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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."
...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.
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Two flying cars?
Practical applications are now only fifty years away! :p
No, see as you approach feasibility, your likelihood of being bough by a competing producer to be extinguished (see gasoline) becomes multitudes greater. 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. Tee short of it, there is too much money to be made to have something as valuable as energy become a low-cost commodity.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no".
Is there any evidence (real evidence, not YouTube videos of guys in their basements) of any "revolutionary, clean energy technology" being bought out and extinguished by the oil industry?
No sig for the moment.
Of course not, they buy out and extinguish the evidence, duh!
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.
I made a working engine that ran off of tap water. Then the oil companies had me killed.
> No, see as you approach feasibility, your likelihood of being bough by a competing producer to be extinguished (see gasoline) becomes multitudes greater.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but do you have a reference?
My own suspicion is that as you approach feasibility, government grant money tends to increase, but if you *achieve* practical feasibility, grant money evaporates. Therefore, to maximize funding, you must asymptotically approach feasibility.
But I'm willing to hear a different theory.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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).
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
You were lucky. The oil companies beat me around the head and neck with a broken bottle, sliced me in two with a bread knife, then danced around my grave singing "Hallelujah!"
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
Some people would take that as a challenge.
Sandia National Laboratories. Government funded?
Doesn't that mean the people own the technology developed - so if anything does come of this - who is going to tell the taxpayer who funded this that he can't go build one for himself or sell the power he can make off of his unit?
Or give him any authority to tell his neighbor not to do the same should his neighbor want to do likewise?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
All they have to do to make profit is make it cheaper then current forms of electricity. This will not be back yard inventor stuff where every home is powered by one built out of spare parts. It will be something sitting on a large site with power transmissions lines coming to it that is selling the electricity on a market. If it costs more to make then current forms, it will not be used. If it costs less, it will be implemented.
There are patents that were filed by Henry Yunick among others in the early 1980's which had a working model Buick getting ~50 MPG's on the road. The patents were sold to GM which subsequently sat on them for ~20 yrs due to interlocking directorships with Exxon Mobil. They are now owned by a holding corp. I'll dig out the relevant patent numbers shortly, theyre around here somewhere...
C|N>K
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:
http://patents.justia.com/inventor/HENRYYUNICK.html
U.S. Patent Number 5,645,368
A race track is disclosed having a tri-oval banked, racing surfacesurrounded by a barrier support material delineating a race barrier support surface at a
U.S. Patent Number 5,515,712
An apparatus and a method for testing internal combustion engines aredisclosed. In the preferred arrangement the apparatus includes a test module supporting an electric
U.S. Patent Number 5,246,086
An internal combustion engine oil change system including an oil filtersupplied with a check valve fill fitting. During an oil change, new oil is
U.S. Patent Number 4,862,859
A method and apparatus for operating an electric ignition, internalcombustion engine that substantially improves the fuel efficiency by utilizing heat normally discharged to the
U.S. Patent Number 4,637,365
A method and apparatus for operating an internal combustion engine thatsubstantially improves the fuel efficiency by utilizing heat normally discharged to the ambient to
U.S. Patent Number 4,592,329
A method and apparatus for operating an electric ignition, internalcombustion engine that substantially improves the fuel efficiency by utilizing heat normally discharged to the
U.S. Patent Number 4,503,833
A method and apparatus for operating an electric ignition, internalcombustion engine that substantially improves the fuel efficiency by utilizing heat normally discharged to the
U.S. Patent Number 4,467,752
An internal combustion engine having a cylinder 16, a cylinder head 10, anda piston 12 slidably mounted within the cylinder for reciprocating movement towards
U.S. Patent Number 4,068,635
A valve is interposed between spaced valve seats of a conduit having end portions communicating with the ends of an internal combustion engine valve
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Search for any combination of "butamax gevo patent sue suit" etc etc.
These guys are having to fight over obvious refinements of the ABE process for making butanol, you can look it up on Wikipedia or numerous other places.
And when I say "these guys" I mean a company that wants to actually make and sell Butanol, a "green, clean" 1:1 replacement for gasoline with lower emissions versus Butamax, which is owned by BP and DuPont, who has sued them to prevent them from producing fuel.
I hear it is theoretically possible to get a permit to operate a still for the purpose of producing fuel, and you might even be able to use it for road fuel if you're willing to pay the taxes on it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
And when did 50 MPG become some sort of incredible technological triumph in the first place?
It's actually pretty easy to make a vehicle from the 1980s get 50 MPG via modifications. Machine the engine to incredibly tight tolerances, use super high quality oil, implement some stuff that modern cars already do via computerized fuel injection, strip out the emission controls, preheat gasoline (which is what appears to be done here)...50 MPG is impressive, but not some sort of impossible thing.
In fact, a lot of the patents in that list appear to be carburetor tricks for creating air-fuel mixes. Anyone who thinks they are even slightly useful does not quite understand that a) we've moved past carburetors, and b) the fuel-injection systems we replaced them with already do many of those 'tricks', or don't need them. Fuel injectors are constantly adjusting based on engine temp and all sorts of things, and do not operate by by the crazy method of 'mixing air and gas by hitting a moving metal flap with gasoline' which required all sorts of odd tricks to make things work right.
In short: The guy was right. By correctly varying the air-fuel mixture, much higher MPGs can be reached. It's how we went from 20 MPG in the 80s to 40 MPGs now. The problem is, while _he_ was working on stupid carburetor tricks, other people were inventing fuel injection operated by computers that do all this stuff magically.
And the problem with the _rest_ of the changes, tightening tolerances and whatnot, is now you've made the car 10 times as expensive, as all that has to be done by hand...and the damn engine will blow up at the slightest piece of dirt that gets in, or when the oil pressure drops by 10%, or just rip itself apart when you run out of gas. And oil costs about fifty times what it should.
Any idiot can get rid of a dozen 'inefficiencies' of an automobile engine that actually exist because the thing is designed to operate, and be maintained, and parts replaced, in real world conditions, not a damn clean room. Car companies do not sell cars like that, as they would not make it out of the two-year warranty.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?