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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
"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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