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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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NRC nominee Nieh commits to independent safety mission
During a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing today, Ho Nieh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as a commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was urged to maintain the agency’s independence regardless of political pressure from the Trump administration.
2025 International Conference on Accelerator Applications (AccApp'25)
Abstract: Creating a controlled fusion reaction that produces more energy than supplied to initiate it (i.e. target gain >1) is a grand scientific challenge with broad societal implications. A significant barrier for every approach pursuing this goal is to create plasma conditions which exceed Lawson's criteria, where the power of fusion self-heating exceeds all the power losses of the system, to the point where target gain >1 is achieved. After decades of research and technological advances, the first laser indirect-drive inertial confinement fusion experiment to meet the Lawson Criteria and achieve a target gain >1 was performed.
This talk will discuss both the key scientific and technological advances that enabled fusion ignition via the inertial confinement approach and the future research directions across a broad range of areas needed to realize Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE).
Additional detail will be given on key nuclear and x-ray observations used to identify the principal sources of fusion yield variability that can arise from variations in target quality and implosion drive asymmetry. The principal scalings, tradeoffs, and design evolutions required to achieve the higher energy gains required for realizing an integrated IFE community test facility will be discussed. Initial findings from recent experiments seeking to increase target gain from ICF experiments will also be presented.
Dr. Arthur Pak is the Lead for Strategic Development for the Inertial Confinement (ICF) Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Associate Director for Strategy of the Livermore Institute for Fusion Technology (LIFT). Arthur is focused on further developing inertial fusion for economic, energy, and national security. Since joining the National Ignition Campaign at LLNL in 2011, Arthur has held several positions within the ICF program, including leading experimental campaigns and analysis working groups that achieved fusion ignition in 2022. His research has focused on using experimental measurements, together with analytic models and detailed simulations to understand and mitigate the principal mechanisms that inhibited fusion ignition. Arthur received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Davis in Optical Science Engineering, and his Ph.D from the University of California, Los Angeles in Plasma Physics.
Last modified September 18, 2025, 8:02am EDT
