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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."
"This is about creating a clean, reliable, cost effective energy solution."
We already have those, and they actually work and generate profits.
This doesn't work, possibly won't ever work, and can't possibly be profitable.
John Nuckolls, the guy that pretty much single-handedly drove ICF research through LLNL, was presented with this problem when the concept was first seriously presented in the early 1960s. At the time he thought the fuel loads could be sprayed from an atomizer and costs fractions of a cent. The next 50 years of experimentation conclusively demonstrated this is *simply not possible*. Not "it's an engineering problem", but "not possible". Curing the Rayleigh instabilities requires target perfection that costs thousands of dollars a shot. And those shots can only ever return pennies worth of power.
Do the math yourself. And when you do, compare it to current wind prices at 5 to 6 cents/kWh, solar around 10 to 15, or hydro at 1 to 2. There's more than enough of those three to produce every erg used on the planet, and they actually work, right now.
Tiny compared to most things on day-to-day human scales. Here's an image of the pellet.
As for the reaction itself (and I probably have this wrong, so please correct me if you discover so) it would, best-case, generate 100-150 MJ, but I read the target chamber's design only allows for 45 MJ (realistic expectations, I suppose?) That amounts to 11 kg of TNT (yes this is all paraphrased from Wikipedia.) Certainly tiny by the standards of fusion/fission, but quite huge considering the pellet above.
This might not seem like much, but it is a demonstrative design. Going for designs that would produce a practical commercial system at appreciable outputs would have been astronomically more expensive. Better to prove the concept first. Still more, this is a dual purpose facility; it's primary objective is stockpile stewardship. The potential for fusion research for commercial purposes is just added value.
Demented But Determined.