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."

Comments

Still problems?

[TFer_Atvar]

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.

Re:Still problems?

[JRIsidore]

I'd say building a laser capable of firing with this frequency is the smaller problem. They're already designing the next generation of lasers which can do this (see HiPER). IMHO the targets pose a way larger problem. Right now they are all hand-crafted and hand-picked. Target laboratories produce maybe a few dozen per day but a full blown reactor needs about half a million per day! And since they are cryogenic you have too cool them until the very last moment before the laser hits them. The latest system to do this takes ~ 3 hours to bring a single target in place. Even if you fire them with a some kind of gun into the target chamber you have to ensure they are aligned on a micron scale in a chamber with about 10m diameter (NIF).

So far this was of big deal as laser experiments have always been single shot experiments. Current big lasers can shoot only once in a few hours, plenty of time to prepare each shot and align the target. High reprate lasers (with high energy) only start to emerge and people begin to focus on high reprate target production.

Energy Independence

[joocemann]

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.

Re:Energy Independence

[digitalunity]

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.

Re:Energy Independence

[Hao Wu]

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.

Ultra-cheap energy will create devices that require materials and technology which yield other shortages. Wars will continue over those items.

War itself will be cheaper to wage due to the low energy costs, removing a major incentive not to wage it.

Re:Energy Independence

[quantaman]

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.

Ultra-cheap energy will create devices that require materials and technology which yield other shortages. Wars will continue over those items.

War itself will be cheaper to wage due to the low energy costs, removing a major incentive not to wage it.

The first world would seem to serve as a counter-example.

True as our standards improve we'll squabble over more trivial things.

But I don't think it's as hopeless as you make it sound, there's a reason why the world is as peaceful as its ever been and I think it's related to the fact our material wealth is also as great as its ever been.

Re:Energy Independence

[mauthbaux]

Momofuku Ando, the guy who invented ramen noodles thought something similar: "Peace will come to the world when the people have enough to eat."

The problem is, as you provide for peoples' needs, they start to bicker about pettier and pettier things. For instance, look at the violence that breaks out between fans of opposing sport teams.

Re:Energy Independence

[ChromaticDragon]

I imagine there are all sorts of resources where this view may hold true. But I'm not certain every resource problem can be solved this way - especially not within a desirable timeframe.

Furthermore, since we are in the realm of discussing science fiction, what about waste heat? There are authors (such as Peter Hamilton) who have envisioned that the widespread adoption of fusion and "free energy" sends global warming skyrocketing, not due to greenhouse gases but simply due to enormous amounts of waste heat.

Re:Energy Independence

[Ihlosi]

There are authors (such as Peter Hamilton) who have envisioned that the widespread adoption of fusion and "free energy" sends global warming skyrocketing, not due to greenhouse gases but simply due to enormous amounts of waste heat.

Err .. I don't think that waste heat will be a global problem. Compared to the heat input earth receives from the sun, a couple of hundred fusion reactors will be lost in the measurement noise.

However, waste heat will very much be a local problem. You can only heat up rivers and spots on the shoreline that much before problems occur, and you _will_ need a water-based heat sink for those reactors.

Re:Energy Independence

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really have free infinite energy, you can land asteroids, let 'em warm up to room temp, and launch 'em back away.

Inertial confinement vs. magnetic confinement

[Sgs-Cruz]

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)

Re:Inertial confinement vs. magnetic confinement

[doppe1]

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.

They are not trying to sell NIF as the fusion energy production. It is the first step on a long road in that direction.

They are selling LIFE as the fusion energy of the future, this will be built on techonology developed for NIF.

From the link

LIFE, an acronym for Laser Inertial Fusion-Fission Energy, is an advanced energy concept under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Based on physics and technology developed for the National Ignition Facility (NIF), LIFE has the potential to meet future worldwide energy needs in a safe, sustainable manner without carbon dioxide emissions.

Re:Inertial confinement vs. magnetic confinement

[Sgs-Cruz]

Well we (meaning humanity, not the United States) have achieved plasma discharges several hours long in the TRIAM-1M tokamak in Japan.

We have also achieved plasma conditions in pure deuterium plasmas in which, had the reactors been fueled with "live" fuel (50% deuterium, 50% tritium), the Q-value (energy out / energy in) would have been greater than one.

There have also been two experiments in which 50%D/50%T "live" fuel has been used. One is the Joint European Torus (JET) in Culham, England, near Oxford. It's still operating today, albeit on "inert" fuel (100% D). Even with 100%D, some amount of fusion still goes on, so it's not totally "inert", but it's far less than with 50%D/50%T. The other experiment was the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) in the United States at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL). That's now disassembled.

The problem is that we haven't done all of these things at the same time, yet. That's why we're building ITER

ITER, the big reactor being built in Cadarache, France, will achieve Q=10. It was supposed to achieve "ignition", in which self-heating of the plasma is enough to keep it hot, and you can turn off the external heating (corresponding to Q=infinity), but the ITER consortium had to cut the budget when the U.S. pulled out of the project in 1998. Of course, then the U.S. rejoined in 2003, but by then the plan was set on "ITER Lite". It's not supposed to be done construction until 2018, though, and there's a chance of further schedule slippage approaching 100%. It's going to run for 25 years.

If you go to slide #25 of this presentation by Chris Llewellyn-Smith, you can see that the current "fast-track" plan for a commercial fusion plant has the first plants operating in 2048. Of course, that presentation was in 2005, and the ITER schedule has slipped by about four years since then, so we can say that if we somehow manage to stick to the "fast-track" plan from now on (we won't), there could be operating fusion power plants in the 2050s.

Yes, it's a long-term plan. That doesn't mean it's not worth funding. There still is no other energy source that can compete with its theoretical benefit. The only ones that come close in ability to provide a large amount of energy are fission and solar, and they have the disadvantages, respectively, of long-lived actinide waste, and massive land use.

Re:Inertial confinement vs. magnetic confinement

[Goldsmith]

Nice comments on this thread! I totally agree with you about the need in physics to separate basic and weapons research.

I used to work in fusion (DIII-D), but I don't believe the "40 years away" mark. My feeling is that the materials to build a commercial grade reactor are still too expensive and that there is some non-trivial materials work still to be done with the reactor walls and gathering energy. I realize this is what the ITER people tell the grant reviewers they're going to look at, but it has been my experience that plasma physicists are not really interested in materials research when it comes down to who gets to pay postdocs and grad students. In the end, the monolithic grant structuring in fusion will need to integrate or approximate the smaller scale, more distributed materials research community (lots of small, cheap experiments) for fusion to have a chance to work commercially in 40 years. I doubt the handful of experiments around now will be able solve the materials problems quickly. Oddly, this is not an opinion I got from studying materials physics, but from the plasma physicists I used to work with who thought ITER was trying to sell something it couldn't deliver prior to being changed into "ITER lite" and cutting back on the expectations.

NIF could do some materials research, and I'm sure they'll run a few test, but it's still the wrong kind of experiment. The money would have been better spent developing a tool which could be sold to ~50 research universities for materials testing for fusion.

Re:Inertial confinement vs. magnetic confinement

[nojayuk]

You (I presume you are American) already have one. It's called... ITER. The US whined and moaned over the possibility of ITER being built in France, delaying its start by a couple of years. Eventually the US was over-ruled by nearly all the other countries who actually wanted to get on with developing fusion as a possible power source. Cadarache in France was finally chosen as the site and the project is now up and running.

There are a number of other fusion research projects going on around the world, but ITER's job is to figure out how to build a magnetic-containment fusion reactor that will deliver electrical power into a grid, and it's the biggest and best-equipped (and best-funded) of the current fusion projects.

EDIT: I may have spoken too soon, as I'm not sure the US has actually agreed to contribute to funding ITER, at least in this budget cycle.

Re:big a pdf

[uvajed_ekil]

Did my computer screw it up or does the link really point to a 6MB 1p pdf? Why not just use a bmp?

6MB? That's nothing. A few days ago I clicked on a link to some information about a local city park. Five minutes later, after being distracted, I thought the link was broken or I didn't click it or something. Nope: the 28MB pdf was still downloading! But at least I got the entry info for the 5k run... for last year! But I guess that's to be expected in a city of 20,000 that still doesn't accept online utility payments, doesn't have even one Starbucks (which I'm okay with) and has 3 Circle K stores one one road within 1.5 miles of each other.

Re:indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, just like nuclear fission.

Oh, wait...

The first artificial nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, was constructed at the University of Chicago by a team led by Enrico Fermi in 1942.

U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower made his famous Atoms for Peace speech to the UN General Assembly on December 8, 1953. This diplomacy led to the dissemination of reactor technology to U.S. institutions and worldwide.

More like 11 years. And this is mostly due to the fact that nuclear fission research was deemed classified at the start of World War 2.

Re:how is that racist?

[Nutria]

since when are you a racist simply because you criticize another culture?

When multiculturalists are in position (namely, academia) to influence society.

Of course, anyone with at least half a functioning brain can see that it won't work ("The Diversity Theorem: Groups of people from anywhere in the world, mixed together in any numbers and proportions whatsoever, will eventually settle down as a harmonious society, appreciating--nay, celebrating!--their differences... which will of course soon disappear entirely."), thus leading to Balkanization.

little help!

[i_b_don]

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

Re:Sorry, can't get worked up over it

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with you 100% wrt the importance of fission and why would should be building more, I feel obligated to point out to you that we already do have these better technologies of which you speak. Granted, they're still fission technologies, but they're the kinds of things that ensure we won't be hard up for uranium any time soon.

My favorite example is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Which is actually a broad envelope covering a number of reactor types. Some of which I've helped write simulation code for. (Dangle, you! Dangle I say!)

Anyway, they're very clever, in that they can take previously useless once-through fuel, fiddle with it a bit, and then run it through their cycles to burn fission up all the nasty transuranics into low-level relatively harmless junk and get some power out of them in the process. My favorite actually involves sticking thorium in there as well, on account of it can fission (it just doesn't do so as easily as U-235, so we never really jumped on it before) and its super abundant here on Earth.

Here, have another wiki, because Thorium is fun. Or something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium

Re:indeed

[idiot900]

According to your post, the time between initial observation and commercialization of major energy producing methods has been decreasing by orders of magnitude as history marches on. Maybe it's not so stupid to ask about commercialization of the technology within a single generation.

Re:indeed

[GospelHead821]

That's exactly the case made by some futurists. The most prominent one of whom I am aware is Ray Kurzweil. He has some pretty compelling explanations illustrating exponential trends in just about every facet of the growth of intelligence and technological capacity. I'm probably exaggerating his position a little bit, but he might argue that dreaming of harnessing fusion power by the end of the century is so quaint; by then we'll be closer to harnessing all of the energy that the earth receives from the sun.

fusion != world peace Re:Energy Independence

[Anonymous Coward]

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.