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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!
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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
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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.
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?
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
"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.
yeah so we're still only 30 years away from it.
just like 30 years ago.
now call the news outlets when they figure a way to make the material absorb more of the lasers output.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Don't be so sure. There are scientists working on increasing the human lifetime.
We can't blame the network that brings us Dr Who for shoddy reporting, so lets blame the Americans and their shutdown.
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
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).