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Nuclear Fusion Real Soon Now
Mr. A. Coward writes "Researchers at the
National Ignition Facility are attempting to produce nuclear fusion. They'll focus 192 amplified lasers on a pellet of frozen hydrogen. 'NIF experiments will be the first to create fusion that gives off more energy than it takes in.' That will have to be quite a bit, since it will take 500 trillion watts to ignite the pellet in the first place. The facility has been plagued with delays, and so far only 4 of the 192 lasers have been completed. Researchers believe they will first achieve fusion sometime around 2014."
The cost of the lasers and the associated ancillary paraphernalia associated with the fusion plant. If the cost per kWh from the setup and maintenance of the equipment needs to be x cents / kWh and using renewable / clean sources of electricity can generate at x/5 cents / kWh then it wont fly.
Great to see that it is now thought probable that fusion can actually be an energy producer though.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
it doesn't work like that.
the money hasn't just been going into a big hole with a sign saying "Fusion Power". it's been employing people and adding to our understanding.
This is what happens after the thinking. ... and then ... they go and test it.
See, the smart people think out a plan
From where I'm sitting, sustainable fusion should suffer from the inverse of the law of diminishing returns - the gains could be frickin' tremendous, so the effort should be pretty high.
Besides, making this big ungainly beast is an important step towards getting a Mr. Fusion power supply for a DeLorean, a critical part of our future economy.
I think I need a new sig here.
Well, the US government probably funds this particular form of fusion research as much to improve their H-bomb designs under the test ban as to find a new energy source. Building a practical reactor isn't necessarily the main goal.
Todays world (well, the 'civilized' part of it) suffers from the instant-satisfaction syndrome. Everything has to happen now, now, now.
Things can take more than a decade, an election-term, a year, a month or a year. And that doesn't make them boring.
bash$
Nothing is wrong with this statement. You are probably referring to the Law of Conservation of Energy, which states, more or less, that energy cannot be created or destroyed. The confusion with nuclear reactions, fission and fusion, is that the reaction liberates energy stored in the nuclei of the reactants. No energy is being created, but more energy (hopefully) is harnessed than was used to start the reaction.
Think of a spark plug in a piston engine. It releases a fairly small amout of energy to start a reaction that releases a larger amount of energy stored in the fuel/air mixture.
Fusion will be a Good Thing once the bugs are ironed out.
Bzzt, thanks for playing. Most hydrogen bombs have a yield breakdown of about 85% fission to 15% fusion (fission is a much better producer of blast and fire), but in the 1960s there were the Bassoon Tests, which used hydrogen bombs where virtually 100% of the blast yield came from fusion.
So yes, we have the capability to artificially create fusion. We've had it for decades.
I think the irony of this situation is that we're already so far past the MAD model of weaponry (i.e. that there are already so many super weapons...) that whether or not a new technology provides a new superweapon is largely moot.
Sure, we may develop some fantastic death-star beam we can fire with pin point accuracy from space, but what does it matter if the enemy can simply still smuggle dirty bombs or plagues into our cities?
This is no more going to lead to a new superweapon [in and of itself] than any other increase in efficiency in power generation: we already have nuclear fusion bombs.
"Stumble before you crawl"
It strikes me that trying to create a fusion reactor is an awful waste of time, effort and money when there's one just just across the road (in space terms) that we can use for free!
If all the money that's been poured into fusion research so far had been poured into making those "cheap" solar arrays they keep telling us are "just around the corner" then we'd all have roofs made of the stuff that would make us energy self-sufficient and we'd even be driving electric cars that were powered by the sun.
It seems stupid to try and reinvent the wheel (fusion) when nature has done such a wonderful job about ninety quintillion times over and we can harness the power of at least one of those natural fusion reactors very safely.
We've had fusion weapons since the '50s... they're called thermonuclear bombs.
At this point, research into fusion *power* probably isn't going to increase their effectiveness much more.
Right now, the big areas of superweapon research are biotech and nanotech. Mmmm, grey goo.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Who cares? I don't.
We need cheap, clean power. Fission is cheap and clean if done well, but with past waste disposal practices waiting to bite us on our collective bums in the future and certain incidents like that one in the Ukraine 18 years ago in the public memory, I don't think we can afford to risk it. Oil and coal are dirty and running out. Solar, wind, tidal? Useful adjuncts to conventional generation techniques, but blighted by NIMBY and power storage issues.
Everything that has been spent on fusion research could be multiplied tenfold, a hundredfold, and the payoff for humanity would still be worthwhile.
A hundred years from now, I want a fresh set of environmental and social problems. I want our biggest concerns to be the marginal increase in salinity in some ocean currents from desalination plants and some wacky local weather issues due to waste heat from the fusion plants. I want population growth to be a non-issue because of better education of formerly developing and subsistence economies and cultures. I don't even care if my great-great-grandchildren speak Hindi or Arabic or Mandarin so long as the improvement between my life and theirs (materially and in freedoms) is comparable to the improvement between the Middle Ages and now - is it really an issue that I don't speak Middle English, Old Norse, Latin? Or that most of the world doesn't either?I want it to be a world in which pertoleum is seen as too valuable to burn, and as a valuable raw material for manufacturing. I want a world in which it is so cheap to transport and recycle our waste that is easier to "mine" our garbage than process new raw materials.
The thing is, power that is too cheap to meter (at least in personal-use quantities) is going to shake up things considerably. In the West we have all sorts of neat manufactured goods because power is cheap compared with a century ago. Imagine conveying those benefits to Africa, India, China, Iraq without the environmental downside. Imagine a world in which manufactured goods and food are so easy to produce that it doesn't matter that a significant percentage of the population don't make or grow things. Many Western economies are heading towards being services-based rather than manufacturing-based, but we can only continue to do this at the expense of the developing world - unless we can give everybody the same opportunities. We can turn the advent of fusion power into a golden age. Our descendents can wonder at a world in which it made more sense to build something in Beijing than Boston because the people in Beijing were paid less and lived under worse conditions than those in Boston. Our great-great-great-great-grandchildren can scratch their heads in wonder at the fact that people used to get sick and die because they could not afford to heat their homes in winter. They can stare in history books in disbelief, not comprehending what it would be like to live in a world before Universal Service Obligations extended beyond basic telecommunications to the energy necessary to sustain and enjoy life.
So, is this some left-wing Utopia? Maybe. But there's no reason it couldn't be shared by all - except that those currently holding the purse-strings will feel threatened - it's only natural that present energy suppliers may feel this way, although the more astute ones will already be diversifying and looking at possible futures. New industries will spring up that we can't even imagine now. Jobs will be displaced - but will we really need a coal miner then any more than we need cloth fullers now? Half the jobs our great-great-great-great-Grandchildren will be doing probably haven't even been invented yet.
So, when will the great payoff from fusion occur? With the first child's life that it saves. With the better husbanding of the scarce resources of this world, and with access to those of the rest of the solar system (Str
You imply that maser is a neolgism, while laser is not. The maser actually was created before the laser so shouldn't you say, "visual light maser"? ;-)
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
We're getting a new solar heater for our house and it costs several thousand dollars. It will take a decade or more to recoup the costs in cost savings.
With fission and fusion the idea is to take a relativly small amount of energy to start a chain reaction that releases a very large amount of energy.
There is a solar array by the university but it's unsightly. We just don't have the stuff to make solar cells efficient enough to be practical. We can't very well be driving along at 20 miles per hour with 200 square feet of solar cells on the roof of the car that only has room for half a person.
Using the sun directly as a power source isn't looking very promising. So we make use of it instead to grow crops and whatnot. It's not like the sun's power is just going to waste. Trying to use it make electricity just isn't working out. The sun seems to be a screwdriver that we're attempting to pound nails in with.
Maybe one day we'll find a material that reaches a practical amount of efficency for solar cells. In the mean time we need power and fussion and fission are the most practical and cost effective.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Break even and ignition are two separate things. Break even means that the total fusion energy produced exceeds the energy put into heating the ingredients. I think JET achieved break even in a tokamak, and it's even easier in laser fusion.
Ignition means that the energy being produced by fusion and re-absorbed in the plasma is keeping it hot enough to keep on fusing with no external energy inputs until some other factor (like running out of fuel or the plasma blowing itself apart) intervenes. This has only been acheived in bombs.
As an analogy consider trying to light a recalcitrant campfire. Break even is when the total energy produced by your buring wood before it sputters out exceeds the energy put in by the match. Ignition is when it keeps burning on its own.
Hmmm, or you could just beam the energy back down to the surface of the planet and leave fusion to the sun.
-josh
"Fission is cheap and clean if done well, but with past waste disposal practices waiting to bite us on our collective bums in the future and certain incidents like that one in the Ukraine 18 years ago in the public memory, I don't think we can afford to risk it. "
Fission is a good source of power today. The waste disposal, at least for irradiated fuel, is not such a bad things. When 15 years of 2000MW production fits into a large swimming pool, I really don't think that is so bad. Try cramming all the CO2 and other byproducts of coal, oil, or natural gas into such a small space. At least with nuclear, the waste doesn't float around in the atmosphere.
As for Chernobyl, that was Soviet tech, while running an experiment gone wrong. They did not have a containment dome, and the reactor used a different moderator to control the reactivity.
Things have come a long way since Chernobyl and TMI, and what is required in the US should not be compared to something different in other nations.