Z-Machine at Sandia Labs Aims for More Power

Vexar writes "Memorable for its Back-to-the-Future room of electric arcs in 1998, Sandia Labs' Z-Machine is getting $61.7 Million in new funding. In addition to more physics textbook-worthy photos, the scientists at this lab intend to hit the all-important, fusion-ready 2.0 million degrees C."

Comments

Weapons research

[RobertB-DC]

Amazing research, though when they talk about reaching fusion temperatures, it looks to me like they're talking about modeling the fusion reaction of a Hydrogen Bomb, not creating a safe, clean power source. To wit:

Z's advance in power is expected to make a major contribution to the Department of Energy's (DOE) science-based approach to stockpile stewardship, which must use giant computing and laboratory experiments to provide the basis to sustain the nation's nuclear stockpile without above- or below-ground tests.

There were two milestones in temperature: the first for weapons physics configurations was 100 eV (1.2 million degrees). The achieved value was 140 eV (1.6 million degrees). The second temperature milestone in a configuration suitable for target compression experiments was 150 eV (1.7 million degrees). Sandia has achieved 140 eV (1.6 million degrees).

X-1 will provide laboratory data on the physics of nuclear weapons implosions and their effects. The data are necessary to validate the increasingly sophisticated computational models of weapon performance, without underground testing.

He points out that Sandia's teraflops computer, capable of a trillion operations a second, and the other advanced computers being developed for DOE's science-based stockpile stewardship program "will be needed to reach our goals. We will succeed with creating high-yield fusion when we can fully harness the power of both our teraflops and terawatts."

It's still debatable whether the "stewardship" of nuclear weapons is really a Good Thing. It means that you're keeping the frickin' things around and functional, instead of simply dismantling them. Do we really need a stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction? That said, this research looks to be amazingly cool, and I'd hope it would lead to "consumer" fusion in the same way that nuclear bomb research led to nuclear fission reactors.

Interesting that the scientists are still being allowed to talk about their research... unlike their counterparts doing antimatter research.

Re:Weapons research

[j_cavera]

Tens of megajoules of energy applied to a small target for a few nanoseconds. How can this not be fun!? That said, this is not being looked at for practical purposes right now. The point is for fundamental research into an ill-understood region of plasma physics. At this point, the best outcome of their experiments would be to identify the plasma instabilities in this regime and correct for them. Future spin-offs would be in terrestrial energy production and plasma or fusion space propulsion, both of which don't scale well outside of the lab due to (you guessed it) instabilities in the plasma. Oh, yeah. It also resembles a nuclear weapon detonation, kinda. Of course advances in plasma physics go to weapons research and vice versa.