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.'"

Comments

People laughed at idea of heavier than air machine

[backslashdot]

..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.

This superficially sounds like....

[distantbody]

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.

AI has a problem of changing definintion

[GuyMannDude]

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

Re:AI has a problem of changing definintion

[Kjella]

It used to be that a computer that could beat a human grandmaster at chess would have sufficed as AI.

That's because the multi-CPU monster that beat him wasn't really more intelligent than my PC. Computer speeds simply outgrew the human mind with no noticable help from AI researchers. Take the eliza test for example - once you could emulate a human, but it'd take you a decade to answer each question, you have created intelligence. Making it fast enough to happen in real-time is just IT progress.

Kjella

Re:Nuclear Weapons

[xestrel]

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

Re:Nuclear Weapons

[InfiniteWisdom]

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.

Re:Fusion again?

[doodlelogic]

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...

Re:65% efficiency!

[Tekzel]

The trick is -controlled- fusion, and FWIW, the ball of magic fire in the sky isn't controlled either. :)

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? :)