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Fusion Power Breakthrough Near At Sandia Labs?
An anonymous reader writes "An achievement that would have extraordinary energy and defense implications might be near at Sandia National Laboratories. The lab is testing a concept called MagLIF (Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion), which uses magnetic fields and laser pre-heating in the quest for energetic fusion. A paper by Sandia researchers that was accepted for publication states that the Z-pinch driven MagLIF fusion could reach 'high-gain' fusion conditions, where the fusion energy released greatly exceeds (by more than 1,000 times) the energy supplied to the fuel."
so the 20-50 year estimate that never shrinks may actually get reduced some?
...I just want you guys to know that "Sandía" means "watermelon" in Spanish.
Oh, also: I hope this leads to a new, efficient and clean type of energy.
No sig for the moment.
Two flying cars?
Practical applications are now only fifty years away! :p
All the previous vaporware and false claims about fusion are about "cold fusion". This is not the same thing. Accusations of being vaporware would only be valid if the word "cold" appeared in the summary, which it does not.
so uhh.. call us in a year if it works, ok? that the parts which are known to work do work isn't really news you know.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
How much energy goes into the production of the liner tubes, which are apparently eaten away throughout the course of the fusion reaction? Obviously this is all preliminary research, but I still think I'm missing something.
Insert self-referential sig here.
Take that, Sol! Now we don't need you for anything!
Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no".
The photos of the Z machine have to be seen to be believed, and even then, it is grade A sci-fi: http://www.sandia.gov/z-machine/ The "Z pinch" is an alternative method of containing the hot plasma. Tokomak reactors use magnetic confinement of a continuous plasma, while the Z machine uses inertial confinement for shorter lived plasmas. IIRC the web of lightning shown in Sandia's publicity photos is produced when thousands of tungsten filaments are vaporized in order to generate x-rays. The fuel pellet sits in the center and the X-rays compress it into criticality -- if it sounds like an H-bomb, that's because it probably is.
Which it hasn't really been for a decade now, and wouldn't have been like that if fusion had been receiving the funding it deserves. Of all non-service industries energy has the lowest research funding to revenue ratio, and super-majority of that has been towards fracking and ethanol.
This is a self-perpetuating myth if ever there was one. My money's on FocusFusion to beat sandia to net+ though.
Go to http://xkcd.com/678/, pick your own time line.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
tell me when it's done
I expect you'll know when it happens.
You will never actually reach production with things like this, for the same reason you will never reach a wall by moving in increments of 1/2.
Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox has a resolution. This is more like the Rockefeller Contraction (apologies to Hendrik Lorentz).
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The Tokamak's have been scientific breakeven for more than a decade, ITER is supposed to achieve fiscal breakeven. What's the difference? Scientific breakeven means you extract more energy than you put into it, but you don't actually try to collect any of the energy. Fiscal breakeven is that added step where you actually try to collect the energy and use it.
See Fusion has this problem in that it's pretty easy to trigger fusion, it's not easy to keep it going and it's damn near impossible to collect any energy from it because all the stuff you have to start the fusion is in the way of collecting any of the energy and all the neutron and alpha particle emissions tend to destroy any materials you put in there to collect the energy.
This is EXACTLY the point of ITER, it's supposed to test the actual engineering of real world (not laboratory) fusion at an economic scale. This testing is costing a lot of money (US contributions are in the $2 Billion dollar range, total economic input from all the partner nations is 25X that amount).
it's all coming together http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/09/17/2229257/warp-drive-might-be-less-impossible-than-previously-thought I know when it finishes - about 10 min after I die . Oops - should have done this as anonymous
Nuclear energy research has been funded the same way the internet was funded, the usual way research gets publicly funded in the US (or for that matter, elsewhere): The promise of military applications.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Wait a sec.... so american "engineers" can manage to get 400 BHP out of a six liter now?
Another few decades of practice and they might make a car worth owning.
Yeah, I remember when we had the MIT fusion research Slashdot Interview, and they showed the graph that was presented in the 70s showing how soon they could have fusion given various funding levels.
The saddest part was of the various scenarios like "fusion in 10 years", "fusion in 20 years", there was a "fusion never" line where funding was never sufficient to yield breakeven fusion, and then there was overlaid a new "actual funding" line which was significantly lower than that. :(
P.S. Personally my money is on Sandia, but that's just because the old Z-Machine was the most fucking awesome thing ever. EVER. I admit this is not a rational scientific argument, and that a working Z-pinch fusion device would not look like that at all, but come on!
The enemies of Democracy are
And how low cost will it be actually?
Let's assume that the Sandia technique/technology results in sustained net-positive fusion by the end of 2013. The results are so positive that a small-scale concept plant that will push to the grid gets built, by, say 2020.
This works well enough and there's enough refinement that a full-scale 8 GW plant can be built. By what, 2035? This plant is so successful that by 2050 there are maybe 4-5 more built an in operation.
So we have a lead time of 2050 for less than 50 GW of power. Considering total production is something like 1300 GW, it hardly seems like a threat to anything or a source of the vaunted "free" energy.
Even if you manage increase production by a factor of 10 to 500 GW capacity, what will fund the grid expansion to deliver all this free energy? Will the cost of electrically powered stuff go down -- or up, now that "everything" is made to run on electricity and the demand for rare earths, copper and other related materials goes way up?
Although both terms are hot... one is several million degrees hotter than the other
Both take 40 years to begin production.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Do you know who they are? The .gov address might give you a clue but it is Sandia National Laboratories. They are one of the DoE's research labs. It's where they do research relating to nuclear weapons, among other things. This isn't something the oil companies have any sway over or ability to grab.
As he said, the answer is no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines
Simply scale up the reaction to a level where it is self-sustaining on the ambient hydrogen in space, and then collect the resulting photon emissions with an array of photovoltaic converters.
Here is the interview,, and Here is the graph.
Funding fusion power is probably the best thing we can do for the environment right now.
Because they exceeded the breakeven point with fusion, which is the second most important achievement other than eventually achieving huge energy returns on energy invested. That's the biggest news in fusion since the hydrogen bomb generations ago.
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make install -not war
RTFA, please:
40 years ago we could produce large amounts of fusion energy, just not in a particularly controlled manner.
20 years ago we could produce controlled energy from fusion, but it required a bigger input than output, and only lasted for milliseconds.
Now we can produce controlled energy from fusion, at ratios a little greater than unity, for tens of seconds.
~20 years from now (timetabled for 2035) we will hopefully have a proof-of-concept commercial fusion reactor feeding electricity into the grids.
There's an element of truth in the "power of the future, and always will be!" gag, and it has been a very long hard slog, but advances are being made, albeit slowly compared to the development of fission energy production. That said, the first steam engine was made in ancient Greece, but didn't become a large scale commercial venture until the industrial revolution, and compared to that fusion research has happened in the blink of an eye.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
That line gave me pause. To make it it practical it would have to operate for at least 6 to 12 months before the lining was changed since you'd have to go into cold shutdown and be off line for weeks. It doesn't sound like they are even close to that kind of durability. This type of issue is what has kept fusion in the lab. They passed break even a long time ago but they only got slightly more power than it took to sustain the reaction so it'd be like building a nuclear plant to power a house. They've really got to get the durability of the liners to exceed 12 months and the lasers to last even longer or the amount of energy you get out won't justify the expense. I'm a big fan of fusion I'm just also a skeptic, I've been following since the 70s. One added benefit of fusion would be an attractive waste bi-product, Helium.