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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."
Since when did Real Soon Now translate to 10yrs+ ... ?
At least cold fusion did not cost that much.
So when was the break even point that they recover all the money that has been spent developing it?
I know that it makes sense to at least do something so that we continue to learn, but sometimes it seems like they need to do more thinking and less building.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Actually, just using your numbers, it's about the same as running a standard lightbulb for an hour or so (100 watt hours).
so what industry do you work in that will create something that changes life as we know it in less than 10 years or so?
Actually, once you've generated it and it puts out more than it received, you can recycle the process indefinitely. then its a matter of harnessing the output effeciently AND saving enough of the overage to eventually set a second chain of lasers firing, then in a few years the power output will grow exponentially and poof, free energy, mass space exploration, colonization, pure research civilization, galactic domination, intergalactic war with insect race, universal domination, peace and love and enlightenment, fin.
its kinda like putting a million bucks in the bank and living off the interest, but also putting aside enough of the interest to increase your returns.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I know a number of people working on NIF and hear of its progress every few months. It's been plagued with problems largely due to budgeting, as scandals have hit the lab and much of the money was funneled out. The LLNL management was largely replaced due to these activities and for a while the entire laboratory was on the brink of being shutdown.
The four beams mentioned in the summary are really just a testbed. In the previous system, Nova, there was a smaller machine called Novet that had the same purpose. I always forget the newer machine's name, but this is standard practice versus a major delay. NIF is behind the original schedule, but that's due to problems (e.g. lens issues) and technical challenges always faced in such large R&D projects.
From what I hear, things will be going pretty well from now on. Since this is an international effort (led by the US), other countries are building their own versions. France has similar system that was brought up last year with help from LLNL personnel and has allowed the lab to avoid many of the same pitfalls the French have faced.
My main contribution to this thread is simply that NIF doesn't seem to be heading towards cancellation, like many government projects. The people behind it are extremely competent and far smarter than I am. The scandals are behind them and will be making steady progress. It's a really, really impressive effort.
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That's what my set of encyclopedias from 1968 say about the new "Stellarator" reactor they're building over at Stanford... "Within 10 or 20 years." But cynicism aside, there's no denying we've made great progress. From energy output/input ratios of .00001 to .3 and .4 since fusion research began.
My thought is that if you want a way to get unbelievable energy intensities, use the big fusion reactor in the sky. Launch a gossamer thin sheet of aluminized mylar, spin it into a disk, and use a minimal amount of structure to form it into a parabolic mirror. If you use a 500 meter radius piece, that's a constant 740 megawatts focused on the pinhead-sized object of your choice. If you need more, just launch a bigger piece of aluminized mylar.
It is much more real - the availability of new power plants depends on combinations of:
:)
1) Mayor Rating
2) Number of high-wealth residents
3) Total power requirements
4) Total number of high-tech industry
5) Total energy demand
Same is true for all other nice things you get in that game. However, it's impossible to do that in one city, it just stagnates. The interaction between bordering cities it crucial. You basicaly get a region where you develop tens of cities, and RCI demand in one city affects the neighbour. The "deals" thing is same as in SC 3000, i.e. they can sell each other services. It's neat to have one "garbage" city, because that's really the only thing you can not get rid of safely in this game - only two options - garbade dump or waste-to-energy plant, both affect neighbours. Of course you can still have garbage island
Also, you can no longer build perfect city.
This is very similar to the history of fuel cells: they have always been about 5 years away. (For the past 30 years)
There has been much progress with the plasma focus fairly recently. Taken from the Focus Fusion website:
In recently completed test experiments, the researchers were able to achieve temperatures that reached up to two billion degrees in some shots of the plasma focus device, well surpassing previous records of 520 million degrees achieved by the commonly used tokamak device. The much larger and more expensive tokamak has been cornerstone of the US fusion program for 25 years.
The plasma focus functions in a fundamentally different way from other fusion devices. Tokamaks and most other fusion devices use powerful magnets to attempt to stabilize the plasma - the extremely hot, electrically conducting gas in which the fusion reactions occur. This task has been likened to lifting gelatin with rubber bands. Instead, the plasma focus takes advantage of the natural instabilities of the plasma, so that the plasma's own magnetic fields compress it and heat it. "The plasma focus works with the plasma, not against it," says Lerner.
Perhaps someone with the foresight to see the best path for future power generation can fund this research fully and cease our pseudo problems concerning concerns about future energy sources. The solution is apparent.
It's interesting that the NIF first full light is now pushed back to 2014. There's a small chance we may just beat them to ignigion.
I work at the Omega Laser(still the most powerfull in the world at 60 Terawatts! ya!) and there is currently construction going on here to complete what is called Omega EP(extended performance) by ~2007. Omega EP will produce an astounding 2.6 PETAWATTS(million billion watts!!) of power for a around a picosecond (so about 2-3 Kilojoules per shot which is much less than the NIF's megajoule scale shots) making it, by far the worlds most powerfull laser when complete. The new laser will use what's called chirped pulse amplification to produce its incredibly high petawatt scale power.
Using the current 60 beam 60 Terawatt (~30Kj) laser to compress a pellet of hydrogen fuel and then just before the moment of maximum inward compression and then stagnation; the EP petawatt beam will fire, producing an instant injection of Mev scale electrons directly into the center of the collapsing target and hopefully producing high fusion yeilds and perhaps even approaching ignition. The Gekko XII laser in Japan with its 500 terawatt scale CPA lser has validated this scheme, which is called "fast ignition", reporting that with the CPA laser used at maximum compression with their 12 beam 40 terrawat laser they've achieve an increase in neutron output(fusion yield) by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude...Can't wait till we can fire ours up!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I'm not a physicist, but from what I can tell, the key phrasing in that article is "equivalent energy."
. htm
According to a half dozen other sites, you are correct, we have reached the break even point, with a radically different technique. The problem is that containment of the fusion has not exceeded 1.2 seconds, and required constant energy input to continue the reaction.
Ignition reactors will create a self-sustaining fusion reaction, so that the amount of energy to start it would be a one time thing. I would guess they mean exceed the break even point for a sustained reaction, which would be necessary if we intended to harness it somehow...
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/news/1998/06/980611
This is *exactly* why I always make people convert measurements to joules. At least in joules I can figure how much energy we're talking. If we're talking Watts, all I can figure is how much equipment we're going to fry.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Perhaps all this "enviro-clean" stuff is just a boondoggle? I mean, what do you get when you've pushed the limits of phyisics to get you a powerful power source? Let's see:
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Oops I misspoke, I meant to say the Omega laser is actually the most ENERGETIC UV laser in the world at ~30Kilojoules/shot, Not the most powerfull, as there are a few other chirped pulse lasers with higher powers out there but not higher energies(most can only do a few hundred J per shot though this is still enough to do direct laser induced nuclear reactions).
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Most hydrogen bombs have a yield breakdown of about 85% fission to 15% fusion (fission is a much better producer of blast and fire)
Do you have a reference for this? I thought the fusion part of the blast was the major difference between the tens of kilotons we used on Japan and the megaton-plus warheads we have now.
The primary purpose of the NIF is to study nuclear reactions so that the US nuclear weapon stockpile can be maintained without ongoing nuclear weapon tests.
That doesn't sound very believable. Maybe if you were to say "stockpile can be modernized" it would make sense. But if all you're doing is maintaining the existing stockpile, just use your existing data that says a bomb lasts 20 years (or whatever), then
recycle it into a new one using the same design. If the design worked 20 years ago, it will still work now.
I'm glad that progress is being made but I have to ask:
How good are (computer) simulations at modeling this? I mean the NIF and presumably you are going to spend billions to essentially run experiments. I assume this means that simulations of the physics are not good enough to predict what is the best design. So, what's the problem? Is there a fundamental lack of knowledge (quantum/relativistic effects/high energy densities) at these regimes or are your equations good but you just don't have the computing power to solve them? Because we might see PetaFLOP computers before we see PetaWATT lasers!
Also do you know if Magnetic confinement schemes also have simulation problems?
(BTW I met the exec. dir. of the Max Planck inst. in Plasma phys. while on the TGV last year, he seemed quite optimistic that magnetic confinement was going to be producing results "real soon now";)
Essentially that's true, I suppose. NOVA was around 100 Terawatts per shot (I've heard it was capable of 100 Kilojoules per shot but I suspect it was actually less). NOVA only had 10 beams though and this ended up creating huge problems. When a pellet was imploded on NOVA the beam/beam instabilities and nonuniformity of the irradiation on target caused very large hydrodynamic instabilities as it imploded (Rayleigh-Taylor instability mostly) which spoiled the fusion reaction before it could really start.
The Omega laser with its 60 beams produces much higher irradiation uniformity and even though it's lower power than NOVA(which was decomissioned in '99) it holds the record for neutron production in a shot at something like 5X10^13 neutrons, indicating a much 'cleaner' convergence and fusion burn. There were several lasers at LLNL before the NOVA laser with various names like Janus, Argus and Shiva, which all used the fundamental frequency of Nd:glass lasers at 1064 nanometers(infrared) and the great contribution in the early '80s to ICF laser fusion by the Omega guys was the idea to convert this IR to its third harmonic at ~351 nanometers in the UV. This greatly increased laser absorption efficiency on target and consequently increased target compression pressures/temperatures accordingly. Allmost all high power Nd:glass lasers use this technique today.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
apparently this fusion reaction does not require energy to sustain a plasma. this is more like an injection fusion system where the hydrogen pellet is placed in a location and then the laser is shot and the fusion reaction occurs and then you place the next pellet in there.
sure, there are issues of creating and storing the hydrogen pellet, but that is easier than keeping a high energy plasma.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
No offense bu investing money into researching fusion is pretty stupid IMHO. In case nobody noticed we're all sitting atop thin skin of solid rock floating on top of a space-borne ball of **molten lava**. WTF! Can we just drill a couple thousand holes in the ground, run some pipes, attach a heat exchanger and some turbines and call it a day? HDR Geothermal (Hot Dry Rock). What the hell.
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Migma fusion
- Inertial electrostatic confinement
- Muon-catalyzed fusion
- Antimatter-catalyzed fusion
- Cold fusion
It would also be nice if the fusion effort was run by scientists and engineers instead of politicians and bureaucrats. Check out this stupidity:He's talking about the high yield dirty staged weapons with yields of 75-85%+ fission. These are usually in fission-fusion-fission configurations. The clean but lower yield weapons are fission-fusion with yields 75-90+% fusion.
Keep in mind that a fission bomb may be boosted by small amounts of fusion fuel to increase effiency of the fission reaction and may be used as the triggers for the above weapon types. Also, staged weapons may have more than just 2 or 3 stages.
All that said, fusion may well give us all that the fission power 1950's white elephant promised - but we don't know yet, so "practical" is not the right word.
Unfortunately, politicians get in the way of scientific research, and in the last 25 years in particular here in the UK, blue-sky research has been cut in preference to that which looks promising from a commercial point of view. The accountants rule. Unfortunately, this reduces science to mere "refinement of engineering" at the expense of radical new and exciting discoveries and knowledge; and they wonder why no one wants to be a scientist any more.
Stick Men
You're basically right but there's one more factor that comes into play when we're talking about pollution: Distribution of polluters.
Even if we have to have powerplants to create our hydrogen fuel, it would be much better to have a bunch of such plants in each country than to have millions of polluting cars in each country. It's much easier to make sure the factories are as clean as possible than to make sure each car doesn't pollute.
General rule in environmental issues: the less distributed the sources of pollution are, the better.
It's always amazing how the people in charge (or that sponsor the project) seem to 'forget' this little detail. But, in fact, the critics are right. Billions and billions are wasted, on something that they know full well will never amount to a working fusion reactor that actually delivers energy to the market. The design (and goals, btw) are extremely unsuited to accomplish that, especially compared to the JET-project - http://www.jet.efda.org/ - (or actually the ITER-project).
And all the 'new things that have been learned' does not weigh up against the billions spend on it. The REAL reason (which they never mention) that they have gone through with this, is because of military pressure and animousity between the EU and USA on some key issues. Because, while a tokamak design yields the best results and opportunities for actual energy-output in a sustained, marketable way, the laser-pellet system is a lot more usefull in one respect: the study and experimentation of atomic/hydrogen fussions as they occur in bombs (explosive output). THAT is why they went for that project, because for usefull civilian experimentation, other ways of attaining nuclear fusion are far better suited.
Strange how you never seem to hear that aspect from the scientists/politicians involved.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Tritium must be manufactured, atom by atom.
They are actually using Lithium instead of Tritium both in h-bombs and experimental fusion reactors. A neutron hitting a Lithium-7 nucleus splits it to a Tritium and He-4 nuclei. Or:
The ideal reaction to use of course would be proton-proton fusion, which powers the sun.
This is utter nonsense. There is no such thing as proton-proton fusion, since this would result in a Helium nucleus with no neutrons, which simply does not exist. The lightest Helium isotope is He-3 with two protons and one neutron.
Quoth petabyte:
That may be correct for a *gravitationally confined* fusion reactor which contains all of the fuel necessary for an 8 billion year burn and can switch off to burning helium instead of hydrogen. However, our earth bound reactors are either *inertially confined* or *magnetically confined* and do not contain enough hydrogen to burn continuously. Furthermore, our fusion reactors cannot simply switch to burning helium. Helium needs different conditions to fuse, hence the red giant phase of a star to which you alluded.
I'm placing my bets on this guy doing it first or some other amateur tinkerer. I hate to mention the billions of dollars wasted on tokamak "make it bigger and it will work" technology that completely does a reverse 180 from Farnsworth's discovery of potential wells where smaller is better (most people can't vacuum out the inert neutrons quick enough). I'd like to mention that nobody has yet met the fusor challenge, amateur or professional. Produce enough excess energy to light a 60watt lightbulb. I believe there's a million or two dollars out there as a reward if I'm not mistaken.
My father is a Nuclear Engineer. He had this to say about the article:
There are two major approaches to fusion: Inertial Confinement and Magnetic Confinement. The facility at Livermore discussed in this article is part of the inertial confinement effort. I visited this facility quite a few years ago when they were building the NOVA facility which was mentioned in the article. The basic idea is to compress and heat a target pellet and hope that it stays together long enough to fuse before blowing apart - hence the "inertia" in its name. My personal opinion is that this method has less chance of being used for commercial electricity production than magnetic confinement fusion concepts. I think that this method has a pretty good chance to form the basis of some fantastic weapon for attacking threats coming from space. Once the tecnical hurdles are crossed, fusion will still face a huge economic problem. The facilities, either magnetic or inertial, have huge construction costs. I do believe that we will persevere and cross all of these hurdles. One driving force is happening now. The price of gas is going up. When other forms of energy get prohibitively expensive, the governments of the world will increase their support for fusion research and the problems will be solved. Fusion has considerable advantages of limitless cheap fuel, very low and easily managed radioactive waste products, very safe facilities, and no chance of proliferation of weapons-grade material. It will be great when we are able to achieve it, but I'm not expecting that to happen very soon. I once bet a colleague that we would see a commercial fusion power plant before I retired. I will concede that I have lost that bet. I hope that we will see it before my children are all retired but I'm not very confident even of that.
Batteries have such low energy density compared to any kind of combustible chemical it is laughable. The only advantage batteries have over fossil fuels is their lack of polution. Hydrogen solves both probems. It has about 1/4 the energy per volume as a liquid so your gas tank will have to go from 12 gallons(my civic) to 48. Thats a big jump but not as bad as batteries would be. Hydrogen isn't that bad, long range and no expensive batteries or fuel cells(if you burn it in a normal combustion engine) and zero pollution(except heat and steam). And since we can't produce gasoline or methonal ethanol, diesel etc from arbitrary energy sources this sounds pretty good to me. All the choices you list except biodiesel demand that we remain dependent on foreign oil or start mining more of our own. Niether is something I'm really excited about
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H2: 120 MJ/kg = 33 kWh/kg (LHV)
Gasoline: 12.3 kWh/kg gasoline (LHV)
from (from electric vehicle technology, p. 53)from http://www.spinglass.net/scooters/thumb.html
Batteries with specific energy of > 100Wh/kg and energy
from http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/successes/ss/7-015
Liquid hydrogen has a density of 0.07 grams per cubic centimeter, whereas water has a density of 1.0 g/cc and gasoline about 0.75 g/cc.
from http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/hydro