Slashdot Mirror
National Ignition Facility Takes First Steps Towards Fusion Energy
sciencehabit writes "As it approaches its fifth birthday, the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a troubled laser fusion facility in California, has finally produced some results that fusion scientists can get enthusiastic about. In a series of experiments late last year (abstract 1, abstract 2), NIF researchers managed to produce energy yields 10 times greater than produced before and to demonstrate the phenomenon of self-heating that will be crucial if fusion is to reach its ultimate goal of 'ignition'—a self-sustaining burning reaction that produces more energy than it consumes."
Temporal control circuits are being used to superimpose our world views against a finite set of realities that are not congruent with excursions created in regards to the 4th and nth gates of the NWO.
The earth will never be the same after that.
Useful levels of fusion are still a long way off. "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser," says , the head of a huge fusion experiment in the U.K. called the , or JET.
Not sure if this is a rehash of the same fusion discussion here a few weeks/months ago...
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The so-called "hydrogen bomb" has been in existence for decades. This is a fusion bomb.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
They still need to produce 100x more energy to break even.
To be economically viable, they probably need 1000x more.
I love this bit from TFA:
In 2013, NIF researchers began to explore the problems more scientifically; there was also a change of leadership at the lab and new researchers joined the team.
Apparently casting those chicken bones under the reactor had no effect and they had to switch to SCIENCE!
Sigh. Journalism majors.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Woooo, install one in my Tesla Roadster! I'll make the Mr Fusion label if they handle the magnetic containment field not resetting my radio presets in the dash.
Why not just ask the Taelons?
They had a net gain in output energy vs input by like 5% several months ago and all they got was defunded and everyone saying they were lying. So not really.
The hydrogen bomb IS a fusion bomb. Its been around since 1952.
The match you use to light a fusion bomb is a small atomic (fission) bomb.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
the world will not be the same again. Cheap energy, without CO2 pollution. Wow.
Except the fuel is radioactive (tritium), and the fusion creates lots of neutrons that irradiate and structurally weaken everything around them, likely producing more nasty nuclear waste than fission reactors, which were also once predicted to produce energy "too cheap to meter."
If this keeps up, the magnetic fusion guys, who achieved break even (ignition) decades ago, are going to start crashing NIF press conferences so they can get noticed. The NIF press push and lack of discussion of the field as a whole has got to drive them crazy. I'm sure it's not doing any favors for their budgets.
likely producing more nasty nuclear waste than fission reactors
I'll need a source to believe that's "likely" rather than "conceivably".
Not sure if this is a rehash of the same fusion discussion here a few weeks/months ago...
Of course it is, we get to discuss it once when the arxiv preprint goes up and once again when the prl/nature papers get published. Now with moar SCIENCE!
JET is in the UK, NIF is in California.
Where all those stupid Americans are you know...
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Cue breathless, hysterical stories about how fusion energy will cause three-headed babies, global enturbulation, and the heartbreak of psorisis in 3... 2... 1...
these phony "results" start showing up.
BTW, it we took all the money dumped into this project and bought solar panels that we gave to homeowners, how much power would be produced?
If you actually read the Nature article you find out that the error bars on the data are the only thing that breaks even.
Actually, most of the yield of a thermonuclear weapon comes from fission, not fusion. The fission bomb triggers the fusion, which then acts as a sort of "booster" for the fission process.
What a beautiful world this will be.
What a glorious time to be free!
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure time for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young.
-- Cheers!
Are you really that stupid and ignorant, or you are just trolling?
most of the yield of a thermonuclear weapon comes from fission, not fusion
Wrong. Go read Wikipedia.
I'm sure the same was said about nuclear power planets...
The hydrogen bomb IS a fusion bomb. Its been around since 1952.
The match you use to light a fusion bomb is a small atomic (fission) bomb.
Isn't that what parent said?:
The so-called "hydrogen bomb" has been in existence for decades. This is a fusion bomb.
Then do as you say and you'll find out you're wrong. Example: Castle Bravo had a yield of 15 megatons, 10 of which were fission, only 5 were fusion. This is a common feature of actually weaponized "hydrogen" bombs and most of those devices tested by the US somewhere down in the Pacific where they didn't care what happened with the fallout.
The Soviets, on the other hand, realized that since they had to test on their own territory, they best reduce the fission yield of their test devices as much as possible to cut down the fallout. Their largest bomb hat a yield of 50 megatons, with only 1.5 megatons of fission yield. But they could have added 50 megatons of fission yield at any time by replacing the lead tamper with natural uranium (which was in fact the original plan) and presumably another 50 or so by using highly enriched uranium in its place.
D-T Fusion releases seriously fast neutrons (some 17 MeV) that can split any kind of uranium and makes fission much more efficient, because you don't need to rely soley on the chain reaction to give you enough neutrons before the whole thing blows apart.
...Isn't this how Fallout 3 started?
Are you really that stupid and ignorant, or you are just trolling?
Well, you replied... and I pointed that out...
What the NIF is all about is compressing D-T fuel by radiation pressure and finding out what kind of profile of the radiation pressure pulse has the highest yield. That's exactly what you do when you want to get a bigger bang out of the nuclear weapons you have, because your NATIONAL DICK isn't big enough yet to properly display your "patriotic" manlihood to the rest of the world that you feel like you have to dominate completely in order to feel like you've accomplished something.
By the way, the rest of the world doesn't agree with you oversized national libido, even if most countries officials don't say so openly.
Currently, they put in over 100 times as much energy into the lasers as they get out in term. Not to mention the energy it takes to engineer the fuel capsule or the inconvenient fact that it takes hours or days to properly set up and align everything, or that lasers at this kind of power level tend to wear down rather quickly. What they get out is 17kJ per shot. In order to get as little as 1MW of electricity out of this thing, you'll need a yield of 200.000.000.000 kJ per day. Plus whatever you need to keep the lasers running. (Currently 2000 kJ per shot.)
The "this is a potential fusion power plant" argument is a red herring.
Actually it was fusion power that was going to be too cheap to meter but it makes a good story to attribute it to fission plants. The prediction was the product of a marketing executive, not someone with any real knowledge of the science, engineering, finance or commercial operation of any such facility. Makes a great soundbite though, doesn't it?
So, let's get this straight. This is the FIRST STEP???? You guys have been at this for decades and have spend millions if not billions in the quest for "clean energy" and this "first step" is all we have to show for it? Besides cranking up a bunch of lasers all at once every now and again, what, exactly have you been doing?
I seem to recall a story about fusion just a few months ago that said "We are only a decade or two away from FREE energy!" Fusion, it's Coming!!! etc. Pardon my skeptic bent, but I think we should skip to the chase on what's really going on and get an answer to the REAL question.
How much money do you guys need now?
I'm all for research, but lets not fool ourselves. We are not even close on this one. We might be barking up the wrong tree with this and I think we should double down on our investment and start another group to try some different ideas if there are any. So perhaps we should half the last contribution and solicit some other bright folks to do some research with the other half.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Yup, lobbyists won't let this happen. Even the government wants the tax money from expensive energy (worker's incomes, land leases, etc)
Why wouldn't you build a collector to take advantage of it?
We don't want your Big Solar Death Panels covering the Earth.
likely producing more nasty nuclear waste than fission reactors,
It will produce more waste by volume, but it will be short lived, much shorter than fission waste with only a little effort in selection of materials. You can find leftover parts from experiments like TFTR that are no longer radioactive because things like activated iron and copper decay quite quickly. The only reason you can still find it though is it is required to be labeled as radioactive waste as long as it has any measurable radioactivity, even if it is less than background or less than newly created metals that have been no where near a neutron source.
They ALL take FIRST steps toward fusion energy. I'll get excited when one of these machines takes the LAST steps.
So in fact the yield doesn't have to come mostly from fission. Its just usually done that way because its more efficient.
The fact is fusion is 10 times more powerful per unit of weight than fission at delivering explosive power.
First step has many meaning. Clearly it's not the very first thing they did.
Lighten up, Francis.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Rock you like a Hurricane!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's at best 5 times better. (21MeV from fusion of H-2 and H-3 vs. 200MeV from fission of U-235 or Pu-239). But since you won't use pure tritium and deuterium, and instead something like partially tritated lithium deuteride, where you breed your tritium from lithium in-situ, the ratio drops further to something like a factor of 3. In terms of volume (which is important for MIRVs), you'll find that using uranium is in fact *better* by a factor of 3 to 5.
And it isn't going to be lighter in any case, since you'll need some sort of a tamper anyway - and you might as well use uranium for that while you're at it.
The GP was correct. The vast majority of weapons that were actually built obtained most of their yield from fission. The exceptions were mainly tests and oddities like neutron bombs.
You don't get any fusion yield without surrounding it with something heavy to squeeze it, so the weight of the actual fusion fuel is irrelevant. They figured that if they needed something heavy in the bomb anyway, it might as well be uranium because that gave 2X to 3X the bang for free.
"You guys have been at this for decades and have spend millions if not billions in the quest for "clean energy" and this "first step" is all we have to show for it?"
From what I've been able to find, the NIF has cost $3.5Billion so far, or around 1/10 of what we will spend on F-35 fighters by the 2030s. You really have a problem with spending on fusion?
May I ask where you were educated in atomic structure? neutrons MIGHT create a bunch of funky isotopes, if they hit. However they are not damaging to just have them around, nor are the nuclei of atoms large targets. Also, much of a fission reactors "waste" could be re-used either as fuel, or as medical isotopes or similar; however, the process of reprocessing the "waste" produces a small amount of bomb quality material, which is why it isn't done.
I'm sure the same was said about nuclear power planets...
What do you mean "was" it still is; however, radiation scares have made nuclear unpopular.
Stupid is as stupid does you know http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/02/12/1318251/majority-of-young-american-adults-think-astrology-is-a-science
Seriously, the question "How much money do you guys need now?" has no answer. Not at present.
There was an article in Discover a handful of years ago that covered this. And towards the end they dealt with the practicality and engineering hurdles in front of various fusion technologies being worked on.
The upshot was, every single fusion method required multiple major breakthroughs to have any realistic shot at being commercialized. Not one but a minimum of three, as I recall. And that was at best! Less promising approaches could require 5 or more.
What this means is that there is no realistic timeline and no realistic cost estimate. Anything you'd get would be a Stupid Wild-Assed Guess (SWAG). Fusion is a money pit and only suitable for deep, fundamental research projects right now. Forget about near-term results, there aren't any.
It's about time for another update from these guys
"Not sure if this is a rehash of the same fusion discussion here a few weeks/months ago..."
In part.
The NIF did manage to spark a fusion reaction that actually output more energy than was input to the fuel pellet.
However, it is important to note that it was not more energy than the total input to the system. The energy used to power the lasers was still more than the energy of the fusion reaction. So it wasn't "break even".
Since you must have an education in atomic structures if you were to call someone out like that, surely you've heard of neutron embrittlement and issues like Wigner energy, things that fission reactor engineers already have to deal with that fusion reactors will have to deal with also due to orders of magnitude more neutron flux. And you probably don't need to be reminded that of popular figures that each atom is expected to experience 100 displacement events before a material is replaced, and that there are whole projects like IFMIF dedicated to dealing with material issues.
-Fusion reactor spokesman, 1960
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
We know how the physics of fusion works. What they are really trying to do now is design a cost-efficient device. That's an engineering task, not a task for physicists, and they don't seem to be very good at it.
If you look at this result, billions spent to achieve a neutron flux that theoretically contains slightly more energy than a theoretical number grabbed out of a hat, it's useless and a gigantic waste of money. They are as far away from energy production as ever.
It's not that simple. The energy released by fusion is mostly in the neutrons, which aren't so good at converting to heat and blast. Our nukes are fusion boosted fission weapons as the AC and tp1024 stated. They are dirty, radiological weapons by design. Read: http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/...
Are you really that stupid and ignorant
i'm just trolling... you're the stupid and ignorant one
And again this is worthless as the containment fields don't last. The sub-atomic particles will destroy the units long before they pay for themselves, I'm sure of that. And THAT is the real problem with fusion.
D-T Fusion releases seriously fast neutrons (some 17 MeV) that can split any kind of uranium and makes fission much more efficient, because you don't need to rely soley on the chain reaction to give you enough neutrons before the whole thing blows apart.
Why don't we use that principle in nuclear fission power plants? Same power with less fuel present in reactor, several orders of magnitude more frequent refueling, it seems like it would reduce risk of meltdown, because you could keep sub-sub-critical mass inside reactor at any time, and as soon as fusor is switched off, the fission also dies out and thermal mass is so small it all also cools rapidly without breaching the container.
H-Bomb employ's fusion ignition, however the uranium fission is the destructive force behind the weapon. This will allow them essentially to turn the ignition of a thermonuclear weapon into the actual weapon, and much more destructive and compact.
We're obviously a long way off, but the billions we're spending is a drop in the bucket compared to the worldwide cost of energy production every year, not to mention the environmental impact.
You can't just say "hey, we fired a really big series of lasers at this thing, and it didn't do anything special" and conclude that it's the wrong approach. Sometimes, focusing deeply on one approach is better than spending a small amount of effort on a wide range of leads that may not go anywhere.
I doubt many of us here really know enough about nuclear physics engineering to say which approach is truly the right way -- there are certainly knowledgeable people in the field who make the same argument that NIF might not be the best allocation of fusion research funding, but there are others in the field who disagree with them.
i'm not sure if you're the real apk or just an imposter, but you probably don't want me bringing up that old buggy python script of yours again eh? :-P
lol sorry apk i just realized you weren't actually replying to my comment... apparently i haven't drunk enough coffee thismorning :-)