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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."
Hasn't the worlds largest laser always been completed? Or at least since the first laser was created..
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
I think we've moved past the old Cold War era modus operandi: nuclear weapons are no longer necessary nor considered as an indicator of power. Military spending in that area has decreased drastically since the Reagan era. Essentially, we've reached a point where "kick[ing] each others ass as best as we can afford" is no longer a profitable venture and is, in fact, a great way to lose the economic support and favor of the international community. What we need is some CERN-scale collaboration on this so that we can possibly help to alleviate the energy strains on the global populace.
You're right, we should just give up now. Obviously the fact that it's not ready for commercialization now is indicative of it's future potential as a technology.
Excuse me while I go reload my coal plant.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
what I keep hearing from people in the field of nuclear physics is that Fusion will be realized by the mid 2020s.
Commercial fusion reactors have been 20 years away for at least the last 40 years. It's good to hear that we're now only 15 years away.
Have you read my blog lately?
> 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.
ROFLMAO! Energy abundance will more likely just shift the resource wars to different places. We won't need oil any more but we will need all sorts of rare minerals just like we do now, only with limitless energy we will develop all sorts of new exotic manufacturing processes. But telling the House of Saud to go pound sand will still be priceless.
Democrat delenda est
because it's not going to be energy production, fusion has been 10 years off for the last 40 years.
Which clearly means it is never, ever going to work and we should just give up, right?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
The next big fight will be over fresh water.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Go to the NIF site. What are the first things you see?
You can't tell me that there isn't a very deliberate marketing plan being put into action here.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
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
Durh. Maxwell definitely shouldn't have been pursuing a unified theory of electromagnetism. Much better to have stuck to improving the horse-drawn buggy.
What we need is some CERN-scale collaboration on this so that we can possibly help to alleviate the energy strains on the global populace.
That's great and all, but not very helpful when you have religious radical factions tearing nations apart from the inside out.
What governs humanity's motivation often goes beyond just the quest of plentiful resources.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
Hey, I saw that Star Trek episode too.
Like any good Slashdot geek I can appreciate a little Star Trek humor. But in all seriousness, the original poster is only half right. Nearly infinite clean energy is practically useless without the replication technology that takes advantage of it.
If our ultimate goal as a species is world peace, like the original poster was talking about, then we are going to have to eliminate the planetary struggle and competition of scarce resources that marks our current existence. In order to do that we will need both technologies.
You're a fucking idiot. The time from the earliest nuclear experiments and commercial nuclear plants was almost a century. The time between finding out that black liquid from the ground burns and oil refineries was a thousand years. The time between fire and steam power was longer than all of recorded history.
The time it takes an idiot to turn a random brain firing into an unthought out Slashdot posting, however, is obviously much, much shorter.
But a nuclear fission plant had an accident 20 years ago.. Sorry but we'll just have to wait for fusion and use coal in the meantime.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
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.
[[ Ultra-cheap energy will create devices that require materials and technology which yield other shortages ]]
That's FAR from certain: ultra-cheap energy would allow to recycle materials better so external need for materials could be lessened too.
Beside which material are you talking about??
Also, don't expect energy to stay cheap. Fossil fuels are obviously finite.
Did you skip the Article AND Summary? Well let me remidn you, this discussion is about the implications of Fusion power. Dwell on that one of a while my freind.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
It depends. How much energy is used to refine that 2mm nugget of beryllium? It's almost certainly a specific isotope mix, which would require a pretty sophisticated refining process (i.e. could be moderately energy intensive aside from the 2MJ ignition burst). You might think that you've got a lot wriggle room with an order of magnitude power output, but keep in mind that Gasoline has an energy density of about 45 megajoules per kilogram, so it wouldn't take much for that refining energy cost to be higher than the ignition energy costs. You have to look at the whole process (for instance look at the costs of corn-based ethanol).
Secondly, how much of the 20MJ output can be captured in a useful manner (i.e. electricity) versus capture/conversion losses? With a modern Internal Combustion Engine, after more than a century of refinement, it's less than 30%.
If the beryllium extraction/refining energy costs are close to the same as ignition input and the conversion efficiency to electricity is under 30%, you don't gain that much.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
In two salt domes in Germany, which are currently used to store nuclear waste, water started to ingress in the last years. Since saltwater is very corrosive, additives have been poured into the brine to slow the corrosion of the waste containers (they are made of steel). So it's only a matter of time until radioactive substances start to diffuse into the groundwater and poison the drinking water in that areas. Show me a long term stable deposit for nuclear waste and I will consider nuclear power again.
but the amount of wars per year has decreased for many many years now.
Citation needed.
Nuclear experiments in 1855? Surely you joke. Nobody in 1855 knew what a nucleus was, or was even convinced about the atomic theory of matter.
In fact, nuclear fission was discovered in 1938, and large scale full production systems were operating by 1945 (Hanford), with commercial utility turn-on by mid 1950's.
Nuclear fusion was discovered in early 30's, I think, before fission.
The reason why nuclear fission went from discovery to exploitation immediately, and fusion is still really hard, is due to the laws of physics.
Specifically:
1) neutrons have charge zero, but nuclei don't.
2) strong force is very short range
These will never change.
And yes, the original poster is right, NIF isn't helping much for energy production.
Reprocess the material instead of putting it in puzzle boxes. Deep storage is like throwing a car away instead of changing the spark plugs.
I guess you don't read the literature. Tokamak "advanced modes" are practically a breakthrough and thats from the actual data not simulations. ITER will produce sustained fusion burn. DEMO will go one step further. At the cost of 20 billion for 5+ year program its not bad since a plain old fashion nuclear reactor can cost upwards of 10 billion. In fact if they got the budget of say federal roading (about 40Billion per year) it would have been done by now.
I find it amusing that you assume that we are still in the 60s with plasma and fusion technology without reading up on any of it first.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Yes. What do you think particle colliders are for? (Of course, turning helium into iron is a fairly boring affair, and particle colliders are expensive, so they're mostly used for interesting stuff, like producing transuranic elements, exotic isotopes or subatomic particles).
However, if you were asking if we have the technology to turn Helium into Iron _and_ harvest some of the energy released the the process ... then no, we can't do that right now.
If you have effectively free and infinite energy, practically any other resource problem can be solved with today's technology.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
What governs humanity's motivation often goes beyond just the quest of plentiful resources.
No, it doesn't.
The radical religious factions tearing nations apart are a symptom of lack of resources. Not that there won't be fanatics, regardless, but without a large population of hungry, dissatisfied people with no opportunities and nothing to look forward to but a life of grinding poverty, the fanatics have very limited power.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
My main point is that yes, there are leaders that will always want more power. Every leader depends on a large following of people, though. Equip those people with what they need, and they'll be less likely to follow their leader.
Many of your examples are fueled by legions of people who want a slightly better life for themselves, even if it is in the afterlife. If you take care of their needs, they'll be less likely to go along with it. They'll have more to lose by being part of a destructive mission, rather than feeling like there is nothing to lose and a chance for personal gain.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
and how much energy goes into getting gas to the pump? (Hint: A lot more) why do people, always ignore that with gasoline when they are poo-pooing a different technology.
People like you just really hate change, don't you?
And why are you comparing this to a combustion engine efficiency? you should be comparing this to power generation efficiency.
When talking abut electric engines, then talk about the efficiency of engines.
Of course in that comparison, combustion looses, badly.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, and a global outbreak of selflessness and common sense.
I fear we'll get infinite clean energy waaaay before we get that.
You're confused. The scientists there are conducting experiments for the sake of science. That is pure science.
The people who fund them see the benefit. That does not, however, make the science "impure". It just means that there are additional reasons for conducting these experiments.
They're observing nuclear fusion. That is as pure as science gets.