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Europe Plans a New Type of Fusion Facility
SR71Blackbird writes "European physicists have put forward a plan for a facility that uses lasers to produce fusion. From the article: 'The laser would be used to compress and heat a small capsule of deuterium and tritium until the nuclei are hot enough to undergo nuclear fusion and produce helium and neutrons. In a reactor the energy of the neutrons would be used to generate electricity without the emission of greenhouse gases or the generation of long-lived nuclear waste.'"
We've heard about fusion happening just around the corner every month for the last 30 years. What makes this any different?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
oil as a fuel, won't out last the decade i think. you think you have high prices in the USA? everyone else is paying 2x 4x as much as you are. consumer demand for cheaper power and transportation will drive the nails in the coffen.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
..until the Wright brothers built one.
A thirty, fifty, or even seventy-five year delay doesnt mean people should write a technology off!
What makes this different? Well rtfa.
the US National Ignition Facility. The NIF will be used for multiple exercises, however, the devices main roles will be nuclear weapons testing for the United States, and fusion power experiments.
Fusion, AI, and Flying cars are always 10 years away...
The problem with AI is that it is constantly being redefined. At one point, a robot that would vaccum your house without you lifting a finger would have been considered an example of AI. Nowdays, hardly anyone is impressed by a Roomba. It used to be that a computer that could beat a human grandmaster at chess would have sufficed as AI. Today, we consider that to be little more than a clever computer algorithm. AI will always be 10+ years away if we keep redefining it to exclude any successes we achieve.
If you are talking about "strong AI", where machines can actually think for themselves and are sentient beings, I don't think you're going to find any reputable scientist claiming that is only 10 years away.
GMD
watch this
Now that we've signed the nuclear test ban treaty, you can't actually tell what percent of your weapons will really explode if you were to use them (it's not 100%).
Some of the lightest warheads are actually pretty fragile and it's an open question if they'll fizzle or go boom. You can simulate the degradation of materials and take a guess.
Some of the warheads are dial-a-yield too. Maybe you could make interesting focused explosions for underground hits. You want your opponents to get the sense that there is no defense against nuclear weapons. But right now I think that some leaders believe that they can escape destruction personally. You have to remind them that their society is worth saving. It encourages people to be more diplomatic.
What there is left to nuclear weapons research today is understanding what happens to nuclear weapons as they age. This is the goal of so-called 'stock-pile stewardship.' And since we are currently not testing nuclear weapons, there's no empirical way to understand how our decades-old nuclear stock pile will perform today and in the future. These laser facilities will be able to provide weapons designers some information on the subject. That's one major reason why the DOE is willing to spend tens of billions of dollars on these facilities.
-xest
Much better?
Sure, if you ignore the fact that it's about 16 times harder to even initiate the reaction, *and* the fact that since most of the energy comes off the reaction as a 15 MeV proton, the Bremsstrahlung losses absolutely kill you.
The more you look into magnetic confinement fusion, the more it seems that there's almost some sort of cosmic conspiracy to prevent us from using it as a power generation scheme. Go with neutronic fusion to avoid losing all your produced power to collisions with electrons in the plasma, and you run up against materials limitations. Try to avoid that problem, and you suddenly have a reaction that is *grotesquely* less efficient, to the point where it's probably not *possible* to even *break even*. To reduce those losses, you need to operate at even *higher* temperatures that it takes just to initiate the reaction, but when you do that, you lower your power density relative to D-T by a similar proportion and make containment that much harder.
Seriously, we do not have the time to keep generating power by fossil fuels until we get fusion to work, because that might never happen, the problems are that significant. Even that big new testbed reactor that's going up in France won't really get us close, because it's not dealing with the materials issue; over the lifetime of a fusion reactor, *every single atom* in the containment vessel will be struck by neutrons hundreds or even thousands of times, and we don't know how to build materials that can withstand that sort of irradiation without swelling, distorting, cracking, and a variety of other things you don't want to see in a nuclear containment vessel.
On the other hand, we know how to make *fission* work, and we should switch to that *now*. By the time we start making a dent in the fissionable fuels available to us, we should know how to build large-scale structures in orbit, and can just switch to solar collection satellites. I sincerely doubt if we'll ever even use fusion for power generation; by the time we ever figure out how to do it, it's likely there will be superior options available to us.
Making big, dirty nuclear weapons is relatively easy. The challenge is making low-yeild ones that don't produce long-term radioactive fallout. Basically the "bunker busters" that Bush has been talking about.
1. 22 MJ is quit a hefty pulse so might be useful in the odd application.
2. 16 MW is nothing. Less than one windmill.
3. 65% - put 100 in get 65 out, never going to do anything except exacerbate our fuel crisis...
The same way you take anything discrete and make it continuous in electronics: Your good friend, the capacitor.
-Amalcon
This couldn't be further from the truth. It is a VERY controlled fusion reaction, its controlling mechanisms are magnetism, gravity, and other forces. It is so perfectly balanced that it takes a quantity of fuel and an inital ingnition and will burn for billions of years. How much more controlled can you get?