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NIF Aims For the Ultimate Green Energy Source
theodp writes "Edward Moses and his team of 500 scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility are betting $3.5B in taxpayer money on a tiny pellet they hope could produce an endless supply of safe, clean energy. By the fall of 2010, the team aims to start blasting capsules containing deuterium-tritium fuel with 1.4 megajoules of laser power, a first step towards the holy grail of controlled nuclear fusion. Not all are convinced that Moses will lead us to the promised land. 'They're snake-oil salesmen,' says Thomas Cochran, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Moses, for his part, seems unfazed by the skepticism, saying he's confident that his team will succeed."
Deuterium is limited by the amount of deuterium in ocean water, which is the largest source on Earth but remains quite limited.
And sadly, unless these wishful dreamers can find an energy efficient way to harvest deuterium in bulk, there is very little point to this research. None of the available fusion processes work well with plain hydrogen, and barring a miracle occurring, deuterium refinement is still only done with stunningly high energy costs, nowhere near even theoretical break-even costs for bulk refinement and use in fusion.
No, this is an excuse to spend money on fusion weapons research under the guise of "energy research". It's flat-out pork-barrel money for military facilities who will otherwise "lose American jobs!". Spend it instead on solar mirror research, which has a much better return-on-investment and merely requires large-scale engineering, not hoped-for scientific breakthroughs that remain unlikely to occur in our lifetimes.