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Fusion "Breakthrough" At National Ignition Facility? Not So Fast
sciencehabit writes "One unintended effect of the U.S. federal shutdown is that helpful press officers at government labs are not available to provide a reality check to some of the wilder stories that can catch fire on the Internet. They would have come in handy this week, when a number of outlets jumped on a report on the BBC News website. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, it reported, had passed a 'nuclear fusion milestone.' NIF uses the world's highest energy laser system to crush tiny pellets containing a form of hydrogen fuel to enormous temperature and pressure. The aim is to get the hydrogen nuclei to fuse together into helium atoms, releasing energy. The BBC story reported that during one experiment last month, 'the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel — the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.' This prompted a rush of even more effusive headlines proclaiming the 'fusion breakthrough.' As no doubt NIF's press officers would have told reporters, the experiment in question certainly shows important progress, but it is not the breakthrough everyone is hoping for."
Blowing things out of proportion and bad reporting? Say it isn't so!
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
not the breakthrough everyone is hoping for.
The breakthrough I'm hoping for is cheap free fusion energy, generated in my backyard, from trash, branded "Mr Fusion."
What is everyone else hoping for?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's a good discussion by Jeff Hecht in the Laser Focus World blog: "Progress at NIF, but no 'breakthrough'"
http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/2013/10/progress-at-nif-but-no-breakthrough.html
The amount of energy generated by fusion is quoted as having exceeded the amount of energy absorbed by the fusion fuel [my italics].
The misleading part comes from the fact that the target absorbs only a small fraction of the energy in the laser pulse. The August experiments used a laser pulse of 1.7 million joules to generate 8000 joules of fusion energy (measured from neutron yield). So the fusion energy amounts to a few percent of the energy in the laser pulse (and much less if you account for the inefficiency of the laser).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So it was not more than break-even. The gain was actually 0.0077 - 1.8MJ in, 14kJ out. Just a small (i.e. about "1") mistake by the genius journalists.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
My worry is that these people don't really know what they're doing, and that they're going to ignite a fusion reaction that will be self-feeding and turn our planet into a sun.
This is one area of research where a mistake can really ruin the environment.
Don't worry. All you need to do is unwrap the entire roll of aluminum foil and cover your whole body. You'll be safe then.
From quite a lot of things, actually.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
actually the BBC's story reports correctly -
"The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel - the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.
This is a step short of the lab's stated goal of "ignition", where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. This is because known "inefficiencies" in different parts of the system mean not all the energy supplied through the laser is delivered to the fuel."
Don't worry. All you need to do is unwrap the entire roll of aluminum foil and cover your whole body. You'll be safe then.
First, nice snark. But, it's worth mentioning that tinfoil only blocks EMR and beta radiation. Nuclear fusion emits more than those; You'd be wrapping yourself up in tin foil only to find it has been used for its intended purpose.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Like Slashdot, for example?
The headline states, "the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel".
This is not enough, they must be able to capture that energy and use it to produce the next laser implosion of the fuel.
That will be a milestone.
Also, since this is using a Deuterium-Tritium Fuel it produces very high energy neutrons which will help destroy the reactor much faster than in conventional fission reactions.
I'm worried that my campfire is going to burn down all the forests and destroy the atmosphere.
Really? There aren't any other people in the world that don't work for government agencies that could have pointed out this silly mistake?
Something good happens in science and all the neckbeards come running to shout it down.
Sometimes I wonder why science is a religion for these people since they obviously have some kind of emotional need to destroy what it produces?
that is not how stars form. the earth is far too small to ever self ignite. fission has the same problems =, the china syndrome where a fission reactor goes super critical and melts into the core. well in reality it was Chernobyl and while the hottest man made self heating plasma was formed so hot it's radiation melted the camera they tried to take a picture with, well it hasn't gone into the earth to ignite the earths core, and science has predicted that thorium reaction actually is why there is a molten core on this rock in the sky.
I don't know if NIF is snakebit or just really good at putting out bad information, but this kind of distasteful and misleading marketing of science has been associated with them since their beginning. AAAS is being generous in assuming that their press department would have stepped in and clarified things.
The truth of the matter is that NIF is run by Lawrence Livermore National Security Corporation, a private group formed by defense contractors and academics. They're managed this way specifically to separate themselves from the government. There are plenty of people who are not on the government payroll, who are there working right now, who could have stepped in and corrected everyone's misconceptions. They chose not to.
Fusion doesn't work with chain reactions. You have to replicate and maintain temperatures and pressures thousands of times greater than that at the centre of the sun to get most of your reaction mass to fuse (there are actually far less fusion reactions in the sun as a proportion of its mass than most people seem to think). If you can't maintain these conditions, the fusion stops and the reactor shuts down. For inertial confinement fusion like the NIF one has to keep feeding hydrogen pellets and shooting the laser, and if one can extract enough energy from the fusion to power the laser and whatever else, one can just keep feeding hydrogen pellets to keep producing energy. Same deal with a tokamak design: high magnetic fields heat and compress a plasma of hydrogen so much that it achieves fusion, and presumably the energy produced from the fusion can be used to power the magnetic fields and whatever else. If you shut off the magnetic fields or stop providing a continuous source of usable hydrogen plasma, the fusion stops and the reactor shuts down. We only get nuclear fusion in the sun and other stars because the mass of the sun is so great that gravity produces the conditions necessary for fusion in its core.
Good thing we did all those nuclear weapons tests to prove that possibility wrong, considering the conditions those weapons produced were much more intense than anything used in controlled reactions. You can go back to worrying about the LHC (but no one worries about RHIC...).
Because the staff and management are contractors, not Fed employees, LLNL is not shut down. The Lab will begin shutting down next week (assuming the budget boondoggle continues), but until now has been fully staffed with the exception of a very small number of people directly employed by DOE.
I suppose one of the biggest advantages is that suppression of scientific advancement and the press would be a bit hard to perform at the moment.
Yes, they are. Just read their other posts to see this
as with all science there are risks. But you are worrying far too much about this technology, especially compared with how FISSION reactors were constructed before we had computers to design them!!
Remember, the reason this technique is so safe is that there is a tiny amont of fuel burnt at one time. The attempt is not to ignite a self-sustaining reaction (I think) but rather to have enough of them in a row that the net energy out is > than in.
Since you are feeding the fuel in as frozen H (lovely and black if you have ever seen it! ), stop the fuel, stop the reaction. Simple as that.
The reason this is so important is that fission reactions are already many orders of magnitude more powerful than any form of chemical reaction (witness a 40 year battery on a space probe - not fission but using radioactive decay). Fusion is perhaps another couple of orders of magnitude. 1g of U fission is 8x10^16 J (from uc davis website. http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Physical_Chemistry/Nuclear_Chemistry/Fission_and_Fusion ) , Fusion is perhaps a few orders (~10^19 J) more than that.
If you want to read just how weird for fusion has been google "muon catalyzed fusion" for a really esoteric cold-fusion (real not the BS magic metal kind).
"This is a step short of the lab's stated goal of "ignition", where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. This is because known "inefficiencies" in different parts of the system mean not all the energy supplied through the laser is delivered to the fuel."
The article made it CLEAR that the energy output was more than the energy absorbed. But it also made it CLEAR that it was not as much energy as was input to the whole system.
This is a non-article about a non-issue.
HEADLINE: "People Read Article Wrong... Chaos Ensues!"
This is where teamwork really pays off. All the GP has to do is enlist the assistance of a friend to make sure the foil is uniformly wrapped around every square centimeter of his body, triple check that it's tightly crimped to avoid any potential for air leaks, and wait a mere matter of minutes for whatever problems he may have been concerned about to vanish.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Yeah, some of them downstairs, climb walls, deploy umbrellas, lemmings can do all sorts of things
I thought the government was shut down. If that is so, why is this government lab still operating? Is someone trying to convince the rest of us that sending a press "officer" home but keeping everyone else on the job is a "shutdown"? I suppose if the government can lie about whether or not it is operating, it can lie about achieving scientific breakthroughs.
Mr. Potato head. Mr. POTATO HEAD!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Sorry, that was for Malvin, I mean elloz.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I'm worried that my campfire is going to burn down all the forests and destroy the atmosphere.
Pshah! What a silly thing to be worried about.
I'm worried that my five gallon plastic bucket will drain the oceans by bailing them out, and in the process drown all the land. And then people will fight over handfuls of the only remaining dirt in the world, and captains of the remaining supertankers will become warlords, and some people will evolve gills within a hundred years or so.
I can barely sleep at night due to this imminent threat. I would bury the bucket at Yucca Mountain, but I'm worried that it isn't geologically stable for the time frames we need.
If this is a success, next to do: the self-sustaining black hole; a glitch would be epic, being much better and scarier at fulfilling your worries.
The correcting article gives the impression we have a verrrry long way to go..
Energy released was 0.0077 that of total put in.. This gives the impression we have over 1000x more progress to make. It causes the reader to mistakenly assume it could take hundreds of more years.
However, fusion ignition, when it occurs will be a VERY dramatic jump in output. In other words, for this project input/output ratio is a measure of success, but a very poor measure of progress.
Lies, lies, lies. We won't have actual, real, fusion producing actual, real, power in an actual, real, commercial power plant on the grid in the lifetime of anyone alive now. It is not going to happen. "They" have been making up stories about this for decades. And still the lies go on - mostly from the media and even from some scientists.
If that would be possible, it would have happened at the very instant the first hydrogen bomb exploded.
We can't blame the network that brings us Dr Who for shoddy reporting, so lets blame the Americans and their shutdown.
On the other hand just go out on a sunny day and enjoy more free power than man will ever develop.
Further evidence:/p /p /p /p /p /p
09:18 EST 10/11/13 http://www.nist.gov - "NIST Closed, NIST and Affiliated Web Sites Not Available"/p
but,/p
http://www.uscis.gov - "All USCIS offices worldwide are open. Report to interviews and appointments as scheduled. Fee for service activities performed by USCIS are not affected by a lapse in appropriated annual funding."/p
Yah, right. Gotta process those EB-5's./p
Tinfoil hat, my ass. Tell it to the people the Park Service is arresting.
but what if it massively increases the, uh, mass of the earth and does make a sun? what then?
nuclear science = nuclear bombs. stop being so ignorant and realize that this is nothing short of evil and the scientists are probably possessed by satan
We'd still pay the same, or more than what we do now. Fat cats gotta get paid!
Awesome!! If our future of energy production is to fuse hydrogen nuclei (protons) into helium atoms, we would have a great source of ever-so-precious helium, which is becoming more and more scarce and expensive. The problem is, it sounds like He2 is produced, which is the lightest isotope of helium, consisting of two protons and no neutrons. If that's the case, it would be VERY unstable helium. In nuclear fusion, when protons are fused, where would the neutrons come from? Is it even possible to get a stable isotope of helium (He4) ?? I guess the helium we DO have is He4 and it's from natural radioactive decay but, that was from fission... bah!
Never, ever believe what comes out of a PR department. Doesn't matter whether it's the PR dept at a government agency, or a major university. They will either slant it or get the facts wrong, or both. Every dang time. Doesn't matter if it's MIT or Stanford or Los Alamos.
The BBC article made it pretty clear when they stated that this was NOT ignition, merely a breakeven. I didn't see any "blowing out of proportion."
the government is not shut down
Was that the original news post had a sensational title, but nowhere in the story, nor any of the links were ANY details about the numbers used in the experiment, specifically about exactly how much power was put in, and how much came out.
It is pretty basic stuff.
I either thought is must be BS or the value were unrealistic to be used in anything but in an experiment (so small as to make it impossible in real scale).