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Z Machine Makes Progress Toward Nuclear Fusion
sciencehabit writes Scientists are reporting a significant advance in the quest to develop an alternative approach to nuclear fusion. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, using the lab's Z machine, a colossal electric pulse generator capable of producing currents of tens of millions of amperes, say they have detected significant numbers of neutrons — byproducts of fusion reactions — coming from the experiment. This, they say, demonstrates the viability of their approach and marks progress toward the ultimate goal of producing more energy than the fusion device takes in.
Probably like ten years ago, wasn't there a thing on Art Bell about John Titor and the nuclear fusion z machine for time travel?
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random capitalization courtesy of: RANdoM cAPiTalIZATIon GeneraToR
Wouldn't it suck (literally and figuratively) if we discovered that the waste product of a fusion reaction are gravitons?
I'm worried these experiments are going to end with a large hole in the ground and a toadstool-shaped cloud of hot gases.
I come here for the love
that the first successful break-even++ fusion reaction won't be too obvious, like in
several megatons too obvious.
From TFA:
"Although the result shows that a substantial number of reactions is taking place—100 times as many as the team achieved a year ago—the group will need to produce 10,000 times as many to achieve breakeven."
In other words they aren't even remotely close to a meaningful breakthrough. Nothing to see here, move along...
More information: New approach to fusion delivers copious neutrons
"temperature of about 35 million degrees and the production of about 1012 neutrons. These results imply an energy output of only about 1 , but Gomez says that a deuterium–tritium fuel would produce around 300 J."
"He estimates that it will require a roughly 3000-fold increase in the current deuterium–tritium energy output – to around 1 MJ" to get ot ignition. And only about a billion dollars for the upgrade to try it out.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
... A high school student working on a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor for their science fair project, capable of accelerating tenths of amperes, detects significant numbers of neutrons-byproducts of fusion reactions-coming from the experiment. This, they say, demonstrates the viability of their approach and marks progress toward the ultimate goal of producing more energy than the fusion device takes in.
Or not.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
...and here I thought this article was going to be about text adventure game engines. :(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z...
Or, if they continue their current rate of increase of 100x/year, it'll take 2 more years.
Wake me when that actually happens. It's easy to double a small number. Going from 1 to 100 is not impressive when you need to get to 1,000,000. Are you aware of any reason I should have a realistic expectation that their progress will be such that they achieve breakeven power within 2 years? Within 5? 20?
Progress is progress and "breakthrough"s only exist in the minds of the people who weren't paying attention to all the incremental steps that created them.
We've been "making progress" in fusion research for 50 years now and still are no where close to turning Pinocchio into a real boy.
A factor of a hundred here, a factor of a hundred there, and pretty soon you're talking about orders of magnitude.
It's easy to make big increases from a starting point near zero. When they show that they can repeat that same level of increase in similarly short periods of time then I'll pay attention. Until then it is simply a cry for funding.
Nonsense! At this rate they should have 10,000 times as many by next year!
Obligatory XKCD on extrapolation
Really all you need is Flashblock. I install Flashblock, I see 0 video ads on text sites.
ObTopic: But if you install Flashblock and try to use the Z Machine, you'll have to click before Flaxo will start.
What the Z machine does is zap a little metal box of wires that may contain fusionables with a high voltage/current pulse that is stored in a really enormous bank of capacitors. Naturally that destroys their target and makes kind of a mess in the process.
I think they manage 8 shots/day if they're lucky.
8 shots/day is a far cry from a reasonable power flux. I'm not sure current pulsed power technology (not to mention other engineering) could stand doing this at some reasonable frequency like 1Hz without breaking down in a few minutes.
But at least they put a good fraction of the power input into the target, NOT like laser fusion--the lasers are horribly inefficient. (1%?)
-PM
How to turn the resulting energy (more than what went in to create the fusion reaction) into power 1) to feed the mechanism to make it reciprocate and 2) to tap it to export the power from the mechanism (what the things is supposed to be for in the first place).
It isn't the lab rat piss that's the problem. It isn't even the boffins freezing it with liquid nitrogen for the lulz. The problem is a lot more profound -- we need heat from those reactors, not neutrons.
All that, and it can play Zork, too?!
I don't see how they prove the viability of the method as power production...
Can you imagine if we put the war on drugs budget against fusion power instead?
The climax of GE and Disney's "Carousel of Progress" at the 1964 New York's World's Fair was the first public demonstration of a fusion reaction. General Electric
The device was a Î-pinch from General Electric. This was similar to the Scylla machine developed earlier at Los Alamos. (1958)
In the mid-1970s, Project PACER, carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) explored the possibility of a fusion power system that would involve exploding small hydrogen bombs (fusion bombs) inside an underground cavity. As an energy source, the system is the only fusion power system that could be demonstrated to work using existing technology.
However it would also require a large, continuous supply of nuclear bombs, making the economics of such a system rather questionable.
While fusion power is still in early stages of development, substantial sums have been and continue to be invested in research. In the EU almost 10 billion euro was spent on fusion research up to the end of the 1990s, and the new ITER reactor alone is budgeted at 10 billion euro.
It is estimated that up to the point of possible implementation of electricity generation by nuclear fusion, R&D will need further promotion totaling around 60--80 billion euro over a period of 50 years or so (of which 20--30 billion euro within the EU) based on a report from 2002. Nuclear fusion research receives 750 million euro (excluding ITER funding) from the European Union, compared with 810 million euro for sustainable energy research, putting research into fusion power well ahead of that of any single rivaling technology. Indeed, the size of the investments and time frame of the expected results mean that fusion research is almost exclusively publicly funded, while research in other forms of energy can be done by the private sector.
Fusion power
The whole pulsed laser fusion effort turned out to be a cover for nuclear weapons research. It lets Lawerence Livermore study H-bomb like fusion reactions on a convenient scale. With a gym-sized bank of lasers aimed at a single point, they can pump enough energy into a tiny space to force fusion. That's a research tool.
So is the Z-machine, for much the same reason. It's yet another pulsed-fusion machine relying on inertial containment.
The tokamak crowd has at least been able to hold a fusion reaction together for 400ms or so. But plasma instability is the curse of all tokamak designs, including ITER. There's much doubt that ITER will work. It's conjectured that a bigger plasma will be more stable, but many physicists question this. ITER has become a pork program, though, and it's hard to stop. Cost is about $15 billion. If there was real confidence it would work, the private sector would fund it.
Right now, the new generation of stellerators looks more promising than the tokamaks.
Progress has been made. The tricky bit is we don't know how much more we've got to do to scale Teller's success down to fit into a box and behave itself.
I looked it up, an M8 class star (the lightest I could find) is about 1.99e29 kg of mass, jupiter is 1.9e27 kg, so it missed being a star by 100x.
So, it is TWO orders of magnitude from being a star, right in the middle of your range.
--PM
Exactly. If this was close to working, the Republicans would have killed it already like they've killed every other form of clean energy.
Actually its Democrats that kill nuclear research. For example Clinton shutting down various research labs working on next generation reactors.
Democrats do this to appease their brand of science deniers, the far left environmentalists who oppose everything and anything nuclear. Note that not all environmentalists are of this type, some are even former deniers who decided to listen to what actual physicists say rather than what far left environmentalist leaders say on the topic of physics.
These people, the nuclear deniers, really are the left's version of the right's climate deniers. And they do control the Democratic party to a frightful degree.
Also from the article:
Simulations suggest that the Z machine’s maximum current of 27 million amps should be enough to reach breakeven. But the researchers are already setting their sights much higher. A hoped-for upgrade to 60 million amps, they say, would boost the power output into a “high gain” realm of 1000 times input—a giant step toward commercial viability.
The article implies a steep logarithmic gain on energy invested into the initial pulses. If Sandia are right, holding the experiment together for a single-digit multiple of the input energy should break even.
Asian cunts are all hairy at 20, unless they shave, and when they do, the skin looks gross.
http://www.networkworld.com/ar...
Dude, this project (MagLIF) is a few million, not billions.
My submission of a couple of days ago.
"The EM2 corportation has submitted a paper to axiv.org http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0133 describing their $10 million US Navy project to investigate Bussards Polywell fusion device. NBC has a report on the development http://www.nbcnews.com/science... . Quoting Nicholas Krall, a plasma physicist who has been working in the fusion field for more than a half-century and has been an adviser to EMC2 Fusion, "I think this is the most exciting experimental advance that I've been involved in," he told NBC News. 'I'm stoked.""
Plus there are 2-3 other concepts that gave got Venture Capital funding. Fusion is looking more interesting.
Once again, the real problem is building a containment field that won't decay. From what I've read, the containment field will break down from the bombardment of the neutrons making the device short lived and too expensive.
Why? It is Darwin time. Let the fittest survive and the first to die to get a unit in her name, according to the old custom.
Here is a map of intelligent civilizations who have successfully reproduced (by experiment in the laboratory) the conditions for creating Gamma Ray Bursts. No one knows whether this map is up to date or even functional because it requires the installation of Microsoft Silverlight, which is only used by Netflix users who would rather watch movies than ping the dying remnants of failed civilizations. Our knowledge of Gamma Ray Bursts is incomplete because astrophysicists have devoted far more time to avoiding Silverlight, which they consider to be a greater danger to life here on Earth.
Here is the list of successful lab experiments observed to date. Due to obvious Y2K errors in the naming convention of GRBs attempts to collate this data over the centuries have been unsuccessful, leading to time paradoxes and fistfights.
The light curves of GRB events ech contain a complex pulse-coded message placed there by the Grand Architect that says in effect, "Whatever you do... don't do this." While the signals have not been decoded, their diversity suggests that there are a number of things that one just should not do. Except for plot on the bottom right which cannot be right, I did that in High School.
Because the characteristics of celestial GRBs mimic the explosion of fission bombs, these bursts are Nature's Way to push paranoid little civilizations over the edge to go full-out on one another during nuclear adolescence. There is a reality show out there that showcases one of these every week with a laugh track dropped in at every retaliatory response, rousing applause at the end.
Let me check, maybe it's on Netflix...
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I've been seeing one promise after another about "inexhaustible fusion power" for going on 50 years now. "I hear the wind blowing, but I don't see any trees falling." Not in my lifetime anyway. Wind and solar did more with less. Conservation is still the best investment.
No, the Z machine's budget for the last 30 years is much more than that
Democrats do this to appease their brand of science deniers, the far left environmentalists who oppose everything and anything nuclear. Note that not all environmentalists are of this type, some are even former deniers who decided to listen to what actual physicists say rather than what far left environmentalist leaders say on the topic of physics.
And Republicans nee 'conservatives' kill Nuclear because despite a ~2.5:1 ratio of conservatives over liberals in super-PAC contributions, which I equate to be what these billionaires consider to be "disposable income"... it is evident that the people they trust to advise them are failing to suggest investments in commercial nuclear technologies, both legacy and new. Perhaps they don't give a hoot about their grandchildren. Perhaps they see the span of fossil fuel decline (amid increasing energy demand) as a time of financial opportunity, and a renaissance of nuclear energy would interfere with vested interests. Perhaps they do not consider the inevitability of global war to secure resources to be a personal expense. Whatever the reason -- I am more likely to believe it is they who could save us, especially if it comes down to investment strategy. Because their position on nuclear energy would be based more on potential reward and applied risk -- especially the lower risks of Molten Salts and other nuclear approaches -- rather than fear.
Virtually limitless energy from a small Thorium mining footprint, ~300 year storage of waste is the best workable idea we have come up with. At present the stall of progress in nuclear energy is a bi-partisan disgrace, an affront to the whole human race.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
OK, anyone else trying to figure out what interactive fiction had to do with Fusion ?
The brits invented the z machine over a half century ago. Pretty easy to scale up but it did not seem economical to make a mile long tube. Also it might have been too easy to do for little brown people. But a good reason was the material science was not up to all those neutrons. And we have never really gotten around to heavy funding to solve that issue.
I suspect we can probably skip the neuron problem though with enough current density. Maybe that is the point here.
I think the other AC's point involved giving "certain sites" an ultimatum to switch from Flash or lose all traffic.