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."

Comments

I know nothing of physics, but...

[Abreu]

...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.

Re:I know nothing of physics, but...

[chemicaldave]

The name comes from Sandia Base where the first labs were located which happened to be next to the Sandia Mountains, which, according to popular belief, got its name due to the reddish color of the mountains at sunset.

Tubes Eaten Away

[bazald]

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.

Re:Tubes Eaten Away

[vlm]

Time for a world famous /. vlm engineering estimate.

The tubes are vaporized by the magnetic crunch. Optimistically they're getting a thousand times the power out as in, or far more than a thousand times the power it takes to vaporize the tube (because most of the power is going into squashing the contents, otherwise whats the point...).

I'm sure they're using beryllium because of its legendary stiffness, not because they love toxic dust. Lets say they use aluminum in a later model. Both light low Z metals of decent strength although beryllium is better. If beryllium oxides were not so toxic we've have airplanes made out of it, not just space satellites and the occasional exotic RF transistor ceramic heatsink. But I digress. Off the top of my head it costs about 5 KWh as an order of magnitude engineering estimate to electrorefine a pound of aluminum. It takes immensely more energy to vaporize a pound of aluminum. An hour in a 5 KW ceramics kiln might melt a pound aluminum... but vaporization is much harder. I'll estimate incredibly low and say you can vaporize a pound of aluminum with only 5 KWh. LOL this is probably 1 or maybe even 2 orders of magnitude low, but its best to be extremely pessimistic... I'm not counting the machining energy or transport, both of which will be much smaller.

So I'd feel fairly confident that a pound or so of aluminum tube, costing about 5 KWh to refine, should generate about 5000 KWh when the deuterium inside the tubes gets squooshed. Not bad.

Another crappy engineering order of magnitude estimate is you gotta burn a pound of coal to make a KWh. And you can earn a tidy profit burning coal to make electricity, for better or worse... WRT materials handling transport and mining/ore/coal processing and storage standpoint, those are not an issue as long as you can get more than one KWH out of a pound of the "stuff", since it's clearly no issue with coal at a pitiful KWh per pound. This thing is getting 5000 KWh out of a pound of aluminum tubes (well, once they're filled up with D2).

No as a first approximation I'm not seeing any fundamental issues with the tubes. This isn't like using up 2 barrels of crude oil to grow and refine 1 barrel equivalent of ethanol. The tubes will be a substantial fraction of the operating expense. Not as significant as jetfuel to a airline, or coal to a powerplant, but more significant than say, the cost of in flight cookies to a airline.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines

[iamjonah]

Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no".

Re:Betteridge's Law of Headlines

[Chris Burke]

A simulation shows that experiments scheduled for next year could work.

Not exactly. This was an actual experiment showing that previously done simulations were correct. They needed to figure out the correct thickness to make the liners to balance implosion speed with vaporization due to extreme current, the simulations said this was a sweet spot, and the experiment said that indeed this would work.

Of course this is just one more step in the design - simulate - experiment cycle, but still, at least it is about a real result.

Also, I'm just glad to be hearing about further progress from the Z-Machine folks at Sandia since I hadn't in quite a while. So even though it's not the final goal, it's still good news.

The most beautiful science

[conorpeterson]

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.

Re:great!

[LurkerXXX]

I made a working engine that ran off of tap water. Then the oil companies had me killed.

Re:Stop hating. "cold fusion" != "fusion"

[Chris Burke]

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!

Re:great!

[azav]

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

Re:No!

[History's Coming To]

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.

Re:great!

[DavidTC]

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.