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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."
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.
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
Your computer is infected with the Adobe virus. A format and reinstall is required to completely eliminate it.
Be relentless!
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).
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
That's the problem with magnetically confined fusion. NIF will be inertially confined.
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.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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.
Inertial confinement fusion does not rely on having a stable plasma for any extended period of time as magnetic confinement does. Instead, think of it as a series of small bombs. Each is fired into the center of the chamber and ignited with the laser system. In a commercial plant this would have occur 5-8 times a second. Meaning you have what is essentially machine gun speed firing of DT pellets into the center of the chamber with equavalent speed lasers. Thus one of the large problems remaining in ICF fusion is the development of the laser components that can fire in this way for extended periods of time. Additionally, first wall materials are needed that can handle the neutron and ion flux that is generated in extended operation. The major US project that was actually addressing the laser and material tech side was HAPL, which got zeroed out on the FY 2009 budget.
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.
They've already started on an adjoining balloon factory. If they can break even on the energy production the Helium balloon animals sales will drive them into profits.
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.
What's so great about nuclear fusion?
Fuel for nuclear fusion is more abundant than fuel for nuclear fission, by a couple of orders of magnitude.
If this works does that mean we'll have clean energy without radioactive byproducts?
Not quite. The "waste" of fusion isn't radioactive, but most fusion reactions generate neutrons that will activate whatever the reactor is made out of. So there will be some waste that needs to be dealt with.
If not, why is this better than nuclear power plants today?
It doesn't depend on heavy elements as fuel, and doesn't produce waste that's a mix of all kinds of crap (unfissioned material, fission products, unfissionable (but still toxic) heavy elements, activated materials), but just one kind of crap (activated materials).
Next, assuming we get this working, what material does it require to make it work successfully?
We have the materials, we need to get the processes right.
And really, what then becomes the bottle neck to producing infinite cheap energy?
Possibly, waste heat. You'll still need to get rid of that, provided that the fusion reactor drives a standard turbine setup.
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.
:w!q
"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!"
Here's an exclusive photo of the test facility!