The development of inertial fusion as a power source will require achieving four principal milestones: ignition and propagating burn; high gain at low drive energy for the reactor driver; pulse repetition rates of a few Hz; and long-term reliability and economics of a reactor. To keep development time and costs to a minimum, these should be accomplished with as few major facilities as possible. A viable scenario for the Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) Program would include establishing the first milestone in a Nova Upgrade for ignition and gain and the latter three in an upgradable, low-power Engineering Test Facility (ETF)/Demonstration Power Plant (DPP), i.e. two major facilities. To be successful in as short a time as possible operations at the major facilities would have to be supported by off-line reactor driver and other reactor technology development efforts. These efforts would evaluate and prioritize the myriad of options available at present for power plant and subsystem concepts. This paper describes the elements of such a program that could make the first commercial power available in the decade of the 2020s and estimates the resources needed. This program would be carried out in phases with major go/no-go decision points before each large …

We discuss the generation of inhomogeneity in the baryon-number density during the cosmic quark-hadron phase transition. We use a simple model with thin-wall phase boundaries and ideal-gas equations of state. The nucleation of the phase transition introduces a new distance scale into the universe which will be the scale of the generated inhomogeneity. We review the estimate of this scale. During the transition baryon number is likely to collect onto a layer at the phase boundary. These layers may in the end be deposited as small regions of very high baryon density. 21 refs., 1 fig.