of nuclear meltdowns that are both associated with nuclear energy.
The problem with fusion energy
Before this clean-energy-abundant future can be realised, however, one final hurdle remains in place, making fusion energy commercially viable, and this is a large part of the Fusion 2040 remit. The main responsibility of Laseroptik within the group, is to develop a new generation of highly powerful, reliable and cost-effective precisely coated optics, which will help the high-performance lasers developed elsewhere in the project to remain stable at the extreme operating temperatures of IFE reactors, allowing them to remain continuously operational.
“It is a special honour to have been selected to work on this outstanding project,” said Laseroptik managing director, Dr. Wolfgang Ebert. “In view of the ambitious project goals, this is a commitment that we take very seriously.”
