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National Ignition Facility Fails To Ignite Support In Congress
Hugh Pickens writes "For more than 50 years, physicists have been eager to achieve controlled fusion, an elusive goal that could potentially offer a boundless and inexpensive source of energy. Now Bill Sweet writes in IEEE Spectrum that the National Ignition Facility (NIF), now five billion dollars over its original budget and years behind schedule, deserves to be recognized as perhaps the biggest and fattest white elephant of all time. With the total tab for NIF now running to an estimated $7 billion, the laboratory has been pulling out all the stops to claim success is just around the corner. 'We didn't achieve the goal,' said Donald L. Cook, an official at the National Nuclear Security Administration who oversees the laser project but rather than predicting when it might succeed, he added in an interview, 'we're going to settle into a serious investigation' of what caused the unforeseen snags. On one hand, the laser's defenders point out, hard science is by definition risky, and no serious progress is possible without occasional failures. On the other, federal science initiatives seldom disappoint on such a gargantuan scale, and the setback comes in an era of tough fiscal choices and skepticism about science among some lawmakers. 'If the main goal is to achieve a power source that could replace fossil fuels, we suspect the money would be better spent on renewable sources of energy that are likely to be cheaper and quicker to put into wide use,' editorializes the NY Times. 'Congress will need to look hard at whether these "stockpile stewardship" and long-term energy goals can be pursued on a smaller budget.'"
It was clear from the start that this was the case, that this was the primary reason of building it.
Why do people keep repeating the propaganda?
Nothing about this project makes any sense at all from a nuclear power perspective. Be it the hugely inefficient, short-lifetime lasers that can be fired about once a day. Just 10% of the energy released from the lasing medium actually reaches the target. Even more energy is wasted creating the laser beam in the first place. Be it the miniscule amounts of *frozen* hydrogen, put into a GOLDEN, high precision capsule, put very precisely into a delicate assembly that needs to be rebuild after each successful shot ... while any significant power generation would need several shots per second, churning through the gold-plated fuel.
Absolutely nothing at all makes sense if you want this to build a power plant. Yet, everybody seems to have swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker. Nobody dared to mentioning the obvious:
The whole assembly is a weapon test stand, with the sole purpose to simulate an environment of radiation pressure that can only be found centimeters away from the explosion of a nuclear bomb, compressing deuterium and tritium - freshly bred in-situ from lithium - for nuclear fusion to boost the fission-chain-reaction of the primary.
I'm more afraid to go to the USA than to China ... there, at least, everybody knows the news are all about spreading propaganda. At least some people still think for themselves every once in a while.