Adrian Barnes ’05: Behind A Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

In December, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that a team of scientists at the National Ignition Facility had achieved fusion ignition after nearly seven decades of effort. By fusing two atomic nuclei at extremely high heat, they’d successfully converted mass and energy into less mass and more energy.

Scientists have been experimenting with nuclear fusion for decades, but this was the first controlled fusion reaction in history to reach energy ignition — producing more energy than what was used to drive the reaction. It’s a breakthrough that’s renewed hope for the possibility of a clean energy future as, unlike traditional energy forms, fusion reactions produce more manageable radioactive waste and release no greenhouse gasses.

Among the scientists involved in this breakthrough was Adrian Barnes ’05, a fourth generation Grinnellian. Barnes’ parents met at Grinnell, as did his grandparents. The story of how his great grandparents met starts to get hazy, but his great grandma attended the college at a time when North and South Campus were separated by students' gender.

At Grinnell, Barnes was a physics major and managed to take all but two courses required to declare the computer science major. Immediately after graduation, he went on to receive his master’s in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. At the time, Barnes never would have predicted his involvement in the nuclear fusion breakthrough. “As an undergraduate, and even as a graduate student, I had no clue what came next,” he says. “I was constantly trying to find what I liked, what interested me — and to follow those passions.” For Barnes, this was no straightforward journey. At Grinnell, he had discovered that he enjoyed engineering more than purely theoretical physics. Then, in grad school, Barnes realized that he was far more interested in computer engineering than the mechanical engineering he was studying.

Finishing his master’s, Adrian found himself unsure of what the next right step was. As he looked for employment, he began discovering jobs and projects that appealed to him but that he hadn’t known existed. One of those jobs? Working with software controls systems at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. Barnes joined the NIF in 2007, figuring he’d only be there for a year or two. He never left.

Barnes now leads one of the teams responsible for programming, monitoring, and diagnosing the more than 70,000 control points (cameras, lasers, meters, and other hardware) involved in NIF experiments. He and the laser controls team operate largely behind the scenes— paving the way for experiments to go off without a hitch — but their work is essential. When it comes to achieving ignition, “I see us as a cog in the machine that got us to this point,” Barnes says. “There are so many people that have contributed to reaching ignition, in huge ways and in small, but without our team, it couldn’t have been done.”

And without his team, Barnes wouldn’t still be at the NIF. “One of the reasons I’ve been here so long is that we have a team of such wonderful people,” he says. Over the years, Barnes has gotten to generate and shape a team of controls experts. “Being a part of this team and having had the opportunity to help create it... that’s something I’m very proud of.” The quest for fusion ignition has been decades-long, and Barnes says he feels lucky to have been at NIF when it all finally came together.

Scientists caution that widescale, affordable fusion energy is far from a reality. Creating fusion ignition in the controlled conditions within a laboratory is just the first step and requires expensive forms of hydrogen. And the lasers used to power the experiment currently require more energy than the fusion ignition creates. But it’s a massive achievement nonetheless, the kind of breakthrough that scientists work for decades in hopes of reaching. “We know how long progress can take,” Barnes says, “but predicting and hoping for a breakthrough of this scale is what keeps the research going.”