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Can World's Largest Laser Zap Earth's Energy Woes?
newviewmedia.com writes "Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory plan on using a laser the size of three football fields to set off a nuclear reaction so intense that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth. If they're successful, the scientists hope to solve the global energy crisis by harnessing the energy generated by the mini-star."
Okay, no, nothing will likely go wrong (at least, nothing dangerous to anyone more than a few hundred yards from the event in the worst case scenario). But damn if this doesn't sound like the opening to the plot of a disaster movie.
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The National Ignition Facility is not doing research into energy production. The research they're doing will not have applications in energy production. The hope is that by understanding ignition other nuclear fusion projects will be able to make better progress.. it is completely pure research, as you would expect from a national laboratory.
How we know is more important than what we know.
On the subject of fusion power, the researchers at Focus Fusion seem to be doing a great job as well.
Quote: We have a very high confidence that we will be able to ignite the target within the next two years...
So basically it'll never happen. Haven't they been saying this for the last 20 years?
The big problems concern engineering -- how to turn a piece of very expensive scientific equipment into a cost-effective and reliable power station. The challenges are huge, and not just for inertially-confined fusion, but magnetically confined fusion as well.
I'm 30 and I'm not even sure I'll be alive to see a working fusion power plant.
One frickin' huge shark.
Thought thinks itself.
We should be safe unless the director of the facility has a white cat, is surrounded by beautiful girls, has a tank of sharks for visitors, ....
Luckily enough, we've got plenty of infrastructure dedicated to transmitting power from generators to our cities already. It's not like you can fit a coal fired plant in your back yard, either...
Despite it's earlier mention in the thread, I have to take the opportunity to point out that Focus Fusion involves a reactor design that extracts power from the reaction via 2 routes ;
Both of which are very much more direct than steam generation. I believe the reaction has plenty of waste heat which could be used industrially as well.
Hey, don't complain - usually we just link to a blog, which links to another blog linking a twitter feed with a tinurl-obfuscated link to another blog finally linking to a tabloid article. When you worked yourself through that link chain, you have all the information you need to google for the original source, which, of course, is behind a paywall.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
If the laser is the size of 3 football fields how big does the shark have to be?
Hope is the currency of fools
By "mini-star" they just mean a brief fusion reaction that is expected to last for a fraction of a second --- if for no other reason then there is only a limited amount of fuel available to it.
Also, the way in which many of those involved ultimately intend to use this is not to create a reactor drawing power purely from fusion but rather to create fusion/fission hybrid reactor in which neutrons from the fusion reaction drive fission reactions in nuclear fuel that would not become critical by itself --- i.e., so we can burn things like nuclear waste and thorium. Such a reactor would be intrinsically fail-safe because when fuel pellets stop being dropped into the reactor and ignited by lasers into "mini-stars" (which, again, is something that needs to be done continuously --- several times a second --- since the "mini-stars" burn up all their hydrogen fuel so quickly) then eventually the whole thing shuts down on its own.
In other words, this is completely unlike the ridiculous and highly implausible fusion reactor featured in Spider-Man 2 which had the magic power to sustain itself by eating everything around it --- which, incidentally, is a power that even our own *actual* sun doesn’t come close to having, since it can only burn its limited supply of hydrogen fuel.
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Any why not? Water is a very useful working fluid - relatively high SHC, liquid at standard pressure and temperature, non-toxic, non-corrosive, plentiful, cheap.
Using it to generate electricity from heat and expansion is effective and well understood. Just because we've been doing it since the early days of industrialisation doesn't mean we have to abandon it just because it "feels a little old". It's not like a pentium 2 with a 16Mb graphics card.
This article concentrates on Deuterium-Tritium fusion, and I agree with it in that context.
Most of the concerns are addressed by the design of a DPF reactor.
withstand temperatures of millions of degrees for years on end
That's just FUD, I'm afraid. Even in tokamak reactors, the plasma is kept separate from the reactor vessel. The plasma is at millions of degrees ; the reactor vessel is not. In a DPF reactor, the plasma is a teensy little 12 microns across - even if the contents are running at about a billion Kelvin, they won't heat the reactor vessel to millions of degrees. The reactor is also designed to emit most of it's energy through non-thermal vectors.
constantly bombarded by high-energy nuclear particles
True, in a DT reactor. Not so true in a pB reactor - the reaction produces helium and electrons, not neutrons.
has to make its own nuclear fuel
This one is the big winner. As they rightly noted, tritium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. A pB reaction uses no tritium, it uses common or garden "normal" hydrogen, and boron, an element that's abundant enough to sell as eyewash.
no outages, interruptions or mishaps—for decades on end
When a 1 GW reactor goes offline, yes, you have a shortfall problem. When the proposed 5MW output DPF reactor goes offline for it's routine maintenance (for about 12 hours), you just lean on the others you have running. Lots of small, local, redundant reactors the size of shipping containers make for more reliability than a few whacking great behemoths the size of aircraft carriers. When they cost $300,000 instead of $10,000,000,000, you can afford to pile them high, and sell them cheap.
must also convert energy from the neutrons into heat that drives a turbine
The design is intended to use 2 methods of direct energy collection that are not heat engines, a more elegant and efficient solution that places it closer to "power plant" break-even.
At least they report the purpose of NIF correctly, albeit couched in soft language - it's about "National Security", not energy generation.
"So to replace the fuel based primary energy Germany must build 95 nuclear plants."
Or four reactors, 24 times as powerful.
How many fossil fuel plants do you think they're running now to produce the rest of their power? A few hundred?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
"The world needs to employ existing fixes for climate change rather than looking for a technological silver bullet that will prove to be too expensive for commercial energy production anyway"
Actually, the world really ought to be doing both. I'm not implying the existence of a "silver bullet" but any renewable energy source (especially one as fundamental as solar fusion) is probably a worthwhile endeavor. Just because it isn't immediately commercially viable doesn't mean we can't still benefit from it.
"Before criticizing someone, first walk a mile in his shoes. Then, you'll be a mile away... and you'll have his shoes."