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

Fusion again?

[ttfkam]

Have they sustained break-even point with this technology yet? Have they produced a surplus -- actually generate electricity -- with this technology yet?

According to Henry Hutchinson of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, who set up the European panel, fast ignition requires less laser energy than the conventional approach, which means that it is considerably cheaper.
"The energy problem is sufficiently urgent that we cannot afford to ignore different approaches to fusion," he says.

It's sufficiently urgent that we can't wait for the fusion fairy to visit us. By all means, we should continue research in fusion. It's an exciting field with a lot of potential. But we don't potential so much as a workable energy policy now. We can't base them prototype research facilities that materialize "by the middle of the next decade."

My $0.02

Re:Fusion again?

[noidentity]

"According to Henry Hutchinson of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, who set up the European panel, fast ignition requires less laser energy than the conventional approach, which means that it is considerably cheaper."

This is great news! Now I can upgrade my imaginary working fusion reactor with a much more efficient model.

Re:Fusion again?

[noidentity]

"Why is everyone so skeptical? There are already working nuclear fusion reactors."

The only nearby one I know of is visible half the day in most parts of the world.

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:Fusion again?

[nofx_3]

You are forgetting all those trillions of not quite as near ones (although some are as close as 4 light years I believe).

Re:Fusion again?

[Lord Pillage]

4.2 to 4.4 lightyears away ;)

Re:Fusion again?

[iamlucky13]

Really minor nitpick: 16 MW isn't a truly impressive amount of power, but it's a lot bigger than the largest wind turbines in existance or planned. GE's largest model is a 3.6 MW, and I believe they're still in the validation process (which is lengthy because of all the people who got upset by the sound of turbines breaking from fatigue in California in the 80's). I believe a Dutch company is at about the same point with a 5 MW design, and their long term plans include building an 8 MW turbine for offshore use only. By comparison, Chernobyl's max electrical generating capacity was 4 gigaWatts (wikipedia).

Re:Fusion again?

[TrickiDicki]

*bzzzt* - incorrect. Typical wind turbines are less than one megawatt. Really large turbines (those deployed out at sea for instance) may be 1, 2 or occassionally 3MW. Multi-megawatt turbines aren't installed on land because they're really big and people don't like big turbines in their backyards.

Re:Fusion again?

[richdun]

Wanna build a Dyson sphere anyone?

Plus, just wait 75 years and pull Scotty out of the transporter, and maybe we can get that transparent aluminum formula.

All the energy we want, and we get to save the whales, all in one.

Re:Fusion again?

[nyri]

Here's the Economist's take on the issue:

Bouillabaisse sushi
Feb 5th 2004
From The Economist print edition

A site will soon be chosen for a new international fusion reactor. This is a pity

IF AVANT-GARDE cuisine is any guide, Japanese-French fusion does not work all that well. And the interminable discussions over the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) suggest that what is true of cooking is true of physics. Japan and France (along with much of the rest of Europe, under the banner of an organisation called Euratom) are supposed to be joining America, China, Russia and South Korea in a project called ITER, which aims to build a fusion reactor.

Such a reactor would generate power by merging the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, and thus liberating the so-called binding energy whose absence, paradoxically, helps to hold complicated atomic nuclei together. This is a process similar to the one that powers the sun. Moreover, unlike previous attempts to do so, ITER would produce more energy than it consumed in getting the hydrogen nuclei hot enough to fuse in the first place.

The current imbroglio is over who gets the reactor, and with it the economic boost of a multibillion-dollar construction project. The two sites remaining in the competition are Cadarache in France and Rokkasho in Japan.

America is siding with Japan, while the French have the backing of the Chinese and the Russians. The South Koreans seem to be sitting on the fence, although leaning--if that is not stretching the metaphor too far--towards Europe. Meetings of ministers in December failed to resolve the issue (indeed, Canada withdrew from the project entirely) and the date for a decision keeps getting pushed back. According to spokesmen from the Japanese embassy in London, early March is now the target.

It is unusual for ministers to be discussing scientific projects of this nature, even ones as expensive as ITER. But the reason for all the attention is not that politicians have suddenly developed a particular interest in physics, but that the question of where to put ITER has become--so observers believe--another proxy for the debate over the war on Iraq. America is commonly thought to be supporting Rokkasho in return for Japan's support in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Russians and Chinese may be trying to spite the Americans by siding with the French. Nor are the French helping the situation by threatening (unlike the Japanese) to pull out of the project entirely if they do not get their way.

One ludicrous compromise would place the reactor in Japan and the data and control centre in France, or vice versa. Such gerrymandering recalls the worst of the International Space Station, a collaborative effort which is a scientific boondoggle, and contrasts badly with collaborations such as CERN, the European centre for particle physics, which is a model for international co-operation on big science projects. So, given ITER's price tag (about $5 billion to build, and another $5 billion in running costs for a 20-year operational lifespan and a ten-year decommissioning period), it might not be a bad outcome if the whole thing did go belly up. Although visionaries have long been lured to the idea of fusion because the fuel, being a constituent of water, is unlikely ever to run out, the economics of the process are dubious.

Boon or boondoggle?

Sceptics (including this newspaper) have pointed out that workable fusion power has seemed perpetually 30 years away since the first experiments were done in the 1950s. Even if the 30-year horizon were actually true on this occasion, the discount rate over three decades, and the opportunity cost of all those billions, would probably make it uneconomic. Nor is the world in obvious need of another way to generate electricity.

There are, of course, arguments on the other side. On the 30-year-horizon question Robert Goldston, the head of the Princeton Pla

Re:Fusion again?

[sanx]

...produce helium and neutrons...

Seems like a real expensive way of novelty balloons...

Re:Fusion again?

[lordholm]

Have they sustained break-even point with this technology yet?

Not with laser ignited fusion such as this, but the JET tokamak in the EU has reached break even.

Have they produced a surplus -- actually generate electricity -- with this technology yet?

No electricity has been produced, this is a lesser problem though (basically a huge water boiler), the main problem is that one would like to achieve ignition and have fusion for more than a second. Iter will achieve this. There are also som problems relating to the tritium producing lithium blanket. The Iter will not generate electricity, but its successor DEMO will, and that should be built around 2030 (with a construction time of 10 years or so).

Re:Fusion again?

[OwnedByTwoCats]

But Scotty pulls up the formula for Transparent Aluminum (or Aluminium; he is Scottish, yes?) on a Mac Plus. You need a working Mac Plus to get the formula, so preserve yours now. The future is counting on it!

Chris

Yeah right

[Eightyford]

We've heard about fusion happening just around the corner every month for the last 30 years. What makes this any different?

Re:Yeah right

[Detritus]

Fusion is easy, turning it into a practical source of energy is hard.

Re:Yeah right

[Spy der Mann]

What makes this any different?

Fast Ignition. From TFA:

Kodama and colleagues are now upgrading their laser system in order to approach "breakeven" - the point at which the energy output is equal to the energy needed to sustain the reaction. They then plan to further enhance their system so that it reaches ignition, which happens when the fusion reactions generate enough energy to sustain themselves without the need for further heating. Finally, they hope to build a demonstration fast-ignition facility. Physicists in the US are also studying fast ignition.

Re:Yeah right

[DAldredge]

Fusion, AI, and Flying cars are always 10 years away...

Re:Yeah right

[brian0918]

TFA serves as an introduction to some nice fancy words like "breakeven" and "ignition", but that is all. It was made clear long ago that lasers are hopeless for this purpose.

Re:Yeah right

[WatertonMan]

Umm... Physicists in the US have been working on this for a long time. There was a laser at Lawrence Berkeley doing these experiments back in the early 90's and I worked on it at Los Alamos then as well.

There are some big problems with it as a reactor design. Needless to say you have to get the tritium pellet positions just so inside a large laser. Figuring out how to do that with a *lot* of spherical pellets is non-trivial. And that's assuming they can make a self-sustaining system. (Something that I tend to doubt a lot - although I became rather cynical about the whole approach)

My personal feeling is that at least in the US, most of those working on this were former weapons physicists. The physics is basically the same. They got to keep their jobs and work on the same sort of thing by bringing up the fabled "alternative energy" mantra. But I honestly doubt it'll ever pay off as an energy source.

Great way to refine the physics of nuclear weapons though.

US Oil Companies Already Interveining Apparently

[WillDraven]

Nothing for you to see here, please move along.

oil companies days are numbered

[timmarhy]

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.

Re:oil companies days are numbered

[Viper Daimao]

Oil will last, just maybe not cheap oil. As far as alternate energy sources, have you looked at oil? Seriously, oil shale in Colorado and tar sands in Alberta have more oil in them than all of Saudi Arabia.

Re:oil companies days are numbered

[ttfkam]

Plants don't grow in a vacuum. They have to get their carbon from somewhere. Most get it from CO2 in the air.

It is this carbon that is later burned. Unlike petroleum diesel which burns carbon sequestered in the ground over millions of years, biodiesel is more of a closed system, recycling the carbon.

Per the Department of Energy's statistics, each year the US consumes roughly 60 billion gallons of petroleum diesel and 120 billion gallons of gasoline. If moving the fleet of predominantly petroleum diesel trucks to biodiesel -- without making major modifications to the truck engines, fuel transportation containers, or fuel distribution methods -- is solving environmental problems, I don't know what is.

Biodiesel can indeed solve environmental problems, especially since it's the most viable way to replace oil/gasoline.

--------------

Now I'm curious. What would you suggest instead as a better environmental solution?

Prior Art

[uits]

I saw this in Spiderman 2, like, a year ago.

Fusion + Laser Beams

[salesgeek]

Sounds like someone got funding from combining two of the coolest buzzwords from the 1950s.

Nuclear Weapons

[ZorbaTHut]

"However, both these billion-dollar lasers will primarily be used for nuclear-weapons research, with only 15% of their time being available for other areas of physics."

Okay, maybe this is a dumb question - but what *is* the forefront of nuclear weapons technology? They blow up really really big and eradicate cities, we've already got that - are they just trying to get a few percentage points of efficiency, or are there actually breakthroughs they're attempting to pull off?

(I'm avoiding the entire flamefest subject of "nuclear weapons evil lol", I'm just curious what there is in nuclear weapons that's worth 85% of two doubtless insanely expensive facilities.)

Re:Nuclear Weapons

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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:Nuclear Weapons

[Waffle Iron]

I never really bought that "stockpile stewardship" angle. Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier just to get out the original blueprints, dismantle the old nukes and build fresh ones to the original specs? After all, one of the primary attractions of nuclear weapons in the first place was that they were so cheap to manufacture relative to their impact.

IMO, what they really want to do is create entirely new designs, and goofing around with tiny thermonuclear blasts helps them to do that.

Re:Nuclear Weapons

[Edmund Blackadder]

"You're thinking of the Kyoto Accord, dumbass."

No, dumbass, I am thinking of the Comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. Although I was not quite correct in saying Bush refused to sign it. He did not refuse to sign it because he did not have an opportunity to refuse, because Clinton signed it. However Clinton could not get it ratified by the then Republican congress. Bush was against the treaty from the begining and still is as are most republicans. The couple of short years of small democratic majority in congress were not sufficient to ratify the treaty as it requires 2/3 of the vote.

So as the test ban treaty is not ratified it is not in force. And of course since the us is not ratifying it a bunch of other countries have decided not to. The treaty will not go into force until all countries that signed it ratify it, and that wont happen while there is 1/3 of republicans in congress.

The usual name for this is

[i_should_be_working]

inertial confinement fusion. I'ts not new, but getting better. Most labs are not trying to reach break even point. It's more of a research tool.

And to everyone who has/will ask 'when will these ever get us energy? We've been hearing about fusion for years!'. The new Tokamak being built in France right now is the first one that physicists expect to reach break even point. No other reactors were ever expected to generate more energy than they consumed. They were all for research purposes, to get them to the point they are at now. Probably the same for this new inertial confinement one in Europe.

Re:The usual name for this is

[Jon Chatow]

Erm. JET reached break-even about 5 years ago, IIRC. Also, the SPHERE project (also at RAL) was rather exciting (v. small and high yeilds). The continuity and sustainability of reaction is the primary issue, right now.

Lasers, eh?

[Landshark17]

Yes, but will there be frickin' sharks?

The problem with D-T fusion is....

[DirtBag99]

The main problem with Deuterium-Tritium fusion, even IF you get to breakeven and beyond is that the energy released has a very substantial neutron component. Unlike gamma or beta radiation, neutrons stick to atomic nucleii and change the atoms of say, the reaction chamber walls into radioactive isotopes which in most cases, are actually far "hotter" than the low-level nuclear waste from fission power plants. Now, you say that you don't change the reactor vessel very often, but with most steel or other possible chamber materials, this bombardment of neutrons also makes the chamber very, very brittle. Now you are faced with the problem of changing and disposing of a very hot pile of material. Much better if you use Deuterium and Helium-3.

Re:The problem with D-T fusion is....

[John Hasler]

> The main problem with Deuterium-Tritium fusion,
> even IF you get to breakeven and beyond is that
> the energy released has a very substantial
> neutron component.

Which you soak up with lithium, generating more tritium.

> ...the reaction chamber walls into radioactive
> isotopes which in most cases, are actually far
> "hotter" than the low-level nuclear waste from
> fission power plants.

Hotter, and therefor shorter lived.

Re:The problem with D-T fusion is....

[dpbsmith]

But, but but... It says right in the article that there are no greenhouse gases, no generation of long-lived nuclear waste... ...no downside, no safety issues, no problems, that it will produce a limitless supply of clean energy too cheap to meter, that neutrons are good for you, that the isotopes it produces will cure cancer and that people living near the plant will probably live to be 150... ...and that you can double your money in 45 days by arbitraging postal reply coupons.

Re:The problem with D-T fusion is....

[Phanatic1a]

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.

Re:The problem with D-T fusion is....

[DirtBag99]

>Which you soak up with lithium, generating more tritium. True enough, however, if you put a layer of Li thick enough to capture all of the neutrons, you'll fill the reactor vessel with lithium... (Ok I'm exaggerating) You won't be able to catch them all... the mean free path of neutrons in lithium might be pretty big, but I don't know what the cross section of lithium is. It probably isn't as big as Halfnium or other "conventional" neutron absorbers. You'll still have a brittle pile of hot steel to replace.... are you going to want to shut down a power plant for 20 odd years while the vessel cools to the point where it can be removed? I doubt our electricity producers would want that. You use D-T because it is by far the easiest reaction to set off... and I sure as heck am not against using it but people should be aware of the downside...

Re:The problem with D-T fusion is....

[QuantumG]

Have to agree, and the new breeder reactors being built in China and elsewhere result in very little nuclear waste that is easier to handle than waste produced by today's reactors and they're safer. So yeah, great, keep doing research into nuclear fusion but don't hail it as the solution to the world's energy problems. Nuclear fission is the answer and it's high time that countries like Australia stop burning coal and use their 40% of the world's supply of uranium before someone invades us to get it.

Re:The problem with D-T fusion is....

[lgw]

Well, you need some sort of moderator to slow your fast neutrons, but this is a well-considered problem for fission reactors, and the result certainly won't be worse than a fission plant. Liquid lithium apparantly works pretty well. It's easy to shield your steel walls from thermal neutrons - a very thin layer of Gadolinium stops thermal neutrons cold (so to speak). Boronated plastics work as well, and are easy enough to dispose of.

Still, D-T reactors are the messiest solution, and I certainly hope we can do better. Of course, the coolest possible way to do fusion would be to find a way to stabilize muons, allowing muon-catalyzed fusion (real "cold fusion"), but given that there's no reason to believe that's even possible, we can't expect to see that until after Duke Nukem Forever ships.

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.

Time Until Break-Even

[Rob Carr]

A lot of people say that "Fusion is always thirty years away." This isn't accurate.

With the latest research and technology, controllable fusion is now only always twenty-nine years away. We're making progress.

It reminds me of downloading a file, where the time to completion stays constant as the file is downloaded because the download speed keeps dropping. Either the file is finally completely downloaded at some point or the system hangs. No matter what it always takes far, far longer than it should have.

This is inertially-confined fusion

[GuyMannDude]

We've heard about fusion happening just around the corner every month for the last 30 years. What makes this any different?

You're exaggerating. Scientists have always been pretty upfront that creating a confined, sustained fusion reaction is an exceptionally difficult problem. The potential payoff is so large that we continue to study it.

What makes this different is that they are building a large test facility for inertially-confined fusion. Magnetically-confined fusion is the more popular approach. The article doesn't talk about the details very much but one of the primary obstacles to inertially-confined fusion are the presence of hydrodynamic instabilities such as the Richtmyer-Meshkov effect. The lasers are directed at a spherical shell containing a deuterium-tritium pellet and are supposed to cause the shell to implode. Manufacturing imperfections result in the RM instability and the less-than-perfect implosion causes the whole thing to fall apart without the deuterium and tritium fusing together. Does anyone know what the status of research on this is? A decade ago, there were still difficulties getting theoretical models of the RM instability to even agree with experiments, which obviously meant that the process of dealing with the instability seemed pretty far off. Are they still having problems with this?

GMD

Re:This is inertially-confined fusion

[JahToasted]

I saw a documentary on how a scientist used lasers to ignite tritium into a fusion reaction. Unfortunately the reaction got out of control and nearly wiped out New York City. It was a good thing Spiderman was there to stop him.

Re:This is inertially-confined fusion

[deglr6328]

Here's the thing. I am currently posting this message as I sit at my desk in this building. You needn't wait until the middle of the next decade to see what Fast Ignition MAY offer us in terms of inertial fusion power. Only 2 more years. That is when our new multikilojoule multiPETAWATT laser will come online and fast ignition experiments will begin. Kodama et. al. have shown a neutron yeild increase of over three orders of magnitude when they coupled 500 J of chirped pulse (heater) light to their imploding cone in shell targets. We will be able to couple a ~3Kj heater pulse to the targets normally imploded on our current 30Kj 60 Terawatt system which currently holds the world record for neutron production at ~5X10^14 neutrons per pulse. This will therefore put us VERY close to the ignition regime and in fact one of the reasons the building of the new laser was approved was to examine the "near ignition parameter space" of scaled implosions to determine if the National Igniton Facility will ignite its capsules with high gain.

As to the subject of hydrodynamic instabilities, IANAP, but from what I gather of it, this problem is far less serious today with the discoveries (many made here at LLE) of things like frequency tripling the beam (to suppress hot electron production in the plasma), polarization smoothing, distributed phase plate smoothing (google for more info on this stuff or just go to the documents section of the LLE site) with the introduction of larger bandwidth of the laser pulse and the simple improvement of irradiation uniformity on target using more beams (our system is only a ~30Kj laser while the NOVA laser at LLNL was a ~40-60Kj laser, the reason we hold the record for neutrons/pulse is because NOVA was a 10 beam system, we are a 60 beam system. The supression of Rayleigh-Taylor instability in imploding targets is VASTLY reduced on our system because of the increase in uniformity.

Fast ignition is exciting because it potentially allows us to examine ignition and high gain in ICF with a huge decrease in price required to build the device to do it by at least a factor of 10. NIF is going to cost ~$4-5 Billion, a fast ignition device which could theoretically attain comparable fusion conditions (as described in TFA) is around $500 million.

Also building chirped pulse petawatt lasers is great for other sicience too. The light is so unbelievably intense from these things that they can initiate nuclear reactions DIRECTLY (photodisruption of the nucleus etc.)! The OMEGA EP will probably allow scientists here to examine Unruh and Hawking radiation in the laboratory....

To anyone who doesn't think that ICF or MFE methods of attaining fusion breakeven and ignition in the laboratory take a look at some graphs like this. The power produced by experimental devices has increased by nearly a factor of a BILLION over the past 3 decades. Slowly but surely we will get there, and when we do, it will change the world in ways I can't even imagine.

Re:This is inertially-confined fusion

[Frogbert]

I feel bad for your university because its plans will all fall in a heap when they realise they don't have the essential shark component for their laser.

Re:This is inertially-confined fusion

[deglr6328]

Well...not quite THAT strong. :)

Re:This is inertially-confined fusion

[srleffler]

I have no idea what Unruh is

Unruh effect

Re:This is inertially-confined fusion

[Aardpig]

I hear sea bass make a good drop-in replacement - but only if they are ill-tempered.

Re:This is inertially-confined fusion

[OldManAndTheC]

"... frequency tripling the beam (to suppress hot electron production in the plasma), polarization smoothing, distributed phase plate smoothing ... "

Scotty, I don't care HOW you do it, just BEAM ME UP!

Re:This is inertially-confined fusion

[famebait]

Only 2 more years. That is when our new multikilojoule multiPETAWATT laser will come online and fast ignition experiments will begin.

That's going to need one hell of a shark!

more info in the headlines please.

[darkonc]

What's interesting about this setup isn't that it's using lasers to produce fusion (yawn... old news). What's relatively new about this facility is that it's using a two-stage approach with one set of lasers being used to compress the capsule, while the other ignites it. Supposedly, this requires less energy, so it's far more hopeful that it will reach the break-even point.

Supposedly, they're even hoping (as the name suggests) to cause ignition -- where the process actually becomes self-sustaining (so you'll only need the containment lasers). Even more likely to reach break-even then.

The other somewhat newsworthy aspect about this unit is that it will be a civilian facility, not a weapons facility with a few weeks a year allowed for civilian research (which is, apparently, the case for many of the other fusion units).

I was originally gonna skip reading TFA, then I figured... Given how (in)accurate slashdot headlines are, I've got to presume that there's something non-boring about this 'new' plan.

Re:People laughed at idea of heavier than air mach

[fossa]

You're right. A glance around my house reveals that *all* my machines are heavier than air. 50 years ago who'd of thought we be at this point today.

Free Fusion

[nurb432]

We have a source of unlimited ( well, practically unlimited ) fusion power plant now.

Its called The sun.

Why not work on technologies that use what we got now, instead of wasting it on research that most scientist agree will never realize even a 1:1 power ratio?

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

[Jeremi]

Nowdays, hardly anyone is impressed by a Roomba.

Well, sure, that's because Roomba looks like the umholy offspring of a frisbee and a cockroach. Everybody knows that a home vacuuming robot is supposed to look like this.

Re:AI has a problem of changing definintion

[Deviant Q]

That's called Tesler's Theorem by Hofstadter: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

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:AI has a problem of changing definintion

[groomed]

The problem with AI is that it is constantly being redefined.

This is pretty much just propaganda from the AI community.

At one point, a robot that would vaccum your house without you lifting a finger would have been considered an example of AI.

The original expectation was of a robot which could do household chores, like the robot from the Jetsons. That is, a robot which could operate a vacuum cleaner, answer the door and feed the dog.

We still don't have that. Instead we have the vacuming cockroach that is the Roomba.

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

Yes, but the expectation was that the computer would be using more or less the same mental processes as a human grandmaster. Instead we got a really fast tic-tac-toe solver which had to be repeatedly rebooted in order to perform its job.

AI will always be 10+ years away if we keep redefining it to exclude any successes we achieve.

The greatest success of the AI community has been to gradually reduce expectations to a level that is easily achieved through classical process control and ordinary solid engineering.

Break even? Where?

[raptor_87]

I just browsed through the JET website and saw nothing about break even mentioned. Why would something that major not be listed?

Useless

[brian0918]

This project is hopeless from the go. Unless they plan on using thousands of lasers, they will never get the symmetry available in setups like pulse-powered z-pinches (which can also do fast ignition, such as Sandia National Labs Z-Machine), and lasers are far more inefficient for this purpose.

Re:Bombs break even

[ttfkam]

But they are initiated by fission reactions. They are not exactly controlled reactions either.

Continuous?

[pla]

I see one major problem with this, if it actually works...

How do you make it work on a more-or-less continuous basis, rather than "blow one up, extract energy, reset system"?

I suppose some sort of gravity-feed would work to control the overall rate, if the exact position of the capsule doesn't matter too much, but even then this will still make "little bangs" rather than a continuous stream of energy. Internal combustion engines we grasp, but internal fusion engines? This strikes me as similar to the problem of a space elevator - great idea, if only we had something that could bear that much stress...

Re:Continuous?

[amalcon]

The same way you take anything discrete and make it continuous in electronics: Your good friend, the capacitor.

Re:Re-Hydrogen The Bomb

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the answer is no. Fusion is very hard to achieve and thus you need to fision bomb to start that reaction. Now in order to make a fision bomb you first have to aquire a large amount of radioactive material. Then you would need the proper protective equipment to handle that material. Not to mention refine that material to weapon grade. This would cost you millions to billions of dollars. Bill Gates would have a hard time making a nuclear bomb from scratch, even with all of his money.

Why do you think most contries in the world can not make nuclear weapons. It not only requires alot of knowledge in physics and chemistry but alot of money. There have been countries trying to make nuclear weapons for the last 60 years and have failed. You need not worry about about this technology resulting in WMD. THis technology could not produce a nuclear weapon as it does not have the energy output to even create a small explosion. It is for scientific purposes only and can not be used by the military for anything more then a reseach platform.

The physics of actually creating nuclear weapons and how this fusion reactor will work are very different. I'm not really going to explain it to you cause there is alot of stuff thats really complicated and I don't feel like writing it. Not to mention that there are some things I just don't know.

Cars, Planes, Ships, Tractors?

[Marrow]

Ok, so lets say we get fusion working perfectly. Say a 50% NET return on the energy in hydrogen. What answers are in the wings for vehicals?

No one is going to give people tritium for plane fuel or tractor fuel.

So how do we use the new clean energy source for portable systems. Burning hydrogen cracked from water comes to mind, but is this really feasible? Is hydrogen energy dense enough to be a good fuel for a comercial airliner? For anything?

Are there other denser fuels that we could make with a rich energy source that would be convenient and portable?

And what other uses besides fuel are we using Oil for? Like what percentage of oil goes for lubricants, chemicals?

I really would like to see a great energy solution that makes all nations self sufficient. It would be a huge step towards reducing violence. But how does it work for the modern world and all its complicated pieces and processes.

Re:Cars, Planes, Ships, Tractors?

[timbo234]

No one is going to give people tritium for plane fuel or tractor fuel.

So how do we use the new clean energy source for portable systems. Burning hydrogen cracked from water comes to mind, but is this really feasible? Is hydrogen energy dense enough to be a good fuel for a comercial airliner? For anything?

I'm not sure about gas-turbines (jet engines) but for most piston engines in cars, trucks and aircraft the idea would be to use either hydrogen fuel cells or hydrogen as a combustible fuel. This has already proven itself feasible in prototypes and the lab. However there's little point in doing this if you have to burn more fossil fuels to get the hydrogen in the first place - which is where fusion (or fission) comes in.


And what other uses besides fuel are we using Oil for? Like what percentage of oil goes for lubricants, chemicals?


Good question. But the more we reduce our use of oil the more will be available for things like this, and fusion is an essential part of this.


I really would like to see a great energy solution that makes all nations self sufficient. It would be a huge step towards reducing violence. But how does it work for the modern world and all its complicated pieces and processes.

Just because fusion promises huge benefits doesn't mean it will solve all the world's problems. It can't (for the foreseeable future) be put in vehicles or aircraft, not is it likely to reduce violence (people will just fight over some over resource - water for example). However it will, if it works, solve or drastically reduce our fossil fuel reliance for power generation and will allow the use of other technologies to also solve that reliance in vehicles at least.

Re:Cars, Planes, Ships, Tractors?

[njh]

There are fairly simple chemical processes for converting H2 and CO2 into oil. They just aren't economic because we produce H2 from oil at the moment. If H2 were cheap, producing oil replacements would be relatively straighforward.

Another approach is to electrolyse the CO2 into carbon and oxygen, then react this with water to produce oil. However, that technology was developed for producing oil from coal, and there is plenty of coal around, so unless fusion power is surprisingly cheap, we'll probably just use coal.

Converting methane into propane and butane is already done on a large scale, and in some countries these gases are already commonly used as car fuels (LPG in australia).

Finally, if fusion electricity is cheap enough, we can simply grow very dense crops under electric lighting and convert the resulting bio-oils to biodiesel.

Re:Cars, Planes, Ships, Tractors?

[Alioth]

Finally, if fusion electricity is cheap enough, we can simply grow very dense crops under electric lighting and convert the resulting bio-oils to biodiesel.

That's unnecessarily complex. Typical crops (such as rapeseed oil) yield around 150 US gallons of biodiesel per acre per year.

On the other hand, algae species have been found to contain 50% oil that can be used for biodiesel. An algae biodiesel factory has the potential for 10,000 to 20,000 US gallons of biodiesel per acre under normal sunlight. Using 0.3% to 0.6% of the land mass in the US (and since growing algae will be more of an industrial than an agricultural process, this can be done in the desert where the sunlight is best) you can make enough biodiesel to power the United States _entire_ transportation infrastructure. Most of this infrastructure (trains, planes, diesel cars and trucks) can use this fuel without modification - unlike hydrogen which will require a complete replacement of the current infrastructure.

Re:Cars, Planes, Ships, Tractors?

[Phanatic1a]

Is hydrogen energy dense enough to be a good fuel for a comercial airliner?

Oh, *hell* yes. For weight-limited applications like air-travel, hydrogen walks all *over* dead dinosaurs. It's volumetric density is piss-poor, which is why you'd need your car's fuel system pressurized to about 5,000psi if you want to get as far on 16-gallon tank of hydrogen as you do on a 16-gallon tank of gasoline, but if you're talking massic energy density? Hooboy.

H2: 140 MJ/kg
Diesel/gasoline/avgas: ~46.8 MJ/kg

Granted, at STP those H2 tanks would definitely be prohibitively large, but big honking airplanes already deal with highly-pressurized systems, for moving flight control surfaces around, so carting the stuff around at a few thousand psi really isn't a big deal.

There is still progress left

[mnemonic_]

According to nuclear physicist Freeman Dyson, it's harder to create nukes that are smaller rather than larger. Likely they want to use these lasers to develop nuclear "bunker buster" bombs that would require sub-kiloton yields. There are also efforts at reducing the radiation fallout while maintaining the physical blast, so possibly we could have "non-atrocious" super-bombs.

Well there's the delay...

[SamAdam3d]

We got people like this sitting around chatting on Slashdot!

I would bet that Slashdot alone loses this world 1 year of progress for every 10 years of time.

Yurop ?

[sfjoe]

Bah - I laugh at these foreign scientists. Just wait until the first wave of creationists start graduating from our high schools. Then we'll show them what scientific advancement is all aboout.

Re:Yurop ?

[EiZei]

"If god would have wanted us to have fusion he would have not made it so damned hard!"

I Thought /. Covered NEWS

[MikeyTheK]

This isn't NEWS. The only NEWS here is that someone in Europe is trying it. Big freaking deal. Berkly and Rochester have been all over this for quite a while now. The only problem is that they haven't actually done any useful experiments yet, the test reactions last milliseconds, and the fuel used and energy released are so small as to be barely discernable.
The insane part of this is that they think 500 million pounds is going to build a meaningful facility. What are they going to return - picowatts? Come on. What's even funnier is that anyone thinks that anyone is Europe is going to get this done quickly. Just aligning the mirrors and getting the timing right takes YEARS. Just ask the folks at Berkley. It's an interesting idea, and the ramifications and implications are exciting, but probably not until we're all pretty darn old.

Most important of all, THIS ISN'T NEWS!

Re:Europe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Europe is neither a country, nor a state in the U.S.A.

Well, of course not. You don't have oil. But if you get a working* fusion reactor... Expect to have your people liberated* from their oppressive* governments, and your technology used to benefit the free world*.

I heartily suggest that if you value your autonomy, you refrain from developing an end-to-end solution which allows automobiles to be powered from a fusion energy source, even indirectly.

Oh, and by the way, Slashdot is not a person, and thus cannot be said to be smart - at least not in the sense you used, which is synonymous with "educated."

* where "working"=="produces net power surplus", "oppressive"=="not Republican", and "free world"=="the Bush family and friends". I think we all know how to translate "liberated".

Re:Europe?

[sydres]

it will be a state when we decide we need german beer, italian cheeses, and french wine. and that the future safety of the U.S. is at risk from european terrorists

The Public and Nuclear Fusion?

[iamlucky13]

Probably the biggest benefit of fusion is no emissions and no long-term radioactive waste. Is this going to be a problem to get the public to accept since the process includes the word "nuclear" or are we going to have to sacrifice 10,000 virgin physicists to appease the hippies?

Intergalactic News report

[origamy]

Two agents of the Intergalactic Intelligence Agency (IIA) transferred to the higher planes as an entire solar system was consumed by a black hole this morning.

Sources from the IIA said they were monitoring a primitive race that lived in the third planet. That race was experimenting with sub-atomic particles trying to achieve sustainable fusion, which we all know can lead to an unstable black hole condition. The agents weren't able to interfere in time to avoid the catastrophe.

---
Measure your age in Hex - it'll make you look younger :-)

Re:Sun worshippers...

[Auraiken]

But I'm not holding my breath. That's good then. We'll need as much flowing air as possible to make this work.

Re:Three Words

[deglr6328]

"Fusion "experiments" have been "beginning" for over three decades, to the tune of over $60 billion dollars when last I checked. It will take an enormous amount of power to break even on that -- and every year the bar gets higher. *We're* nowhere near break-even, but Sandia's been doing all right!"

Whatever are you talking about? The Z-machine at sandia has only produced millijoule fusion yields, the JET at cullham has produced kilojoules.

"Meanwhile, not a penny for research on an electrically- accelerated boron-deuterium reactor."

There's no money for it because that is a nonequilibrium system which was proven impossible for generating excess energy.

I can't quite make much sense of the rest of your post.....

Re:Micro-gravity ?

[hpa]

Actually, you don't even need the ISS. All you need is a drop tower with vacuum inside. Any object in free fall is in zero gee. This technique is commonly used, on Earth, to manufacture small, cheap metal spheres.

65% efficiency!

[xtal]

They'll just have to make it up in volume. ;)

From TFA:

However, both these billion-dollar lasers will primarily be used for nuclear-weapons research, with only 15% of their time being available for other areas of physics.

This is noticably absent from the article headlines.. I will also point out there are several thousand pefectly working fusion reactors on the planet, and I'd be willing to bet there's an excellent chance one of them is aimed at you sleeping in your bed right now!

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

The research is very, very young, and nobody is "Getting Serious" about it yet. Maybe when oil hits $200/bbl.

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? :)

Re:People laughed at idea of heavier than air mach

[ozmanjusri]

I want complete and instantaneous energy release.

Is that how you got to be Chrispy?

Re:Europe?

[fnj]

A "European" scientist can be from Portugal or the most remote parts of Siberia.

If Siberia has been moved from Asia to Europe, I must have missed it. Siberia is bounded on the west by the Urals, and the Urals mark the boundary between Europe and Asia. It's a pretty arbitrary boundary, but it is well accepted.

Available amount of naturally occurring D2 and oth

[fnj]

The main reason for developing fusion is that deuterium is virtually unlimited, unlike fossil and fission fuels.

There is about 0.5 ppm (5E-7 fraction) of hydrogen in the atmosphere, and 200 ppm of that 0.5 ppm is deuterium, so there is 100 ppt (1E-10 fraction) of deuterium in the atmosphere.

There is 1.7 ppm (1.7E-6 fraction) of methane in the atmosphere. In principle we could just extract that and burn it as fuel. It's a potent greenhouse gas in its own right, so the CO2 produced by burning it might actually contribute less greenhouse effect than does the methane being extracted, so the overall cycle could be greenhouse neutral to negative.

There is so much atmosphere (total mass 5.1E18 kg) that there is a lot of both methane and deuterium
in it: 9 trillion kg of methane, and 510 million kg of deuterium. Extracting either one, though, would be extremely difficult to do without using more energy than the resulting product would yield. And in the case of deuterium, you still have to isotopically separate the deuterium from the regular hydrogen after extracting the hydrogen.

There is also lots of deuterium in the oceans, of course.

Check my math.

Atmospheric composition
Natural occurrence of deuterium
Total mass of atmosphere

Re:Cool but not such a new idea.

[deglr6328]

And in the late 1980s at that very same laboratory, Prof. Gerard Mouru discovered a way to increase laser pulse power by over a thousandfold. It is called chirped pulse amplification and NOW it is being used in conjunction with the older lasers to reach ignition. That's the new idea here.

Re:Giant waste of time and money !

[hostyle]

Ehm, what would you suggest then Mr. Smart Guy? The way I see it we (the world) have two options.

1. Using science, try to figure out an efficient nuclear fusion method before the worlds limited petrochemical supplies run out.

2. Do nothing and just wait for the the worlds limited petrochemical supplies to run out.

I'm all for the former. The problem with a load of these "insightful" comments on slashdot is that its just like opposition politics sho go around shouting things like "You guys are useless, you're wasting all our voters hard-earned money on stuff" without offering (or most likely even having) an alternative method of providing a necessary service at lower costs. And what always happens with these political whiners is that voters eventually believe them and they get voted in - only to do exactly the same or worse than their predecessors.

Bottom-line. We need safe and efficient fusion power. If we don't try we'll never get it.

Neutron balloons

[hummassa]

Yeah, specially considering that neutron balloons are awfully heavy... :-)

Whipeout gamma-ray blast

[cz_eye]

Thats good news for America, because Europeans will be the "beta testers" here. Once the reaction gets out of control (as seen so many times lately) the resulting gamma flash will wipe them out. So Americans will be finally able to conquer the old-lands back.

Windpower

[k2r]

AFAIK the biggest wind turbine by now is the "5M" by (German company) Repower. It has a rotor of 126m diameter and does 5MW.
And it's in use already.

http://www.repower.de/index.php?id=66&L=1

k2r

Re:My impression

[Retric]

It's not a number of years off it's a question of research $$$ to finish. AKA spend 3 billion a year and we get fusion in 30 years spend 1 billion a year and it's going to be closer to 70.

The are basically 3 approaches to hot fusion:

Kinetic: AKA no Confinement other than time. Build a bunch of big lasers and hit a little ball. It's by far the hardest but it's a good way to get the department of energy to help pay for your lasers. Take this project, which is getting 15% of this, lasers time but that's not in the article anywhere. (PS: It's a stupid idea and is 100's of years from being efferent. But the military loves them because it involves blowing things up and using big lasers.)

Magnetic Confinement: Sounds all sci-fi and it's the most "fun" to work with. You use supper cooled "high temperature" super conductors to confine supper hot plasma. Science geeks life this stuff and it's not that hard to get working if you have a few Million $ and a bunch of unemployed plasma physicists. It's about 30-75 years off with sufficient funding. (Not with this white house.)

Electrostatic Confinement: Take a wire mesh charge it up to 100+k Electron volts (Works at 15 k but it works much better at higher energy levels ) stir in some plasma and it just works. This is by far the simplest with several hobbyists building working proto types. The problem is it's not that sexy. For the most part you build it and it and then all you can do is optimize the gas density and charge on the mesh. The problem is it's really simple so once you build one there is not much effort to keep it running 24/7. (No idea what time frame this one is at we could probably build a working aka net positive energy plant today if someone wanted to pay for it but nobody is putting much money behind this so it's anybody's' guess how long it's going to take. (Note this is by far the best approach to use in space, as it's extremely lightweight if you don't need a vacuum chamber.)

Yeah, and what's this about break-even?

[srussell]

Speaking of break-even... what's the big deal? I know what break-even means, but what's the practical significance of it? Is it just* a psychological achievement, or do things get much easier after break even?

Break-even has been "just around the corner" for the past 50 years. Assuming we hit break-even within the next few years, will it take another 50 to get 1Mw over break even, or will it progress faster than that? At this rate, we'll run out of fossil fuels long before we get any reasonably useful output.

I'm just imagining having to build something the size of the JET tokamak to produce 1Mw of surplus energy.

* I'm don't want to minimize the importance of psychological milestones. I just don't know if advancement in plasma physics is linear, or if the effort to get increasing amounts of energy out of the system decreases once we achieve break-even.

--- SER

We need a couple of Wright Brother types...

[AB3A]

It's funny. I just flew back from a visit to one of aviation's great monuments: Kill-Devil Hills, where the Wright brothers figured out how to build a controllable aircraft and actually flew it.

The interesting thing about the Wright Brothers is that they approached the "aviation problem" with a totally different view of how the Europeans were approaching it. They studied the European data for why it didn't work, rather than why it did. They discovered, for example, that the Lilienthal tables of aerodynamic performance were far more inaccurate than anyone realized.

Perhaps, with all the effort that we're seeing toward research on the "fusion problem" we ought to ask ourselves, why this isn't working, instead of how it can. And then perhaps someone can think of something better than the brute force methods that everyone seems to enjoy funding. The turn of the last century was one where many governments were throwing money at all sorts of outlandish research projects to figure out how to aviate. Socially this feels remarkably similar to the "fusion problem" of today.

OK, so the first "cold fusion" experiments weren't the real thing. How about Sonoluminescence?
And let's not stop there-- there are many other theories about how one might be able to get fusion energy surplusses on a smaller scale. Ultimately, this may be a class of problem like the power to weight ratio that the Wright Brothers noticed.

Where are those Wright Brother types when you need them?