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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.'"
"That assumes no reprocessing. The whole point of breeders is that they make more fuel than they consume."
Breeder reactors have a 100% economic failure rate. Every study on the economics of a breeder economy is quick to point this out, and outline why they are extremely unlikely to be able to fix this problem.
"You are right that there is currently a flood of fossil fuel that crowds out nuclear,"
2/3rds of all new generation installed in the last year is renewable. Spin that any way you want.
The Plasma Focus devices share similar characteristics and from an engineering and economics standpoint will be much better if the tech can be developed.
That has been said about pretty much every fusion concept at the tabletop phase, and then things get complicated and harder as they scale up. There are still several other designs at different development points, some much further along that plasma focus, that think they can scale up better than tokamaks, and others yet that were found to hit brick walls at larger sizes. It is a slow process to sort out such issues for any device, and the larger ones are probably going to be more expensive than hoped. The question is just exactly how expensive.
Great! we will buy the uranium with all the gold, manganese, lithium and helium3 we will extract from seawater! For all the hype about "extract X from seawater" AFAIK the only things successfully extracted from seawater on an industrial scale are sea salt and water.
AFAIK the only things successfully extracted from seawater on an industrial scale are sea salt and water.
... and fish ;)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.