Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Clean, safe, American-made, no foreign oil, low level of pollutants, and a reasonable amount of entropy (heat) released. Sounds like a winner to me.
However, just as with fission, it's likely nothing will be built without massive amounts of subsidy, and it will pay off only in a span of decades. Unless the public and officials are willing to think longterm, fusion is going to be delayed regardless of whether the technical hurdles are overcome.
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.
What is wrong with a pay off in decades. This "profit now" attitude is going to kill America. You think the interstate system paid off sooner than decades? You think the interstate system was a failure?
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
Ignition means more fusion energy released than laser energy in. Yes, there are issues in scaling it up, but none that are known to be insurmountable. Already there have been experiments to look at target injection (a 2 GW power plant would be at the 5 - 10 Hz region), high rep-rate lasers (Mercury is an example of a high power, high rep-rate laser) and the lining up of the laser in this situation requires less precision than that of anti-missile systems that are around.
Also the Hohlraum approach is unlikely to be used in a power-plant, as it doesn't give the biggest energy gains, so this is basically a significant step towards projects such as HiPER. If NIF achieves success in ignition as is widely expected the money should be around for projects like HiPER.
It was Doc Fucking Brown, not only was that speedometer perfect, it was digital.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Don't worry, as soon as anything explodes, someone dies, or they find a "scientist" who can worry and fret, Foxnews will point out how Obama's DOE is funding crazy apocalypse engines.