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Laser Fusion's Brightest Hope
First time accepted submitter szotz writes "The National Ignition Facility has one foot in national defense and another in the future of commercial energy generation. That makes understanding the basic justification for the facility, which boasts the world's most powerful laser system, more than a little tricky. This article in IEEE Spectrum looks at NIF's recent missed deadline, what scientists think it will take for the facility to live up to its middle name, and all of the controversy and uncertainty that comes from a project that aspires to jumpstart commercial fusion energy but that also does a lot of classified work. NIF's national defense work is often glossed over in the press. This article pulls in some more detail and, in some cases, some very serious criticism. Physicist Richard Garwin, one of the designers of the hydrogen bomb, doesn't mince words. When it comes to nuclear weapons, he says in the article, '[NIF] has no relevance at all to primaries. It doesn't do a good job of mimicking secondaries...it validates the codes in regions that are not relevant to nuclear weapons.'"
Dots definitely something to focus on.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Translate I don't like what they are doing and can I have the money for my project.
Even if it was igniting and had good fusion gain, there are such a huge array of serious engineering issues that they have got no economic answers for that it is never going to work commercially. High precision optics in close proximity to nuclear blasts?? High precision targets that cost $10k (but would have to reduce to $0.25 to be commercial) being introduced into a plasma filled chamber at 15Hz that must be positioned with sub mm precision? May as well keep it running now for the materials side of things, but as much as possible fusion R&D budgets should be directed away from NIF and ITER (tokomaks are too big and too expensive to be commercially viable) and towards fusion options with at least some potential for commercial viability like:
General fusion (liquid metal implosion on plasma target), Tri-Alpha, Helion (electromagnetic compression of plasma toroids), Polywell (Inertial electrostatic confinement in a magnetised 'wiffleball' trap).
Also Fission in fast breeders provides a far more certain short term payoff, cheap, managable engineering issues, no nasty tritium to deal with and massively reducing radioactive waste compared to current non-breeding reactors. There is enough accessible Thorium and Uranium to power our civilisation at current levels until the sun kills the earth.
"That makes understanding the basic justification for the facility, which boasts the world's most powerful laser system, more than a little tricky."
NIF is a way to keep scientists at LLNL employed. That is its #1 justification, and always has been. Ask any insider.
Any hope of laser-based fusion is a pipe dream, and always has been. Nuckolls himself, the guy that started all of this, was shown a calculation in the early 1970s that proves this beyond a doubt. The problem is that the price of the target is many many times the value of the electricity it could produce.
Power on the grid right now is selling for about 3.3 cents a kWh. (see http://www.ieso.ca/imoweb/marketdata/markettoday.asp)
NIF, if it worked, which it doesn't aims to produce about 20 MJ a "shot". Under good conditions you might convert 25% of that to electrical power (don't quote gas peaker efficiencies, they're a different cycle). So we might get 5 MJ per shot.
If you're not familiar with MJ, it's a measure of energy. kWh is a more common one, so I'll convert 5 MJ = 1.39 kWh.
So at current prices, each shot might produce about 5 cents worth of power.
Now simply look at the target. It's a gold-covered cylinder machined to the sixth decimal place accuracy, capped on it's open end by double-pane windows of some incredibly clear optical system, inside of which is an equally perfectly machined plastic sphere containing the fuel that's cryogenically frozen on the inside and then smoothed using an IR laser.
The targets costs thousands and thousands of dollars per shot. And might (if it ever works) delivers a few cents of power. See the problem?
When this was first pointed out to Nuckolls in the early 1970s he worried, and then ignored it. He proposed a system with such high gain that the fuel would be delivered from a perfume mister that would self-form through surface tension into a ball that would be close enough for comfort.
We've spent 40 years learning about the physics of ICF, and what we've learned is that there is absolutely no way this could possibly work. The physics just isn't there. So instead we've pushed ahead with ever less-cost-efficient machines with ever-less-convincing excuses for doing so. Nova, built in the 1980s, was only 2-fold less successful in reaching break-even than NIF. However, NIF costs well over 10 times as much. The price efficiency is *dropping* with every generation.
The bad news is that this has been the case since the 50s. Given the track record of fusion power, I wouldn't hold my breath. Given the rate of climate change we better develop other options fast.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
From an engineering standpoint the Dense Plasma Focus looks like the best option. I have no idea if it will really work but at least it looks like something that can be built and operated.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
MagLIF is the current front runner in my book. I expect ITER to succeed as well.
... and it always will be." - old saying.
As a counterbalance: Clarke's Three Laws:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Read the book "Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking" by Charles Seife.
The upshot in the book is that NIF officially has nothing to do with commercial fusion energy research, that it's about research into high energy plasma physics with applications towards thermonuclear weapons. But the real reason for it's existence is as a jobs program for high energy researchers, who, if not occupied by working on the thing, might get bored and go to work for China or Iran on their weapons program.
"Unlimited fusion power is only five years away"
They figured out how to extrude rubies as giant sheets. I saw them when I went to LLNL a few years back. The laser amplification system they developed is very cool, even if otherwise completely useless.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Believe it, or not, there is only one laser. The output of one laser diode is split and amplified to make the 192 beams. The output of that one laser diode is probably in the vicinity of 1 Watt.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The good news: hydraulic fracturing means more natural gas can be had more readily than ever before.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Three generations of utility plant degreed engineers in my family alone, power, light, water, sewage, have all personally run into the problem of the politicians using a willing "free press" to push ignorance on a sometimes willing sheeple herd. ... well, I'd better leave that one out ... some people are still alive who would feel better NOT having details from federal court non-public (I think actually sealed) testimony brought up in a public setting.
My grandfather swore up and down when he was working on the siting plans for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor that an Illinois State Representative told him to his face that the new EPA law protected species act was written specifically to use the snail darter to KILL commercial (not government owned) nuclear power in the United States because the Atomic Energy Agency had provided testimony that the government SHOULD get out of the energy business and it was not only SAFE, but smart to turn it over to a regulated industry with consensus industry standards and NOT government dictates. I REALLY would like to be able to prove that statement with a reference to the person who made the comments, but grandfather 'moved on' in 1992.
My late Father's more recent dealings with the EPA
I don't understand why this Skunkworks project presentation from Google's "Solve for X" program isn't receiving more attention. The presentation is made by a Lockheed Martin Skunkworks scientist (Charles Chase) who claims they will be able to make a 100MW fusion reactor the size of a truck trailer in a few years. Admittedly there aren't that many details given, but that is understandable as Skunkworks does't usually release its projects. To me the above presentation has the ring of authenticity. I have often thought that achieving fusion conditions at a small scale should be possible by the elegant application of magnetic and electric fields. I know "cold fusion" fooled a lot of people and made us reflexively skeptical of fusion claims. But I don't believe Charles Chase's claims fundamentally violate the laws of physics like many people's vision of cold fusion did. Give this video a watch and see what you think.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
From what I understand, there may have been a non-laws-of-physics-violating explanation for the observed production of neutrons and helium in the cold fusion curiosities of the late 80s
I am quite aware of the details of "cold fusion". I don't want to talk about that. What I do want to talk about is the presentation by Charles Chase on using small scale magnetic confinement (a cylinder of about 1 cubic meter volume I think) of plasma to achieve the conditions necessary for fusion. Sheesh. This is a nerds site. Would someone just watch the video I linked to and explain to me why this cannot be real. Because I have a physics background, and what Charles Chase speaks about sounds plausible to me. Lockheed Martin Skunkworks is a storied program, that brought us things like the SR-71 Blackbird. If they developed new fusion technology, we wouldn't expect them to publish the minute details yet...that's not how they work. But based on my intuitive knowledge of fields, I don't see why it isn't possible to craft a magnetic field arrangement that will confine high temperature plasma. They excite the plasma using radio-frequency EM radiation. And at some point the temperatures and pressures increase enough to achieve the fusion of hydrogen.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
We know it works, all you have to do is look up at the night's sky.
The only question is, how small can we get it?
What is the smallest viable star we can keep in a cage?
It's not only a question of what's more convenient, there's also the question of risk allocation. I'm not familiar with fracking, but I'm sure there's concerns there, just like there are with nuclear fission. I still think fusion is a pretty cool concept. If we're really serious about developing fusion though, how about we stop bitching about a billion dollars and just pour enough money on projects that are worthwhile? We keep saving banks with that money every other day!
There's the example of W7-X in Germany, a stellarator design that'll never be energy efficient, but that's not the point I am making: they took ages designing and mismanaging everything until a science minister actually swung by the place, saw that the scientist were not getting anywhere because they were doing science and not managing the W7-X project, as it was. So the ministry scrapped the project and said: you can have all the funding back, plus a little extra, if you come up with a detailed plan how to build this thing in the next 7 or so years. If you miss a deadline, all your funding is gone. So the project went ahead, they got some actual project managers and consultants to work on the project and lo and behold: the system is almost finished. It just took enough pressure and some people that are actually trained for the job they're supposed to be doing to get that project humming!
So if we're serious about ITER, we need to put professional project managers in charge and not some consortium of scientists and politicians and bitch about who gets which share. The positions should go to the party most qualified for the job and not to a company in a country that didn't get contracts in the amount they poured in yet. If some countries want to pull out - fine, we just need to make sure we stop the finger pointing and the nationalistic attitude. If the Chinese can't provide quality steel, they shouldn't get those contracts! Working on that project is such a pain! Actually, fuck multinational projects, they're not going to work. If you want to build a power plant, devise a plan, get the best people working on the field to do it, secure the funding, put professionals in charge, check every two years if they're on track. That way, we might actually have fusion plants in 50 years. At the rate we're going now and with the projects currently under way, we never will.
TL;DR: multinational projects suck, too many economically motivated political bullshit; professional project managers should lead the project and not some senior scientist who has no clue about how to efficiently manage something on that scale; chance to get fusion plants in 50 years: >0.5. Chance to get fusion plants in 20 years with the currently employed system of running fusion projects: 1E-9.
Small scale fusion isn't that hard. Farnsworth-Hirsch fusors have been built as high-school science fair projects. The hard part is getting the things to output more energy than it takes to run them.
Not a sentence!
You'll want the power station to go with it.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
If you had a 'luser' account it wouldn't be a problem. But you don't want one of those, because your long rambling and bizarrely formatted posts mean your karma gets nuked in next to no time. So I guess you just have to work out which is 'worth it'. Posting AC because I don't want to become your latest fixation.
Had a look at the video. Definitely very intriguing. Their 5-10 year estimate seems mostly based on the smaller size and lower capital. I would imagine the reason they can talk about it is because it's not a military program.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Several comments here have criticized the NIF for being a poor candidate for practical fusion power. Ok, fair enough.
This misses the point. The NIF is not supposed to produce power or even produce a method that will be able to produce power. The NIF's real contribution is research. Achieving ignition is a grand scientific goal, a huge and difficult challenge that drives research and engineering to new heights, much like going to the moon.
Why did we go to the moon? In JFK's famous speech he said: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
JFK was an unusually forward thinking fellow, and he was absolutely right. While the Apollo program was extremely expensive and the accomplishment of its primary goal did not substantially change our lives for the better, the program more than paid for itself in spin-off technologies that were only created due to needs that would not arise under normal circumstances, but nonetheless turned out to have terrestrial applications. We are better off for undergoing the Apollo program than if we hadn't.
It's not easy to motivate the public to back challenging projects such as these despite their long term benefits, so they must wrap themselves in a popular cause. The Apollo program was only possible because it could be framed in terms of "beating" the Soviet Union. JFK's rhetoric about taking on hard scientific challenges would have had little impact on the public without the competition that the Soviets provided during the space race. The entire program cost $145 billion in 2007 dollars, more than the present day GDP of the entire state of Kansas, or enough to run the National Institute of Health for over 4 years, and all this back at a time when the national GDP was only a fraction of its current level. This frankly absurd amount of money would have certainly been earmarked for more mundane uses had Sputnik not shaken up the nation a few years earlier, and had this occured instead of the Apollo program then we would be worse off today. Smaller projects like the NIF must also wrap themselves in popular causes like energy research in order to get funded, even if that makes little practical sense.
Now that's not to say that every large scientific program is worthwhile. Some projects are too easy, and thus don't push the boundaries enough, and so these projects should directly produce something useful whenever possible. This was one of the many problems with the Space Shuttle program, which was overly focused on easy goals which it achieved poorly and at a high cost (though the Shuttle program too spawned many interesting spin-offs, so in the long run it too may have been worth it, but that's a topic for another time). Some projects are way too hard for us to handle now or could only be realistically solved in a destructive manner. For instance, it would be crazy to think we could get a manned flight to Jupiter in the next decade, and the only real solution to such a challenge would be to build an Orion-style spacecraft. These insurmountable challenges can be broken up into smaller pieces, for instance by tackling more reasonable challenges like getting to Mars first or building a permenant habitation on the Moon before thinking about Jupiter.
Is the NIF worth it? I can't say for sure. However, the fact that they're running into problems actually makes the program more likely to pay off in the long run. Why? Well according to our theory, this should work...but it doesn't. Why doesn't it work? This is a mystery that could lead to important practical physics breakthroughs, and the research and engineering needed to properly investigate this mystery could lead to valuable spin offs and new research directions that could open totally new doors.
Who's the more moronic? The original moron, or the one who replies to him knowing full well his comment will certainly be ignored, if not entirely unread, thus bringing the insane troll post to the attention of those who would otherwise not have seen it at all (seeing as it started at 0 and would have rapidly been modded down to -1) and whose post (and, somewhat ironically I grant you, this one as well) now requires 3 more mod points to be spent to hide it?
The flag icon in the lower right allows anyone to recommend a downward mod without using his mod points or even requiring him to have any.
Whenever I read into the NIF, I get excited about the potential. And then I read about the science behind it and I see that we dont even have a clear understanding of the amount of power it would actually take to achieve it. I feel like this is a giant expense crap shoot. And we are just hoping to stumble about a success. Despite the flashy homepage and the awsome shots from inside the labrotory, I am not convinced everyone is acting in a responsible manner with all the money that this project is consuming. I think this money would be better spent in improving on existing energy technologies that are known to actually product energy.