This blog covered Shuji Nakamura at least twice before -- we reported on on how he had invented the blue LED: https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/search?q=Nakamura
Now we report on a more recent effort by Nakamura, this one is focused on nuclear fusion.
I think the inspirational thing about the Nakamura stories has to do with his persistence, his refusal to give up, and -- in this most recent story -- his willingness to take on big challenges at age 72.
Three cheers for Shuji Nakamura!
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From a CNN story: https://www.cnn.com/science/shuji-nakamura-lit-up-the-world-and-now-wants-to-power-it-spc
Shuji Nakamura already transformed the world once. His invention of blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) changed everything about our daily lives.
Computers, phones, big screens, traffic lights and electronic billboards light up because of his invention.
Nakamura earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014, along with two other Japanese scientists, Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, for their contributions to his LED breakthrough.
Some experts have hailed his invention as important as Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb.
And so, it’s big news when one of the world’s greatest inventors says his next invention will far surpass the importance of his previous one.
His goal: To create a power plant that uses a new kind of high-pulse laser for nuclear fusion, producing an “endless” supply of efficient, clean energy. With nuclear fusion, there is no uranium involved and no chance for a meltdown.
If he cracks the code, its potential is limitless, said Nakamura, a professor of materials and of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barara (UCSB).
At an age when many look to retire, Nakamura, 72, bursts with energy.
“Retirement is very boring,” he told CNN.
‘I became so desperate’
Long before Nakamura earned Nobel recognition, before he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, he was maligned and ridiculed — an engineer best known for explosions in his lab and for his lack of productivity.
Nakamura worked at a then-little known Japanese chemical company called Nichia Corporation, in 1979, heading its research and development team, comprised of just two people.
But after about 10 years in, he’d developed only three products — and none sold well. At company soccer and softball games, his colleagues harangued him saying, “Why haven’t you produced anything? You need to quit!”
Afterward, on Friday nights, Nakamura often returned to the office and roamed the halls taking on extra duty as an overnight security guard.
“Yeah,” Nakamura said with a laugh, “I had to check the whole company walking around.”
Feeling isolated, Nakamura developed a mentality of what he calls “invention by anger,” an extreme drive to prove others wrong. All his managers told him the same thing: You must quit.
“I became so desperate,” he said.
A last-ditch effort to save his job
Nakamura grew up in a small Japanese fishing village where he learned to love nature and the color blue because of the ocean.
His experience tinkering, toiling and blowing up stuff in his lab had given him the idea to chase his dream of cracking the code to blue LEDs.Major corporations like IBM, General Electric, Bell Labs, Sony and Toshiba invested millions over the decades trying to solve the mystery. Red and green LEDs were easily mastered, yet the solution to making blue LEDs remained elusive because blue light has a shorter wavelength and requires significantly more energy to emit.
At stake was the potential for a multibillion-dollar industry.
In a last-ditch effort to save his job, Nakamura approached Nichia’s founder and chairman Nobuo Ogawa.
“Can I develop blue LEDs?” Nakamura asked.
He couldn’t believe what came next.
“OK, no problem,” Ogawa said.
Nakamura was given a budget of $3 million, an unheard-of amount in 1988 that represented 2% of the company’s annual sales. Two-thirds of the money was for equipment; the rest was to be spent on studying and learning techniques that could lead to a breakthrough.
‘I feel resentful when people look down on me’
Nakamura then spent a year in a lab at the University of Florida learning about metal-organic chemical vapor deposition, or MOCVD.
At 34, he’d never stepped foot on a plane. He also never had a scientific paper published — a fact that earned scorn in Florida. To those with PhDs in the lab, Nakamura was a nobody with zero academic chops. They treated him like a lowly technician, he said, constantly asking him to fix this and fix that.
He quietly raged. “I feel resentful when people look down on me,” he once said. “At that time, I developed more fighting spirit. I would not allow myself to be beaten by such people.”
When he returned to Japan in 1989, more hurdles were thrown his way. His biggest fan, the founder of Nichia, stepped aside as president.
And in his pursuit of a breakthrough, Nakamura chose to go all-in on studying the material gallium nitride as the key to unlocking blue LEDs. Almost every other researcher in the world worked with a different material, zinc selenide.
This became a huge problem, he said, when a renowned researcher held a seminar at Nichia with an emphatic message: gallium nitride was a dead end. Among those in the audience was Nakamura’s new boss.
By day’s end, a hand-written note arrived on his desk, ordering Nakamura to halt all work.
He rejected the order. “I threw it away in the garbage,” he told CNN, smiling.
More notes arrived every few weeks with the same order. He tossed them in the trash, too.
In Japanese culture, he said, it is nearly unheard of to ignore a superior’s orders. In fact, Nakamura stopped attending weekly R&D briefings so that he wouldn’t have to tell colleagues what he was doing.
“I became so angry,” he said, “so that I make the decision” to keep going and keep chasing his dream.
Within months, Nakamura was vindicated. He experienced “the greatest moment of my life,” when he made a simple LED that illuminated with a soft violet-blue light. He wasn’t sure how long the light might last.
He left for the night, and, in the morning, the light still glowed. “It was still very dim, but it’s surviving,” he said. “That moment is very ‘Oh my gosh!’”
On November 29, 1993, Nichia held a news conference that shocked the electronics world. The blue LED had been conquered.
It turned out Nakamura was right: Gallium nitride proved to be the key.
“The tamer of nature and successor to Edison,” Forbes magazine once wrote, “turned out to be an unknown researcher at a Japanese company few had heard of.”
Endless energy as his final chapter
Nichia and Nakamura eventually had a public falling out with back-and-forth lawsuits. The two sides settled their landmark dispute in 2005 — with Nichia agreeing to pay him $8.1 million, far less than the nearly $180 million a Japanese court had ruled Nakamura deserved for his invention.
Almost all of the money, he said, went to “attorney fees and also taxes.”
He prefers not to dwell on that part of his past. He’s proud of what he invented. Plus, he said, “Winning the Nobel Prize was greater.”
“I’m very happy,” he said.
Nichia didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment.
A recent report by the International Atomic Energy found that if old light bulbs were still used around the world, global electricity needs would be nearly unsustainable — “around 70% higher electricity consumption for indoor lighting in buildings.” The electricity saved on home lighting from LEDs, the report found, roughly equals the power used by the entire country of South Korea.
Nakamura is focused on the future and what he feels will have an even greater environmental impact by producing limitless energy with zero emissions.
To meet this goal, he has formed Blue Laser Fusion, a company that uses his blue LED technology to create laser power that could transform energy generation around the world.
About 99.5% of nuclear fusion research over the decades, he estimated, has focused on using powerful magnetic fields to create endless power. Nakamura believes the answer lies in the 0.5%.
“The story is very similar to the blue LED development,” Nakamura said.
In December 2022, researchers at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California, a core part of the US Department of Energy (DOE), achieved the first-ever “fusion gain,” a major scientific breakthrough, when a laser-induced reaction produced more energy than it takes to trigger it.
Nakamura was not involved in that experiment. However, he had already begun developing a new high-power laser concept for inertial fusion, drawing upon his pioneering work in LEDs and laser diodes.
He co-founded Blue Laser Fusion in November 2022. The DOE fusion breakthrough further energized him. Nakamura is determined to take what was proven as scientifically possible in the lab and turn it into a functioning power plant.
He said Blue Laser Fusion has seen breakthrough after breakthrough in the years since.
To contain the continuous fusion reaction without burning everything up, Nakamura and his team have created what is called the optical enhancement cavity, which stores the high-pulse laser energy in its optical chamber, then amplifies the laser power by up to 100,000 times, which drives and contains the burn.
“In layman’s terms,” UCSB said in a 2025 news release, “the laser is the hammer breaking into a tiny pellet of hydrogen isotopes (atoms). The chamber is the anvil, keeping everything contained. The result? Genuinely clean, secure fusion energy.”
At this point, it’s far from Nakamura’s goal of limitless energy with far-reaching benefits.
More work is needed. The company is scaling up to meet its goal to construct a 1-gigawatt pilot fusion power plant — big enough to power 750,000 to 1 million homes — by 2032 near Santa Barbara, California.
Will this be his greatest achievement and gift to the world?
“Yeah, yeah,” Nakamura said simply.
Asked how he might react if a young scientist in his lab defies his orders and continues doing whatever he or she wants to do, Nakamura laughed.
His message to young scientists everywhere, he said, is this: “Taking a risk is most important.”
Doing so might just change the world.
