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National Ignition Facility Fires 192-Beam Pulse
An anonymous reader writes "The construction and test firing of the National Ignition Facility have been completed. NIF was designed as the first facility ever to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion and, in particular, to reach the point of ignition in which more energy is generated from the reaction than went into creating it. While the recent 192-beam pulse only produced 80 kilojoules worth of energy, all signs point to NIF being able to reach an order of magnitude higher (PDF) than that in the coming year."
Cool.
I didn't see anything in the article about Helium removal. I thought that was the biggest remaining problem with nuclear fusion -- removing the Helium-4 "waste" from the reaction before the Helium "poisons" it and shuts down. Someone please correct me. I'm sure that's not entirely accurate.
Because energy is a useless fiat commodity, while you can eat cold, hard dollar bills.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
When we have energy in surplus, at the (general) expense of no one, the world may move much more easily to peaceful respect and cooperation.
I'm looking forward to renewable energy sources blazing the path to peace, but what I keep hearing from people in the field of nuclear physics is that Fusion will be realized by the mid 2020s.
If we can only hold off on the nuclear weapons until then, maybe we stand a chance to exist in a time when we spend our efforts of work (money/tax-dollars) to help each other instead of kick each others ass as best as we can afford.
Enough of all this shark-jumping! Sharks have feelings, too!
Actually I'm a loan shark, but we're all brothers.
No photos or vids at their site of the implosion explosion.
Did my computer screw it up or does the link really point to a 6MB 1p pdf? Why not just use a bmp?
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
Hasn't the worlds largest laser always been completed? Or at least since the first laser was created..
I guess we are still on track for global annihilation by 2011/2012, between this bad boy, ITER, and the Large Hadron Collider, it is practically guaranteed!
We have been about thirty years away from having fusion power for the last forty or so years. Seems like they pick thirty years because it is far enough out that those making the predictions probably won't be around to be held to account.
And the NIF webpage says nothing about trying to actually achieve a stable fusion reaction, just general high energy research stuff with some carrots dangled out to keep the funding going. So we are still probably thirty years away from fusion plants.
If we were really serious about energy independence (or if ya still believe in AGW) we would be building fission plants as fast as we could pour concrete and dumping serious coin into R&D on fusion. The idea being fission is what we can do NOW but be sure we have something in the pipeline lest we, in a hundred years or so, find ourselves running out of Uranium and back in the same energy crisis and by then demand would be so great burning dinosaurs would be pissin' in the wind.
Democrat delenda est
because then we'd have Carol Browner on everybody's back about people stealing NIF technology for the purpose of getting energy in this crisis of ours. I hope that with the current budget we'll be able to keep up funding for this potentially fruitful venture...shows more promise than ethanol ever did.
Let's be clear here. The purpose of the NIF is not to achieve fusion for energy production purposes. They just sell it that way. Its main goal isn't even simulations of the interior of Jupiter, or whatever they're hyping up this week.
You just need to look at the operating agency to see what its goal is: the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). That is, the people who make and control the H-bombs. See, the U.S. doesn't detonate H-bombs anymore, and needs to figure out whether the old warheads are still reliable. Instead, giant simulations of H-bomb detonations are used: hence the 20-petaflop Sequoia being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
But these simulations are no good if the physics model being used isn't accurate. How do you get an equation of state for deuterium at a billion atmospheres of pressure and 10 million kelvin temperature? You do an experiment: NIF. (And also the Z-Machine at Sandia.)
I get annoyed that the DOE sells NIF as a fusion energy machine. It's not, and it was never meant to be, and when people realize that target implosion fusion is never going to put a watt onto the grid, they're going to get even more annoyed at broken promises from fusion. It's basically avoiding the hard marketing problem of H-bombs by selling the machine as energy research.
(disclaimer: I work in a magnetic fusion lab and while I'm not a pacifist, I don't generally like H-bombs and don't like that my field is associated with them)
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
I thought sustained nuclear fusion would be a really huge scientific breakthrough.
Can this replace all nuclear fission and coal power plants with a clean plentiful nuclear fusion?
Isn't this a change-life-as-we-know-it achievement?
Would a local expert comment on this?
a society is as rich as its values. this is the reason the west is so powerful, not because it has nike sweatshops in indonesia. the usa, in 250 years, has eclipsed civilizations thousands of years older, because its foundational values from the enlightenment are simply superior ways of organizing society in productivity and happiness, and valuing progress and tolerance
however, in its need for energy, the west rewards places like saudi arabia. therefore, saudi arabia has no incentive to get better values, or evolve, and remains a stultified insanity exporting (wahabbi islam) country. when soccer mom fills up her SUV, she funds ultraconservative madrassas in pakistan and indonesia via saudi arabia that teach the west is the devil and should be destroyed
if oil never existed on the arabian penninsula, the insane ultraconservative religious ideas would remain the enclave of the few tribes who remained in the desert, and the cities would be full of young progressive thinking muslims, modern-looking and clamoring for change, and achieving it. simply because there would be no artificially propped up old guard preserving medieval values that simply don't work, and keeping their young from having a society they can envision themselves as better than the one they have
oil money, petrodollars, it keeps saudi arabia frozen in time, without any need or desire to adapt better values, and it allows it to export social values which are toxic to progress and prosperity. it exports these backwards values, and funds the evangelizing of ultraconservative wahabbi islam throughout the muslim world. so when we have fusion, and the value of oil drops to squat, only then will saudi arabia begin to modernize, because only then will it have to modernize for the first time since the penninsula was united in the early 20th century and oil was discovered
but right now, saudi arabia doesn't have to modernize its value system, because it is rewarded insane amounts of cash simply for sitting on a lot of oil. to the detriment of saudi society, the detriment of poor muslim societies that are recipients of the evangelizing of well-funded ultraconservative thinking, and the detriment of the west, which is vilified by the people it pays to give them oil to run their gas guzzling cars
in this way will fusion promote peace: by stop rewarding feeble, backwards societies and their unhuman values, simply because they sit on a lot of oil
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No sharks, but this article has a nice picture. Cool that it looks like something from low budget TV sci-fi (except that it's real)
Unfortunately, National Ignition Facility has nothing to do with energy production and everything to do with nuclear weaponry.
In reality, it is a physical simulation of the tough part of nuclear weapons design, the transfer of photon radiation to the thermonuclear secondary. There are extremely complex and exotic fluid dynamics. These results are used to calibrate the simulation codes for nuclear weapons, which are all about thermodynamics & radiation transfer, and not about nuclear physics.
For energy production research they probably wouldn't have used lasers (far too inefficient vs charged particle beams, but particle beams create less weapon-like conditions) and would have concentrated far more on the engineering aspects of power production.
The even sadder reality is that if it had been designed for energy production research it would never have been funded.
turning all of california into beachfront real estate
thereby boosting house values, and saving the economy
we need someone to fly around the earth real fast to make it rotate backwards and reverse time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I mean it's hard enough for a beam pulse find work after it's been fired let alone 192 of them.
IMMA FIRIN MAH LAZER!
"National Ignition Facility Fires 192-Beam Pulse "
Well, I hope someone hires them.
Too bad there's no mod for "-1 Idiotic".
i have muslim friends. i have nothing against islam. there's a mosque down the street. doesn't bother me at all. i am a very tolerant person
what i don't tolerate is: intolerance. get it?
your problem is you are confusing my criticism of ultraconservative islam, with criticism of just plain islam. i am criticizing the ultraconservative, not islam
we are talking about a society where christians and hindus can't practice their religion: all the rough jobs in saudi arabia are done by indian and filipino laborers, because saudi men won't do jobs "beneath them". don't you consider freedom of religion a basic human right? and women: in saudi arabia, a woman's rights are about as good as the rights of a head of cattle
this is horrible intolerance. and its the law of saudi arabia
i can't criticize that without being a racist in your mind? really?
since when does tolerance mean you tolerate the intolerant?
since when are you a racist simply because you criticize another culture? i can't criticize saudi arabia at all? and if i do, that means i must be a racist? you really believe that?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
He should probably wash his hands next.
A thousand years? Come on. That's the difference between the viking raids and landing on the moon. A lot can happen in a thousand years.
And FYI, RTFA. The thing has a maximum theoretical payoff roughly ten to one in terms of input/output, which they're predicting by 2010. 2MJ goes in, 20 comes out. If they only manage half that, you still have a x5 payoff. Which is still a massive win.
I don't know about you, but that much energy out of a nugget of 2mm nugget of beryllium sounds pretty freakin commercializable to me.
I'm thinking all sorts of great things can come from this. Uber cheap electricity, plug in hybrids to end the fuel crisis, shutting down coal/oil electricity plants, ion drives...there are lots of applications.
And you're not going to have to wait 1000 freaking years for them, either.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Because energy is a useless fiat commodity, while you can eat cold, hard dollar bills.
You can burn dollar bills though. And, if we switched to coal pennies, we could burn those too!
This is my sig.
Has that meme gotten to the point where it gets associated with any article that has words like "beam" that can conceivably be related to lasers in it?
Because if so, I'm breeding sharks with frikkin' two by fours on their heads!
I hate printers.
I'm with the original poster.... unlimited energy makes fresh water
an almost trivial task. It is technically feasible to pump fresh
water hundreds even thousands of miles. The city of San Francisco
has most of its water from just wast of Yosemite (Hetch Hetchy) and
it is almost all gravity feed, only one set of pumps in >100 miles.
Distillation or Reverse Osmosis requires energy, but the technology
has been available for many decades and is quite good.
There are plenty of technologies that start out as a military primary (or even exclusive) purpose but yield benefits to the whole world. Sometimes it is direct, sometimes indirect, but it is very common.
Heck, take nuclear technology in the first place. Whole reason that shit got developed so fast was to make a big bomb. Los Alamos was not started for humanitarian reasons, it was started to blow some people the fuck up. Now the work they did there didn't have any direct civilian applications. Not much market for having a nuke in your yard. However, the research and engineering there was the basis for civilian applications like nuclear power plants.
As a more direct, and recent, example, take GPS. GPS was designed so the military could accurately blow some people the fuck up. They wanted an accurate, universal location system for ships, planes, and even bombs. Does great for that. However it was opened up for civilian uses and has now become the greatest navigational aid in history. It is the prime location method for basically all commercial traffic, land sea or air. They only fall back to older systems should GPS fail.
So sure, one of the uses of this facility may be nuclear weapons testing. Heck, might be the reason for it to exist. That doesn't mean the research there doesn't have civilian energy applications.
Ok... i'm not a nuclear scientists obviously and I need a little more information to help me out. What's so great about nuclear fusion? If this works does that mean we'll have clean energy without radioactive byproducts? If not, why is this better than nuclear power plants today?
Next, assuming we get this working, what material does it require to make it work successfully? And really, what then becomes the bottle neck to producing infinite cheap energy?
I went and skimmed the wikipedia page but in my 3 min search i couldn't find anything to answer my questions. Without this knowledge I don't think I can appreciate this discussion.
Thanks in advance.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
If you're high, don't try telling jokes to sober people.
The pdf says: the total energy of the 192 beams is 1.8MJ. I'm guessing this is the output power carried by the light. Anyone know how much energy went into producing the laser beams?
They testfired the lasers they're going to be using for fusion later. Those beams (attempt to) put out a fixed amount of energy. They reported the total energy. No fusion happened, no energy was net produced, the only thing that happened was the lasers fired at 420J each.
This is pretty clear from the article, but not like anyone would RTFA anyway.
How is the parent a troll?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Pure science wouldn't ever get that large amount of funding (at least in the USA---CERN is the one worldwide exception, as that is pure science).
Most of of the scientific results from NIF will have only one value: designing and maintaining thermonuclear weapons.
And those that don't, are very "dual-use" so they will be nearly as classified as results from actual nuclear weapons tests.
It looks like Saudi peaked in 2005. Virtually all of the anthracite coal is already gone leaving only the lower grades. Renewables are only capable of making up a fraction of current energy usage. Which means we're just about to fall off the energy cliff. Not in 20 years, but now.
Why are Iran building nuclear reactors? Their oil is already running out. Where will the next war zones be? Canada, Australia, Khazakstan.
Deleted
Atomic energy policy is still about maintaining nuclear supremacy.
The latest review of fission reactors for procurement in the UK focussed only on Pressurized Water Reactor designs, even though other designs have the promise of being cheaper and safer.
It's not a coincidence that PWRs happen to produce lots of (ok, enough) lovely plutonium and tritium in ways convenient to extract (compared to breaking open the fuel pellets from a pebble-bed reactor).
You're not sorry at all, are you?!
First Post Prejudice. I think some neg-head mods are just too busy to scroll down the page, the joke has to really kill or you're fucked.
For all the hoopla about inertial confinement, my money is on magnetic confinement as in ITER (see http://www.iter.org/).
"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!"
When we have energy in surplus, at the (general) expense of no one, the world may possibly in theory move much more easily to peaceful respect and cooperation if humans were not human.
Let's be realistic right?
From the summary: "more energy is generated from the reaction than went into creating it" ...correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the definition of perpetual motion?
From the summary: "more energy is generated from the reaction than went into creating it" ...correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the definition of perpetual motion?
No, it's not. You need to take the fuel and the waste products into account, and in every scenario the fuel that goes in contains more energy that the waste products that come out.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Nuclear reactions (both fission and fusion) convert mass into energy. E=mc^2 and all that. It's not perpetual motion because eventually you run out of mass to convert. The sun's been generating energy this way for ~5 billion years and will run out of hydrogen to fuse in another ~5 billion.
Actually has a practical purpose.
No threat of black holes destroying the Earth.
Didn't take years of design and construction, a crew of thousands, massive engineering, a huge staff, and a subterranean circle beneath miles of peaceful countryside.
Didn't destroy itself within a week of startup.
Oh nooooes!
Here's an exclusive photo of the test facility!
Scientific American many years ago has an article with outline plans for such a thing. A spherical tank of liquid beryllium, spinning so as to contain a vortex and with helium bubbling through it. Drop deuterium/tritium pellets down the vortex, and zap them with a laser as they reach the centre of the sphere. Neutrons hit beryllium, transfer heat, create more tritium. Helium bubbles absorb shock waves, and flush unused/created deuterium and tritium for recycling.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
How about Science or Technology?
when do we get to fire the wave motion gun?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Fusion energy is never going to be effectively free. First of all, the fuel itself is deuterium and tritium (I think), which requires a rather expensive separation process from ordinary hydrogen. Of course, there are significant expenses in building your fusion plant. And you also have to pay for transmission of the resulting energy.
Reasonably priced fusion power seems at least possible. Free fusion power? Not happening.
steam engines were invented and developed
privately for the industrial revolution: pumping
water from mines were children dug for cool; to
drive crankshafts for milling machinery.
the government wasn't involved at all. then steam
engine onto wheels (railroads) and ships.
all very basic, trial-and-error development.
then someone thought about changing the "geometry"
of the steam-cylinder with more or less holes
and demonstrated the internal combustion engine
(diesel, 4-strock, etc.)
these engines powered the first two world wars,
which were to a great extend fought for resources
for said machines and the industry they powered.
then at the end of WW2 there were two inventions
or discoveries that somehow clashed with another
but still changed the world. first) turbine
technology, either as a engine (jet) or for
extracting energy from heat (like in a powerplant).
the second one, being the fact that there seems
to exist a kind of ore, that when somehow pile up
correctly and surrounded with the right material
just magically seemed to emit heat (fission).
-
until this very date, electricity was not
something crucial. there was a discovery that
somehow magnets produce electricity and that
electricity can be used to make magnets.
-
the electricity and magnetism weren't crucial,
because so to speak in computer or network
terminology, the steam-engines, combustion
engines or jet-engines where the tcp/ip of the
world, while electricity was just something
"ontop" of the tcp/ip, like HTML.
-
today, electricity/magnetism is still just
something ONTOP of the underlying machinery, a by
product so to speak.
-
the power that be fortunately weren't successful
in suppressing the fact, that electricity,
magnetism can be the tcp/ip. in the promising
technology called fusion.
if fusion works, all the tech. that has made ... vanish! and ...
WorldWars possible and have fueled the need for
wars (resources) will suddenly
along will vanish the overlords of coal, oil, gas
and their minions that make and sell the machines
that consume them.
.
so maybe, in a hundred years
Replication technology won't solve the problem. The reason is that we'll only be able to create mass from energy as the inverse operation as we're creating energy from mass. Ergo, we'd need a metric shit tonne of matter in order to produce a metric shit tonne of matter. So in order to run a replicator, we're still going to need to feed a lot of matter into it to
a) run the thing (some matter)
and
b) get it to produce no more than an equivalent mass of matter as is used to feed the production process.
Now if this is handled differently, by the use of nano assemblers that can build anything (think Diamond Age) _then_ this may be more reasonable. But producing things from pure energy is simply going to be a waste vector on the translation.
However, this is all moot as the problems with world peace, hunger et al. have NEVER been about scarcity of resources. We have always had the necessary resources (as a planet). The problem is about scarcity of resources in a specific location (ie: logistics) and this is controlled by politics. Now we may not always have the resources in the future, but in the past they've always been there.
Maybe I'm just bitter, but i don't think a fusion powered politician is going to have a whole lot more ability to solve these problems than a fission, solar, coal, gas, wind (is that redundant?) or gravity powered one.
This is the first time fusion has been produced and been energy positive in the history of man. This is technology that has been called vaporware for years and considered a pipe dream. Mankind is now harnassing the form of energy that powers the universe.
What does the title of the report a forum of geeks who would appreciate this momentous occasion say? Some shit about a 192nm beam. Shh... don't tell anyone, but the story is about FUCKING FUSION not the damn beam. /end rant
The two are opposites, in terms of fuel, reaction and byproducts.
- Fission uses very heavy elements (ex. uranium, plutonium) whose atoms "fall apart" into fragments (some of these fragments *are* radiation). This "falling apart" business *is* radioactivity.
- A fission reaction is one where the parts knock other atoms and cause them to "fall apart" as well (this is what we call a chain reaction).
- Fission waste tends to remain radioactive for some time.
- Fusion uses hydrogen, which is the smallest element (although, unlike the sun, we cheat by using heavy hydrogen atoms called deuterium and tritium).
- A fusion reaction is one where atoms are slammed together to become slightly bigger atoms.
- Fusion waste is helium (that harmless gas you can breathe in from balloons to get a funny voice).
Both types of reactions generate radiation while going on. We can protect ourselves by encasing the reactions (preferably with alot of lead, as it is quite good at absorbing radiation).
So, fusion is much preferred to fission.
However, controlled fusion is much harder to do than controlled fission, thereof all the research.
Just a question to you guys who know a bit more than I... what about other types of fusion (such as focus fusion)? Are any of them potentially viable, or are they just, umm, scams and wishful thinking?
The big problem here is to synchronize all those lasers. About 10 years ago I developed all the software for synchronizing a remote quartz clock to a local cesium clock to within 1 nanosecond over 10 - 100 km of fiber optic. One of the initial units went to this facility for the purposes of synchronization. This system was independent of temperature and changing path lengths. It was pretty cool.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
religious extremism flourishes in the harshest of soils. If all, regardless of race, creed, or belief have a comfortable life for themselves and their families, very few will be motivated enough to kill and die - even if they are devout.
There will always be limited resources, and those who would deny those resources to others as leverage against their fellow man. It's about power, not scarcity of resources.
To restate this using less socialistic language: There will always be private ownership of resources, and the owners will never be 100% charitable with their property.
I certainly hope that statement is true. If it's not, there will be zero incentive to produce. The size of the pie, that will be oh-so-equitably divided, will shrink to zero. A prescription for massive human suffering.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Yes, but few organisms are grey (there's a wonderful diversity of color) and many of them are not gooey. It wasn't such a disaster after all.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I was about to counter coolness of this with decade old pic of Sandia Z-Machine but I see the BBC story (with Pics!) included it. Man, I love living in the future.
One question, why does Professor Cox look like some guy from Sliders?
I drank what? -- Socrates
Just before 2:00 AM on Feb. 26, the first 192-beam system shot to the center of the National Ignition Facility Target Chamber was fired, marking the unofficial completion of the NIF construction project. An average of 420 joules of ultraviolet laser energy, known as 3Ï, was achieved for each beamline, for a total energy of more than 80 kilojoules (a joule is the energy needed to lift a small apple one meter against the Earth's gravity). The shot cycle preparing for the shot ran smoothly. All data were acquired and were nominal.
See? The energy of the LASERS BEING FIRED consumed 80KJ. There wasn't even any fuel in the chamber -- this was solely a test firing of the lasers. NO ENERGY WAS PRODUCED AT ALL.
This is a great milestone for the project but please, let's hold back the accolades!!!
Or one for dumb sarcastic cunt
The biggest problem with any sort of confined fusion (Hohlraum,
reverse-pinch, tokamak, etc.) is that there are no known materials
that can withstand the neutron bombardment for very long. Let's say
it all works... how do you get the heat from the plasma to
electricity? Somewhere some material is needed that can withstand the
neutrons but conduct/transmit the heat. NIF is a laser physicist's
wet dream of a science fair project and an engineering marvel, but as
a practical means of making useful power, precious little R&D has been
invested in even thinking past the "Okay, we got ourselves a net
positive energy output. What now?" Yes, cool science and an
understanding of nature will no doubt come from this effort and I
can't naysay it on it's own terms (and in the meanwhile it's been
funding a goodly portion of the optics industry). But the "2050 plan"
of both ITER and NIF still have "a miracle occurs here" in them as to
materials and turning the heat into electricity. And I'm sure it
involves making steam and spinning turbines like we've done since the
time of Hero (ca AD 1100?).
The pipeline from university R&D to products that are good for society
is delicate and gets broken easily. Steve Chu might have a chance to
help smooth things out - it's a very tough job to decide where to
spread your money and NIF has been going for a long time. We need
programs like this. But the proportions are off, since nearly nothing
is spent on conventional fission, and the US isn't aggressive in solar
like Spain and Germany (okay, Kaaleefohrnia being an exception, but
that's an Austrian anyway).
I mean, technically he is, but if he wants to change the world, I think that fusion would be a worthy target. I'm not gonna troll about his OTHER places he pisses away money, but imagine the impact fusion would have on the world!
Anyone else think that the "Power of Light" video on the NIF home page bears some resemblance to Spiderman 2?
Well matter also went in, in the form of Deuterium, and less matter comes out in the form of Helium. The difference is released as energy. A self sustaining reaction would at least break even in that the amount of energy needed to start the reaction would at least balance the amount produced by the matter difference.
snig
That's about right, even though I think there's been some advancements in the flash lamp efficiencies, but you capture the essence of the problem quite accurately.
Inertial Confinement Fusion has a long ways to go.
Basically everything the Department of Energy does is either about designing nuclear weapons, or about cleaning up from the processes of building nuclear weapons, or about making it easier for their scientists and engineers to do their work (so there's been some good computer science and network research done there), or about 10% of other friendly-sounding good-for-society work to distract people from the weapons work. And even the friendly-sounding work is mostly working with the nuclear power industry, which you can argue about whether it's good for society, or environmental cleanup technology (because uranium mining, waste disposal, nuclear research and such are messy in rather special ways), or environmental cleanup work of other kinds (because the nastiest environmental problems at Livermore Labs are mostly from what the Navy did before LLNL opened - there's a lot of solvents and explosives and old transformers and such buried there, vs. only a little plutonium.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks