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Laser Fusion Passes Major Hurdle
chill writes "The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has performed their first controlled fusion experiments using all 192 lasers. While still not ramped up to full power, the first experiments proved very fruitful. The lasers create a lot of plasma in the target container and researchers worried that the plasma would interfere with the ability of the target to absorb enough energy to ignite. These experiments show that not only does enough energy make it through, the plasma can be manipulated to increase the uniformity of compression. Ramping up of power is due to start in May." The project lead, Dr. Sigfried Glenzer, is "confident that with everything in place, ignition is on the horizon. He added, quite simply, 'It's going to happen this year.'"
In 5 years I can have Mr. Fusion where I can put junk to power my flying car...
Sweet.
I just hope that fax machines don't come back into style and have multiple for every house.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What does "ignition" mean for the energy gain of this type of fusion? Is this going to be worthwhile enough to overcome the inherent difficulties of this approach? Right now, inertial confinement seems to be suited for one-off events but not for sustained power generation since the fuel pellet will need to be lined up nearly perfectly for the lasers to not just blow it apart. Is "ignition" going to produce enough energy to make all this setup worthwhile in anything but an experimental sense?
Now fusion energy is only 10 years away!
The project lead, Dr. Sigfried Glenzer, is "confident that with everything in place, ignition is on the horizon. He added, quite simply, 'It's going to happen this year.'
Huh. I had always thought that some international police force like "The International Fusion Gestapo" would be dispatched upon hearing this news and show up at your lab and start smashing mirrors and urinating on lasers until you revised your statement to be "15 to 20 years away" so that all their dues paying members would have time to reach tenure before you ruined the party.
I mean, there was no other logical explanation why so many seemingly brilliant scientists continually gave us incorrect estimates of achieving milestones in fusion research. Is this just being overly optimistic or was he carefully picking his words so that they will know if this method is viable (above break even energy production) or not within a year? And if so, where will he get his funding given the if not scenario?
My work here is dung.
Understand just enough to know that I don't understand enough, but this sounds fantastic.
Hope is the currency of fools
but its low powered and has quick half-lives. additionally, there are no geopolitical overtones concerning fuel sources: you just need sea water. no climate changing pollution/ city-choking smog for that matter. no peak oil this or that, no bubbles and spikes in supply or pricing
additionally, if everyone had electric cars, there would be no petrodollars funding saudi arabia, a backwards fundamentalist regime that funds wahhabi madrassas in places like pakistan, that give rise to all of these well-funded (from saudi "charities") militant assholes in the muslim world
no funding of gas bag chavez in venezuela, no funding of neoimperial russia and putin, no funding for nigerian graft and corruption...
it will take a long time, but if we can remove the reason for the world to have any vested interests in backwards regimes, propping them up and preserving them unnaturally, and we instead let these regimes instead rise and fall on their own intrinsic value in governing fair societies, then we will have taken a mighty step forward in terms of progress in this world
of course, it will be decades before we're all driving electric cars powered by fusion plants. but one can dream, cant' they?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The 15 to 20 years estimate is always for energy-positive, viable power plant. The one year date is just when this particular device will be fully operational. There are already many operational fusion devices that exist for research, and this adds another that may or may not give us a breakthrough.
My interpretation is simply that they want to reach the density and temperature required to start fusion within the plasma. This only means that the fusion reaction is starting to happen. Only after that can one start to ask the interesting questions (can enough energy be extracted to have a net surplus? can the energy output be improved? is this economically viable?). So they aren't done for several years yet.
http://www.moonlight3d.eu/
Why aren't they using an array of neural-network-controlled, articulated metal arms to control the fusion chamber?
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
Are you sure it's wise to ignite your nation?
I'm glad that there's plenty of water between me and the nation in question.
Everyone knows fusion power doesn't become available until 2050, and microwave power comes first.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I don't understand why this is even doing news. The temperatures that were reach are commonly reached inside tokamaks. Fusion itself has already been sustained in them for several seconds,a feat a laser confinement mechanism cannot do. Of course these reactions did use more energy than it created. Laser mechanisms have a longer way to go in order to be credible fusion power plants.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
...your 300mW pocket laser pointer popping balloons & burning wood.
You're supposed to take it out of your pocket before using it.
Blank until
Just a minor point - the Death Star had more than three lasers. I think it was more like 12 or so. Just didn't want you to provoke the dark side of the force by underestimating the power of the 'Star.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
By definition, when they achieve ignition - there will be a self sustained, fusion reaction - the fusion reaction will sustain itself until its fuel is exhausted. More energy will be produced than was put in - a net positive in energy.
Of course there isn't any mechanism in NIF to collect the energy, but thats not really the point of the project...
And, let's admit everything works: what quantity of nuclear waste will such a machine produce? And of what type?
Don't give me the "it's fusion, so it's clean, duh" line: this machine is going to generate an enormous amount of energy and a lot of that will in the form of a "carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion" (BBC dixit) -- which means radiation, which also means neutrons. And neutrons are not really good for your health.
Later in TFA it says they'll eventually be fusing a fuel containing a mix deuterium and tritium. Deuterium-deuterium fusion yields tritium and a neutron, and deuterium-tritium fusion yields helium-4 and a neutron. So the byproducts are Helium-4 (not radioactive in the slightest) and neutrons.
High energy neutrons are very bad for you, yes, but that just means you won't be standing near the unshielded reaction chamber. It's not like you have to dump a big pile of poisonous neutrons somewhere. The neutrons will affect the containment itself, but the biggest problem there is just that it becomes brittle, not necessarily radioactive.
It is basically true that fusion is clean. The waste is minimal.
The enemies of Democracy are
since it was perfect
And can it sustain power generation?
You're talking about zapping a very small, supercooled, gold-uranium alloy target with a beryllium sphere containing about 1mg of DT fuel, about 10 times a second.
Have a thought experiment about the engineering involved
what quantity of nuclear waste will such a machine produce?
DT fusion produces fast neutrons, so some. You're looking at much shorter half-lives ; the reactor core will have the same activity as coal ash after about 300 years.
And will ITER be quickly refactored to take this into account?
ITER is a totally different design, so no. I think ITER is a far more credible design than laser-fusion, given that the engineering challenges seem some orders of magnitude easier.
NIF is just a testbed for nuclear fusion, without the inconveniently illegal use of real nuclear weapons.
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If you're firing at 1mg of fuel, by mass, 3/5 of it is Tritium or 0.6mg so (60 * 60 * 24) seconds in day * 10 per second * 0.0006 g = 518.4 g of tritium per day.
The total production in the USA between 1955 and 1996 was 225kg ; the stockpile in 1996 stood at 75kg
Technically the process will generate some radioactive material due to neutron activation of the reactor components, but we're talking small amounts that only need to be stored for a few decades until they are perfectly safe.
One interesting proposal has been to use the neutron flux produced by fusion reactors to transmute long-lived high-level radioactive waste produced in fission reactors into short-lived waste products. So potentially the by-product of fusion reactors would allow us to reduce the impact of fission reactors.
People who make their money on scarcity fear the onset of plenty.
Everyone suffers from the, "What's good for me is good for America," syndrome, even me.
Put those two together, and you get your friend from Texas - or the MafiAA.
There's no shortage of science fiction that examines the impact of the "replicator" on society, sometimes as a side-item. I know a co-worker who is uncomfortable with ST:NG because it was "too socialistic". The way I looked at the series, the basics of life were so cheap that under normal circumstances they could be taken for granted, most of the time. Everyone had moved beyond that on the hierarchy of needs, and their concerns were much more sophisticated.
Or for another example I would suggest Joe Haldeman's "The Forever Peace". It's not a sequel to "The Forever War" - that's "Forever Free", but it's an excellent book in its own right, and touches on some fascinating topics.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I'm a physicist, I love these experiments, but...
The people running this thing need to think really, *really* hard how their comments play out in the media, maybe try and be a little more clear. The difference between getting fusion (the physical process) to work and getting fusion (the power generation system) to work is huge! Should they accomplish their goals in a year, they will still be a very long way away from thinking about building an electricity generating system. The line of "getting more power out than we put in" for fusion in the lab was crossed decades ago, and it's still unclear how doing this with yet another method of creating a fusion plasma is going to result in a more straightforward commercial reactor design.
This is how we end up with government officials who think we're all full of hyperbole, and don't actually do any work. I know they're fighting for their jobs at Livermore, but I don't see how they can keep this up long term. At some point, some Congressional committee is going to ask them to deliver on what has been promised, even if it was a confused, incorrect promise mis-translated by the media.
argued that if free energy were discovered tomorrow, then the whole economy of the world would collapse.
I agree this is clearly nonsense in the long run though some countries (Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, etc) who are primarily dependent on oil income would experience very severe economic problems. It is correct to say that oil is one of the underpinnings of the current economy and it would take some time for adjustment.
Of course, he simultaneously argued that oil production was used for so many applications that the world was dependent on it and could not function without it.
For the foreseeable future he is probably correct in that assertion. The number of products we use that have some form of oil-based products is astonishing. Besides fuels like gasoline or diesel, many, many, many other products have oil as a vital component for which there is no substitute. Synthetic fibers, lubricants, paints, plastics, coatings, chemicals, coolants, and fertilizers all jump to mind off the top of my head. Without oil for power and fertilizer, modern agriculture as we know it could not exist. It is entirely correct that our modern world could not function without oil.
Yes, the interstate highway system did kill trains, especially the interurban trains surrounding urban areas. But that isn't the point. The building of the interstate system, a massive government project, succeeded in reaching its goal of allowing the utilization of vast swaths of under-utilized land, allowing commensurate increases in economic capacity. This was the real goal of pushing automobile transportation. Unfortunately, implicit in this goal was a massive surge in urban sprawl, pollution, and most importantly a huge surge in the production of greenhouse gasses.
I am arguing here that the assumption that government programs always fail and are almost always fundamentally flawed is incorrect, and is not born out by historical evidence. Government CAN achieve constructive goals in society, IF those in government are wise rulers.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
The Navy-funded Polywell experiment is looking to hit break-even in some time less than the frustrating "20 years away" event horizon that's been plaguing magnetic confinement and laser based devices such as this one. I'd say it's a good bet that Polywell will achieve break-even first.
The point of a "self-sustained" laser fusion device is that it produces more power from each fusion blast than is needed to power the lasers.
The idea is that each fusion blast produces enough energy to fire the lasers for the next blast, plus some additional amount that can be used to do useful work.
Sure, it takes a constant stream of pellets as input, but a fission reactor uses fuel rods the same wayl.