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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."
$3.5 billion? This is a better alternative than giving the money to the UAW.
an ill wind that blows no good
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility
Do we have more stick-to-it spirit these days? Or is this another few billion dollars spent with no other purpose than to improve the economy of Livermore, California?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Cochran says the NIF laser is still not powerful enough. Even if it were, he says, "these machines are just going to be too big, and too costly, and they'll never be competitive."
Proof of concept devices area always oversized and more costly than the production versions. Once you know it works and how it works, you can start shrinking it down and since the development is done, the cost per unit goes down further.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Greedy databases rose up and demanded free space. We negotiated a settlement.
Moses leading a team? Will he stop and ask for directions?
Has anyone wondered how to synchronize these lasers to less than a microsecond? Sure one could measure the path lengths and calculate the delays at approx 9 ns per foot. However, about 12 years ago I wrote the software for a system that sync'd a remote quartz clock to a local cesium clock to within a nanosecond over 10 -100 km of fiber. Changes in path length we automatically compensated. It was fun to write this code and put the system together. A prototype was delivered to the Lawrence Livermore Lab for just this purpose.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
It would be great if NIF could produce a working fusion system within the next century, but i find it a bit doubtful. There are two other fusion technologies which have aimed to reduce the size and complexity of fusion systems, instead of building massive billion dollar generators to instead build smaller technologies. These inlcude Polywell and Focus Fusion. Both are developed by engineers and appear to be honest attempts to develop fusion power and to do it with a reasonable amount of money, under 20 years, rather than centuries. While the government has given NIF billions of dollars, the polywell has received about 8 million in funding, despite the fact that if it is possible it could save the planet. Some scientists seem so enamored by the size and complexity, and unfeasibly of such machines as ITER they seem unwilling to consider smaller, cheaper and more practical alternatives, thus fusion always remains something far off in the centuries away future, when it is desperately needed now.
Id like to see polywell, focus fusion and the NIF fully funded however, since it is possible that one may be right and the others not workable, it increases the chance of finding a solution.
Point one: Not spending money on fusion research is incredibly dumb. It's not likely to pan out in the near-term future, but there's plenty of ancillary science to be done on the subject. For example, the VASMIR space drive built on fusion research, it's just not hot enough to provoke fusion
Point two: Relying on fusion power to make for a short-term fix is also dumb. Especially if you think it's going to be safe and clean. The problem with fusion is how many neutrons it emits. Even when you use one of the fusion chains designed not to produce neutrons, you produce a good amount. The reactor core is going to be even more radioactive than a fission reactor core. And even if you get to a "Breakeven" point, that doesn't mean that you'll be price-competitive with other forms of power.
Fusion is easy. Just take a GIANT ball of gas, let it collapse into a star, and put solar panels around the star.
Point three: Calling it the Ultimate Green Energy Source is a cover story. A 2007 report by the National Research Council's Plasma Science Committee concluded that "NIF is crucial to the NNSA Stockpile Stewardship Program because it will be able to create the extreme conditions of temperature and pressure that exist on Earth only in exploding nuclear weapons and that are therefore relevant to understanding the operation of our modern nuclear weapons."
In other words, the NIF will be used, at least some of the time, to re-create the conditions inside of an exploding nuclear warhead so we can design new nukes without testing them and therefore violating the test ban treaties.
Gentoo Sucks
speaking for myself, I was deeply disturbed - I'm well used to my clients' mission-critical clustered systems becoming unavailable for days because of databases issues (no free space, someone forgot to trunc the logs, the db monitor says the db is running but it isn't, someone changed a password, the new DBA went into the server room with the db manufacturer's manual in hand and is now missing, the DBA finally applies a year-old patch, etc.) - hell, even Google goes down relatively often (usually when they try to re-route something?) but when it happens to Slashdot, then I really get surprised ;)
There is big physics that is a good place to sink money, and big physics that is not.
Only the physicists and engineers who are payed by grants in this area seem to think its a good use of money.
And unfortunately projects like this pull billions of taxpayer money from research projects that may actually benefit society.
The NIF is the ISS of the physics world.
Um, except that one factory in Norway in the 40s made 12 tons a year of it and one ton fused contains the same energy as 29 BILLION tons of coal. We also seem to have some 10^15 tons of it out in the ocean before we have to go to space to go shopping.
I can't tell if you're joking, but everything you said about deuterium is 100% false. There is more D in the earth's oceans (1/6500th of all the water) than we could ever imagine using for fusion. It's also extracted cheaply and easily.
If he was actually trying to build a working fusion reactor, that may actually be a surprising response (no need for fission reactors means fewer potential nukes out there).
The design at NIF is not relevant to solving the problems in getting electricity from inertial confinement fusion. It takes over 300MJ for them to power their lasers, while the best output they can hope for from their fusion is about 50MJ. They're also focusing on D-D and D-T fusion, which is not actually "clean" in that it will make the reactor radioactive over time. That's not to say ICF is "bad," or will never work, just that NIF was not designed as an alternative energy experiment. If he's got a reactor design, it's based on other ICF experiments (the one in Japan is nice).
A solar energy guy took over DOE and now they have to say these things to keep their jobs, that's all that's happening here.
HiPER will be a European project that will take advantage of the findings of NIF to use IC Fusion as an energy source. (NIF has mainly military purposes).It will hopefully be ready sooner than ITER, and much cheaper. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiPER
deuterium refinement is still only done with stunningly high energy costs
A buck per liter of pure D is not all that "stunning". In insulated liquid tanker car loads, you could probably buy it somewhat cheaper. True, there is an inherent lower limit regardless of bulk purchase or whatever, I'm guessing probably around 50 cents per liter wholesale. The manufacturers are not operating as a charity, they probably use 100% electrically operated machinery, and probably most of their costs are labor and capital, so I feel confident that a liter of D takes only a couple KWh at most. Perhaps you know so little about the topic that you're confusing stunningly high U-235 fission fuel refining costs with D refining costs? I'm thinking the fuel cost is not going to be an issue, like a rounding error in the budget.
http://www.isotope.com/cil/products/displayproduct.cfm?prod_id=8827&cat_id=35&market=research
Another way to put it, by volume, retail gasoline is about as expensive as D, but the same volume of D when fused generates exactly one zillion times more energy than burning gasoline.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Or rather.
What will happen is it will allow the economy, unlimited growth. With that goes consumption. Humans will literally build, eat and fuck the planet into a desolate wasteland.
Deleted
There was a long (~1 hour) plenary talk about this at a recent American Physical Society conference.
The NIF is exciting scientifically for studying both fusion and "extreme" materials science. No, it's not going to turn into a power plant once we get it working, but fusion power is too promising to not take steps toward it. We won't be able to roll out fusion power in time to avert climate change, of course, so it's not a first priority for energy research. But it is certainly worth doing on its scientific merits alone.
Trouble is, the main intent behind the NIF isn't science -- it's "stockpile stewardship" and weapons development. If it were simply a science experiment I imagine that the science goals could be achieved far more cheaply, and with a higher degree of openness. (For instance, some of the other approaches to fusion seem more promising. But the US's flagship fusion project is this one -- just because you can learn about bombs with it.)
Science that is worth doing (which in my opinion the NIF is) should be done completely independent of the military (so it can be done honestly) and it should be done openly (so it can be useful to society).
They're right, in a sense. Fusion's not going to solve any problems related to climate change -- we need something else for the near-term. But in a hundred and fifty years, it'd be nice to be able to produce 50x the current energy output of the world with no environmental consequences.
It's long-term, not short-term.
Dense Plasma Focus technology is the next best thing to what cold fusion had promised. Best of all it's real and doesn't use any questionable physics.
Safe, small, low cost, low maintenance and efficient. It looks like it will be small enough that it could be ran from inside a rail car or truck.
It's far ,more likely to work then blasting deuterium-tritium with lasers, but they can't get funding!
Slashdot's reported this several times.
A-Step-Closer-To-Cheap-Nuclear-Fusion
And I have posting my research in to this too.
green ideas thinktank
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Recycling and clean manufacturing processes will become economically viable because the energy to do it will be cheap.
Planting in the desert will become economically viable because the energy to desalinate water will be cheap.
People will fight fewer wars over geographically concentrated energy resources.
Wealthy people reproduce less than poor ones, so population growth will be slowed or even reversed.
Cheap clean energy will save the planet.
Oh, my. I do seem to have made a fundamental error on this: I'm afraid I may have to chalk it up partly to age, and partly to thinking of tritium. Note that that their pellets call for both, and _tritium_ is normally produced in plutonium power plants from deuterium.
So it's still limited, but nowhere near so limited as I thought.