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."

Comments

A better alternative

[amightywind]

$3.5 billion? This is a better alternative than giving the money to the UAW.

Re:A better alternative

[Comatose51]

Yeah you know what's funny? When you look at the price tags for the bail out for banks, GM, etc., and the cost of the wars and then compared to the price tags for these possibly world changing scientific research, you start to wonder why we're not pouring even more money into research. The Large Hadron Collider is puny compared to the Supercollider we were building and then shut down because of cost. Seems pretty silly now because we ended up giving even more money so some execs can keep their yachts.

Re:A better alternative

[v1]

cheaper power has several positive side effects

- lowers pollution and environmental damage by displacing formerly cheapest-power sources such as coal and oil
- encourages recycling which can sometimes not be worth it due to energy requirements
- raises quality of life pretty much across the board

Basically when power becomes cheaper, "the way things are done" changes in a lot of places because things that used to be more economical to do one way, become more economical to do another way. This almost always works to society's advantage. And as a result the prices on a lot of things gets cheaper because goods and services are cheaper to produce. When products (cost of living) goes down without average wage going down, quality of life goes up.

Re:A better alternative

[hedwards]

Not really, the UAW is probably the only reason why we have an auto industry in the US at this point. It never ceases to amaze me, the amount of ignorance and union bashing that goes on. Perhaps you'd like to give up your 40 hours work weeks, week ends, OSHA regulations, retirement and disability insurance.

You're not going to get far with energy sources if you're not replacing the older gas guzzlers with newer fewer efficient cars. Despite all the ignorance, the UAW workers don't actually make that much more than their non-union counterparts in the South, but you get the same blind rage from people because ZOMG UNIONS~!!1!!11ONEONEELEVEN

Re:A better alternative

[hedwards]

Not really, people people get outraged over having to pay extra taxes. And without the extra taxes you wind up in the paradox of efficiency, where there's no net gain. As energy gets cheaper, people drive more and development tends to get spread out more. Which leads in nearly all cases to the efficiencies being overshadowed by greater use.

Seattle has the some of the greatest fuel efficiency in the US largely because it resides in a part of the country with a high gas tax. We've got the same vehicles available to us that are in most parts of the country, but because of the gas taxes we tend to consider more carefully whether we drive and how far and what we drive.

Re:A better alternative

[DJRumpy]

I don't think anyone doubts that unions did great things for the American workforce. What they tend to bash is tipping the balance too far to the side of the union workers. When their demands become too unreasonable that they threaten the very company they serve, then there is a problem.

Had they been more accommodating, they probably wouldn't be in bankruptcy. The cost of the insurance packages, retirement packages, 3 people to do one job, union rules that prevent simple jobs from being done, even when they could be done safely, etc.

Not all that is union is golden...

Re:A better alternative

[CastrTroy]

The UAW is the reason that most of the car manufacturing industry has moved to other countries. People who are doing jobs that require not more education or skill than a Walmart worker are being paid 3 times as much. Worked nice for a while, but it isn't sustainable. It's not like auto workers have any special skills. In fact, with the advent of robots, I would have to say that their skills became less and less important. So, while I think it's important for people to have good working conditions, I really dont' understand why the average factory worker would get paid so much more than somebody who works in a retail store, or fast food joint. They really providing anything extra to any company.

Re:A better alternative

[stevelinton]

Mainly to "ourselves". The government borrows money from its own companies and citizens (and pension funds, in particular). To a lesser extent, we owe this money to foreign banks, mainly in th efar east.

Re:A better alternative

[EllisDees]

Sure, nuclear fusion isn't unlimited in the sense of comparing it to infinity. For us puny humans though, it is for all practical purposes unlimited. We know from daily experience that fusion power is attainable. We also know that once we attain it, all other power sources will be obsolete. How this does not deserve a much larger portion of our resources boggles my mind.

Re:A better alternative

[shaitand]

No, there would just be new banks.

Re:A better alternative

[tftp]

It isn't easy to repeatedly attach the same three bolts to part after part all day long or to operate a machine doing more or less the same.

Many years ago I had a temporary job at a factory that made tools (drill bits, mills, etc.) It was tedious, just as you say - for about 3 days. And then it was smooth. You have whole day to think, for example. You load the blank part into the machine, press the button - and you have, say, 30 seconds of no action; the machine is doing what it's programmed to do. Then it stops, you remove the part and repeat. You don't need to think about it - your mind is free. Other workers, who were there for years, didn't see the repetitive labor as anything special; most labor is like that, whether you mop floors or sail ships or nail boards or solder parts onto a PCB. It is only surprising to a very narrow layer (class) of people who do mostly inventive, original work. But even an SQL coder who is asked to put together another boring VB form for another boring query is not that far apart from a machine operator at a factory.

In my opinion the hardships of repetitive work fade compared to stresses at people-facing positions (I worked that one too, for a month.) I won't even mention agricultural jobs where you literally are standing in a mile-long field and need to work it all, rain or shine, usually in a very non-ergonomic posture :-( Auto workers have cushy jobs, compared to farm workers.

Mirror of the mirror

[Geoffrey.landis]

What bothers me is that, back in the 70s, LIvermore built the Mirror Fusion Test Facility, at a cost of somewhat over a billion dollars, to test a fusion concept. The project was cancelled by the Reagan administration the day the facility was finished.

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?

Re:Mirror of the mirror

[WaywardGeek]

Bush Jr also canceled all the funding for fusion experiments. It's the only reason we ever even heard of the Bussard Polywell, since the scientists were free to talk about it after their contract with the Navy ended. Of course, now that the Navy funding is back, we're not allowed to hear how development is going.

The obvious conspiracy theory is Big Oil doesn't like the threat of an alternative energy source, and they have a lot of clout at the White House when Republicans are in power. Other Bush Jr decisions included halting nearly all new permits for solar array power stations. So, the conspiracy theory has legs.

Re:Mirror of the mirror

[tgd]

If you're looking for conspiracy theories, there's a better one that is actually backed by better facts.

Its a common activity of the federal government (and arguably not an unreasonable one) to spend billions of dollars on projects that are not intended to ever succeed in the role they are sold to the public as, but rather to support industries that are deemed critical to national interest or security.

The ISS/Space Shuttle is probably the best and most widely known example. This was hundreds of billions spent to keep engineers and, more importantly, defense contractors, employed and solvent between DoD contracts, and to ensure that the skills they collectively had weren't lost through retirement or otherwise.

The US has the same problem with the skills around nuclear (fission and fusion) research and engineering, particularly since we stopped building and testing nuclear weapons. The argument has been made before, because the scientific justification is so bad, that many of these projects like the NIF are done for the same reason, and focus deliberately shifts around projects as the need for the project to actually produce something starts to come to a head.

IMO, the NIF alone is a giant waste of money, but if it serves as an act of corporate welfare to keep the scientists and contractors involved in the project active and up to date, then perhaps its not a bad investment.

But I don't think any experts who aren't getting a paycheck related to it really expect a viable solution to fusion power to come from it.

Re:Mirror of the mirror

[je ne sais quoi]

To back this up, there have been substantial job cuts at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory twice in its history. The first time was when Reagan cut the staff by about 50%, and Bush, Jr. cut about 10% in 2005. Considering that NREL is one of the centers of expertise of photovoltaics in the world, and often hold the record for efficiency for photovoltaics it does look pretty suspicious.

Proof of Concept

[Ironsides]

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.

Re:Did slashdot just got slashdotted?

[Soulskill]

Greedy databases rose up and demanded free space. We negotiated a settlement.

synchronizing nearly 200 lasers

[gordona]

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.

Re:synchronizing nearly 200 lasers

[joe_frisch]

These days synchronizing lasers to microseconds is easy. At LCLS/SLAC we synchronize our conventional and X-ray laser to 100 femtoseconds. We've also done 40 km of fiber to about 1 picosecond (and I think other labs have done better)

NIF not the only or even best technology

[Eravnrekaree]

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.

Re:NIF not the only or even best technology

[mako1138]

The history of fusion energy research is marked by concepts that have not worked as their designers anticipated them to. In the first half of the 20th century, they built pinches, only to discover MHD instabilities. They built tokamaks, only to discover more and different kinds of MHD instabilities. They built spheromaks, only to find that the energy density couldn't go high enough. They built pinches of various kinds, only to find that the particle leakage was too high. They built inertial confinement devices, only to find that the ions would lose their energy rapidly.

So you see, I am skeptical that these "new" concepts will be successful anytime soon. Economical generation of fusion energy is a hard problem. I wish the small-scale guys luck, but I'm not holding my breath.

Three points

[cmowire]

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.

Re:Three points

[vlm]

The reactor core is going to be even more radioactive than a fission reactor core.

Why? Other than an appeal to authority, or FUD, I don't see it. And I'm fairly well educated in this area.

The inherent problem with "spent" fission fuel, is we have very little control over how the atoms fission. Generally you get about 1/3 and 2/3 chunks but a graph of the relative weights shows two wide peaks. The stuff thats stable for millions of years is harmless, because, well, its stable for millions of years before it does anything. Likewise for the stuff with a half life of a few seconds, like the silver isotopes, because an hour after shutdown its all reacted. But there are plenty of icky cobalt and strontium and other isotopes that have an annoying half life "around a human generation long" that are really hazardous biologically. So there is no way to run a fission reactor without accumulating icky radioactive waste. Don't want a fission reactor full of cobalt and strontium isotopes? Well, tough luck, that is an inherent byproduct of the fuel itself.

On the other hand, fusion doesn't use "stuff" that inherently involves bad half lives. Don't want a fusion reactor full of cobalt and strontium isotopes? Well then don't build the reactor out of it.

... solar panels ...

Ah I see it was all just astroturfing or something.

Re:Three points

[vlm]

Look up neutron activation. When neutrons are flying around in a nuclear (of any type) reactor core, some of them hit the material in the walls, causing the atoms to absorb a neutron and change isotopes. Which tends to result in a reactor core that is radioactive, even though it wasn't made of radioactive materials and didn't absorb any isotopes.

I know a lot about that topic. Lets make our reactor vessel out of iron. Nice and strong. We need a table of nuclides, but wikipedia is an adequate substitute. So, lets see what horrible long term waste results from neutron activation of iron.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_iron

Most of the half lives are in the ms range. If you manage to strike the same atom simultaneously with five neutrons, you get a 44 day halflife, this is irrelevant in practice. Overall, neutron activation of iron is not a significant issue.

Some materials can be neutron activated, some simply cannot. Don't worry about distilled water, or lead.

The important point, is you choose the structural material so neutron activation is simply, inherently irrelevant. Hence the intense interest in material science in fusion reactors.

You could intentionally make a fusion reactors walls out of U-235 and generate tons of contamination, but why?

Re:Three points

[cmowire]

You do realize that iron would become brittle as steel from the neutron flux if you built your reactor vessel out of it, right? It's a vague problem with fission reactors that required some procedural adjustments once neutron embrittlement was better understood, but with orders of magnitude greater neutron flux...

Nor can you rely on a isotope chart of a single element to predict what's going to occur in a high neutron flux environment.

For example, Fe 58 is stable. Capture a neutron it becomes Fe 59, with a 44 day halflife to Co 59. If Co 59 captures a neutron, it becomes Co 60, which is a long-lived radioisotope.

So I guess you do get a reactor vessel with a certain amount of cobalt isotopes, no?

I wouldn't classify this as an "unsolvable problem" but you can't magically wave your hands and make them go away.

For all the "oh my god radioactivity" crap that's going around, the simple fact of the matter is that you can access the core of a fission reactor while it's online whereas you cannot access the core of a fusion reactor while it's online.

Re:Deuterium is hardly "endless"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Deuterium is hardly "endless"

[Waffle Iron]

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.

Cheap clean energy will utterly destroy the planet

[Colin Smith]

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.

 

Clean cheap energy will save the planet

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.