Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I saw this in Spiderman 2, like, a year ago.
"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.
Yes, but will there be frickin' sharks?
This sig is false.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
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.
"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.
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
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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
That's called Tesler's Theorem by Hofstadter: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."
"May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."
"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.....
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"