Z Machine Advances Fusion Race

Sandia Labs has announced a new milestone in Linear Transformer Driver technology that aims to solve one of the biggest obstacles to practical fusion reactors. Getting the current needed to "spark" a burst of fusion is doable; getting a constant series of sparks going to create a continuous chain of fusion bursts has never been achieved. The LTD, which allows the Sandia Z machine to fire once every 10.2 seconds, makes it look achievable. The press release (which has been picked up in a few places, but with no further analysis) says that practical fusion power could now be 20 years off.

Comments

See the Z Machine

[Ambitwistor]

The article lacked a photo of the Z Machine in operation. Amazing!

Re:ICF, not MCF

[nietsch]

A few nitpickings: A fusor as invented by Farnsworth et al. (and ongoing navy-funded research by Bussard et al.) does not use magnetism to hold the plasma in place, not all fusion research is done with tokamaks (although most money is spent on them).
The plasma in a fusion reaction does not fall apart due to gravity. The effects of heat (and thus pressure) is much higher than those of gravity.

ICF in this form may work, but do they have a method to harvest energy yet? are they close to break even? In theory one could capture emitted alpha particles (they have an energy/speed of several million electron volts, which translates to a very small current of a few million volts), but AFAIK, nobody has done such a feat yet.

I worked in that department for 3 summers

[brian0918]

I remember seeing a powerpoint lecture given by one of the researchers there, who calculated that to make the Z machine feasible for providing fusion power, they would need to fire one of these off every 0.1 second, so once every 10 seconds is not even close. Plus, the simple fact that there's an enormous explosion going off ten times a second, which destroys the chamber that holds the capsule, makes it seem like there's a definite engineering feat to overcome, otherwise the whole thing is liable to crumble to bits. Right now, they only fire off the Z machine a few hundred times a year... going from that to a few hundred times a minute is a big step.

I also wouldn't want to live anywhere near there; it feels like a moderately strong earthquake in the area everytime they fire that thing; it seems like the ground beneath and around a rapid-fire facility would quickly weaken and collapse.

So yes, the Z machine is an excellent source of x-rays, and those x-rays can definitely be used to collapse a fusion capsule, but how applicable is it for fusion power?

Re:20 year off == 20 good funding years

[LWATCDR]

You can breed tritium with a fission reactor.
But...
If you think Plutonium is a weapon proliferation problem you haven't seen nothing yet. Tritium is the key to making really powerful small nuclear weapons. Buy injecting Tritium gas into the core of a nuclear bomb you can boost the yield a lot.