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Laser Fusion Put On a Slow Burn By US Government
gbrumfiel writes "Those hoping to laser their way out of the energy crisis will have to wait a little longer. The U.S. government has unveiled its new plan for laser fusion, and it's not going to happen anytime soon. It all comes down to problems at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world's most powerful laser at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California. For the past six years researchers at NIF have been trying to use the laser to spark a fusion reaction in a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. Like all fusion, it's tougher than it looks, and their campaign came up short. That left Congress a little bit miffed, so they asked for a new plan. The new plan calls for a more methodical study of fusion, along with a broader approach to achieving it with the NIF. In three years or so, they should know whether the NIF will ever work."
It is not about fusion power.
It is about bombs.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Fusion is nifty, but Thorium has already been done (and is being done overseas). It's more likely to yield results in the short to medium term.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
FYI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
only Sandia's z-pinch machine and the polywell are looking even remotely promising anyway. ITER is a toilet for flushing down money
until we can blow up the sun at will military minds will keep wanting bigger bombs let them keep developing though lots of our current civilian tech is derived from military research. Besides if they don't pour it into research they will look for places to spend it, or rather places to blow up.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Besides being an ugly word it is imposing a sort of emotional response to something that is more practical and dare scientific.
At the end of the day we have created fusion. Most of it came through bombs, but from a scientific standpoint we know about fusion.
This is about creating a clean, reliable, cost effective energy solution.
There should not be hard feelings or even a feeling of failure. The idea was sound enough to look into. Maybe it's just not practical. No use throwing good money after bad or crying over spilled milk.
they'll be able to report that fusion technology is in fact merely 20 years away. I think I'll wait to make that reservation in 2036, however.
You need to contain the H fusion reaction in a metallic lattice. This is how the Sun really works,...the accretion model.
I just got cold fusion working outback in the garage and now they leapfrog my achievement with this?
Oh well. I guess I'll have too throw it out.
Back to the drawing board.
until we can blow up the sun at will military minds will keep wanting bigger bombs let them keep developing though lots of our current civilian tech is derived from military research. Besides if they don't pour it into research they will look for places to spend it, or rather places to blow up.
every sun.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Figure it out and get the patents and then we can buy our electricity from them like we do oil now.
I think you could probably pay for a year's worth of Polywell or Focus Fusion research with just the budget for coffeebreaks at the NIF
Another one of those things that is always 20 years in the future.
If you want to get an understanding of the state of fusion research, you need to look at this graph. Fusion power is not unreasonable, nor even very far out of reach. This interview is good reading as well.
If we want to get serious about global warming, we could do worse than funding more fusion research.
For the past six years researchers at NIF have been trying to use the laser to spark a fusion reaction in a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel.
When you say "tiny", what exactly are you comparing that to? Is the fusion reaction also "tiny"?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Fusion is not going to happen. Ever.
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
In this case I can get more specific:
The NIF is physically limited to shots up to about 50 MJ. To put that in more familiar terms, that's about 14 kWh.
At current baseload prices here in Ontario, about 3.5 cents/kWh, that shot is worth about 50 cents. That's assuming that we convert it entire to electricity, which is of course impossible. A more realistic conversion with 25% thermal efficiency gets us 15 cents of power.
The fuel target costs tens of thousands of dollars.
$10,000 >> 15 cents
Anyone see a problem here? And don't wave this away, we literally have absolutely no idea how to make the fuel cost less than the power is worth. None whatsoever.
And that's not the only one, of course. The beamlines feed about 1.8 MJ of UV laser light into the chamber. That is generated from 4 MJ of IR in the main beamlines. That's fed from 350 MJ of electrical power. To get 50 MJ out.
350 MJ >> 50 MJ >> 15 MJ of electricity after conversion
So there's that too. At current efficiencies, you're better off burning money.
We have some febrile ideas about how to get this improved by a factor of 10, or maybe even 100. But that's still *below* energy break even. And we don't need break even for this to be practical, we need 10 to 100x.
This is never going to happen. It's a weapons program, always was. Testing we don't need for a weapon we don't want.
It's where 99.9% of the energy on this planet has come from and where 99.9% will ever come from. Sooner or later it's going to have to be our primary source.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Huzzah!
Although the funding and research at the NIF is no doubt aimed towards weapons research, its recent detour to support the National Ignition Campaign was basically a pork barrel project designed to channel federal stimulus money into california. For example, this earmark among others. The funding was sold to other congressfolk as them voting for an alternative energy research program, and now that the results of the campaign have been spotlighted as a failure, they of course are wondering what they voted for.
I'm sure that makes another round of earmarks unlikely and now that the stimulus spending spree is over, the NIF will of course return back to be to its previous pork-barrel life as a weapons research money pit.
And Uranium has been done too. Uranium is also easier to acquire, we already have stockpiles of it. It does not require fast neutron reactors to work, but it could use fast neutron reactors too - you know, most of the "waste" problem goes away using fast neutron reactors.
Anyway, thorium is only useful if you have lots of thorium and little uranium. Like India. That is the only reason to use thorium over uranium.
Thorium is no safer than uranium. You can use the same reactor design for uranium as you do for thorium. You can just as easily cause a meltdown in thorium reactor. You can just as easily temporarily pollute large areas of land with daughter nuclei with a thorium reactor as you do with uranium. Thorium is no safer than uranium. It is the same process!! Heck, some current uranium reactors can burn thorium too.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ENF-Thorium_use_in_Candu_units_to_be_assessed-1507095.html
More research is needed for fast neutron reactors, but that is irrespective of using thorium as fuel.
When has anything funded by the Federal Government not been on a 'slow burn?' The only things that have ever been fast-tracked are things that are seen as expedient by the masses, like going to the moon. But, did we go to the moon for scientific purposes? Nope. We went to beat the Red Menace, and for no other reason. NASA just happened to, you know, get science stuff done while they were there. Wake me up when clean energy becomes a politically expedient necessity for EVERY PARTY. Then things will happen.
No, the compression beams need to be fired for every shot, which produces a finite and fairly small amount of energy.
Fission will always be easier than fusion, because neutrons are uncharged and aren't repelled by a nucleus.
Laser fusion has been three years away for, oh, 30 years now. Any day we're going to be the big breakthrough though. Just need a few more billion dollars...
sPh
One issue with Navy funding is that they embargo the results until after the review of the final report of each stage of the work. That means the workers can't talk about how things are doing and you get a short burst of news every year or two. B-b
Last I heard of the plan the next step after WB-8 (and maybe another small model with a different symmetry), if the scaling rules worked out in practice, was to be a beyond-breakeven proof-of-concept machine with 100 MW output, for about $200M - which, if it could run continuously for little ongoing cost, would be cheaper than a solar panel farm (which only gets about 5 hour-equivalents of the panel rating per day). I was hoping that the end-of-2012 news would be that WB-8 had worked as expected and they were going ahead with the real thing. So I was both elated and disappointed at the news that things seemed to be working as expected but that they were going to spend a couple more years doing engineering and science with WB-8.
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Hello, I'm sorry to say this, but aneutronic fusion is probably never going to be a practical energy source.
There's a reason D-T fusion is the focus. One problem is that all the aneutronic fusion reactions involve higher-Z (higher atomic number) nuclei. Higher Z nuclei have worse energy loss via Bremsstrahlung radiation than the D-T or D-D reactions. In a plasma hot enough to sustain fusion reactions, the electrons and ions are banging against each other, and every hit potentially makes X-rays or gamma rays, converting thermal energy into light. In a reasonable-sized thermal plasma, these photons pretty much just leave without interacting again, thus cooling the plasma.
People have calculated that the energy loss rate from Bremsstrahlung in a thermal plasma composed of atoms capable of doing aneutronic fusion would exceed the rate that the fusion reactions would heat it. Thus, the plasma would cool right off, the flame would in effect "go out" because it would lose heat faster than it created heat via fusion.
In a star, this works out, because a star is so very, very big that the photons from Bremsstrahlung are re-captured within the star: i.e., the heat can't escape because of sheer mass in the way. We're never going to pull that size and density off in a lab or an engineering installation.
Now, if you can somehow arrange for the plasma to NOT be thermal, you may be able to beat this issue. However, keeping a plasma from thermalizing requires a large energy input, and is very hard to arrange for and preserve long enough to get energy from fusions. Inertial confinement might work (laser or Z-pinch or the like), there you potentially have very high densities for maybe "long enough" for Bremsstrahlung not to eat your lunch: I don't know. However, both laser and Z-type installations seem very hard engineering problems.
The wikipedia on "aneutronic fusion" discusses these issues some as well.
Anyway, that's one reason most are happily ignoring aneutronic fusion entirely. Another is that much higher temperatures are required for the aneutronic fusion reactions, and we haven't even got D-T going yet and that is the lowest temperature fusion reaction. D-T is where I would put my money, too, given the results of the physics calculations.
--PM
I looked at your graph, and the only message it conveys is that someone pulled the idea out of their rear that if we spent more money on fusion research we'd get somewhere, and invented numbers for the investment required and when results would be achieved.
I mean, those curves? They look like a kid scribbling with crayon. There's no iron-clad guarantee that *any* level of investment will lead to a practical fusion reactor. The only serious notion to be derived from that plot is that current US investment levels are insufficient to get anywhere.
And even if we DO achieve a fusion reactor that produces net energy, it may cost more in capital to build the plant than you can pay for by selling the power produced. I.e., it'd be cheaper to build solar plants + energy storage than the fusion plant.
--PM
we'd have fusion power in 30 years. And it's still 30 years away.
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He's Fission for compliments :)
It's where 99.9% of the energy on this planet has come from and where 99.9% will ever come from. Sooner or later it's going to have to be our primary source.
So what your saying is the future lies in fusion?
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I suppose that depends on your definition of "having got something going". As far as temperatures involved, the Lawrenceville Plasma Physics lab seems to have got quite far and they seem to be perfectly aware of cooling loss problems when they say they're likely not that far off from potentially achieving over-unity in their test shots - they certainly seem to be well ahead of the field regarding modelling the actual science going on in their test reactor producing record plasma densities and temperatures. (http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com)
if the u.s. military would get fusion powered wouldn't it
at that very moment become obsolete?
we haven't even got D-T going yet
Not above break-even, but actually performing D-T fusion is relatively easy, to the point it has been done as a high-school science experiment using the old Farnsworth-Hirsch 'fusor' IEC design.