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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.
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.
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?
Never mind ignition, as big an achievement it'll be. It'll be the engineering challenges of building a fusion power plant that'll bring them unstuck.
I'm keen to see how they're going to cheaply and automatically manufacture, load and position the targets to micron-accuracy in the chamber. I'm also interested in seeing how they're going to engineer the chamber to harvest the energy from the reaction, and to withstand the tremendous punishment it'll have to take, being jackhammered by tiny fusion explosions 10 x a second.
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.
Fortunately we can use the LHC to create a black hole to dump this in if things go wrong.
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".
I just want to know how many first steps they can take, it seems I am always hearing about this first step or that first step
JET is in the UK, NIF is in California.
Where all those stupid Americans are you know...
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
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.
Cue the anti-NIF greentard hate; "...but just use the big fusion reactor in the sky herp derp..."
3... 2... 1...
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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most of the yield of a thermonuclear weapon comes from fission, not fusion
Wrong. Go read Wikipedia.
Actually you're misremembering what's alway been the first step. It's just that before taking a second step, one must go halfway and take the first step. But before taking that first step, one must go halfway and take half a step. But before taking that half a step, one must go halfway and take a quarter step. . .
tl;dr: it's halfsies all the way down.
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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.
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.
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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.
No mod points today, but yeah, I think maintaining precision in the process of capturing power output at the level of several hundred megawatts is going to be interesting. I'm getting up there in years; I've pretty much given up on commercial fusion power in my lifetime.
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.
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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.
I think it's fair to say no one living today will see fusion in their lifetime, especially anything from the national ignition facility.
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"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".
-Fusion reactor spokesman, 1960
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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/...
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.
It's a good idea and, like all good ideas, somebody already had it. It's called subcritical reactor. But it's nuclear fission technology and so, as usual in the last two or three decades, nobody really gives a shit.
Fission fusion hybrids have been thought of. Unfortunately you tend to get all the problems of both - the fusion part is still expensive, while the fission means you still have a big decay heat problem to deal with.
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 :-)