John H. Nuckolls
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Remarks

I'd like to thank the Biden Administration and the DOE Office of Science for honoring me today. I'm proud to share this award with Héctor Abruña and Paul Alivisatos. Joining these two, and the illustrious list of past recipients is truly remarkable. They include my heroes, mentors and colleagues, like Edward Teller, Harold Brown and John Foster.

I'd also like to thank my colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where I spent my entire career.

Scientific accomplishments are never an individual achievement - we build on the work of our predecessors, expand our knowledge through collaboration and competition and pass forward new problems and ideas to the next generation of scientists.

I was fortunate to begin my career just before the invention of the laser. In 1960, this cutting-edge technology opened exciting new avenues of research in physics. Pretty soon Lawrence Livermore started a laser program. From the start, I believed we could use a laser to achieve fusion ignition.

Lawrence Livermore emerged as a leader in both laser research and supercomputing, which proved fortuitous. Without supercomputing, we could not have done the calculations necessary to advance this work.

As happens in most careers, I eventually moved into leadership, becoming Lab director in 1988. It was a remarkable time, with the end of the Cold War and underground nuclear weapons testing. This provided the impetus for building the laser that could achieve fusion - the National Ignition Facility, or NIF.

NIF became one of the main ingredients in the science-based stockpile stewardship program, which replaced underground testing with laboratory experiments and supercomputing. Launching this is one of the highlights of my career.

We had high hopes when NIF began experiments, but the results didn't match our expectations. We had much more to learn to understand these strange results. We had to challenge our assumptions and really think outside the box, but we solved the problems.

But NIF still had plenty of doubters. Repeatedly, different review teams told us that it would never work, that the facility would never achieve ignition. I joined a red team to refute this, and in the end, we proved them wrong.

In 2018, I received the John S. Foster Jr. Medal. I received many awards over the course of my career, but this one stands out because it recognized my work of the last 10 years. I'm proud of my contributions to understanding the complex physics of NIF experiments.

Just over two years ago we did what many thought was impossible - we achieved ignition at NIF. And in the last two years, we've repeated this result over and over.

Now scientists are building on this new foundation to advance the experiments we can do for stockpile stewardship - while the media and general public tend to overlook this, it is the reason NIF exists.

But the beautiful thing about NIF is that as we explore new regimes of high-energy-density physics, that understanding applies to stockpile stewardship and the pursuit of fusion energy.

As I reflect on my career, I am moved beyond words. I always believed we'd achieve fusion ignition in my lifetime, but no one foresaw how hard it would be. But we did it, and now the US is the undisputed leader in fusion energy research. We are on a path to energy independence. I believe fusion energy will play an even more dominant role in our lives in the years to come.

For the aspiring scientists out there, I'll close with some advice - seek out mentors and aspire to become one. Don't be afraid of challenges. Science is driven by audacity.