Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Even when Tokamak was introduced for the first time, it was obvious that idea of using fusion process as a heating element (using steam or other inefficient way to convert heat to electricity) is simply laughable. Laser-based fusion is horrendous even as a concept - it's as barbaric as trying to create mass transit using 19-th century tram carriage propelled by small-scale nuclear blasts. There is absolutely no engineering elegance in it, even less than in the first-generation (fission) nuclear plants.
I find Focus Fusion or some other non-billion-budget projects much more appealing - not because they have more chances to succeed (most of them don't), but because they represent something new. New technologies, new designs, new way of thinking at least. Compare NASA and SpaceX - yes, latter would not be possible without the former, but for now our real chance to progress towards easily accessible space-travel lies with (comparatively) small private companies, not with some inefficient hulking money-consuming monstrosity. Of course I would be glad to any form of cheap fusion energy, or any form of "consumer-grade" space-travel, but for now my hopes don't lie with NIF or NASA.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
... 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