National Ignition Facility Fires 192-Beam Pulse 438
An anonymous reader writes "The construction and test firing of the National Ignition Facility have been completed. NIF was designed as the first facility ever to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion and, in particular, to reach the point of ignition in which more energy is generated from the reaction than went into creating it. While the recent 192-beam pulse only produced 80 kilojoules worth of energy, all signs point to NIF being able to reach an order of magnitude higher (PDF) than that in the coming year."
This is a really big deal, right? (Score:2, Informative)
Can this replace all nuclear fission and coal power plants with a clean plentiful nuclear fusion?
Isn't this a change-life-as-we-know-it achievement?
Would a local expert comment on this?
Re:indeed (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. It's pure science. They have no other goals except "study the ignition of nuclear fusion". It's a bit hard to do that inside a nuclear reactor (or bomb) and thus the big freakin' lasers.
Re:Still problems? (Score:4, Informative)
That's the problem with magnetically confined fusion. NIF will be inertially confined.
Re:Energy Independence (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Inertial confinement vs. magnetic confinement (Score:5, Informative)
I did my BSc thesis on the laser plasma interaction in NIF and my impression was that while inertial confinement fusion is extremely unlikely to be practical as a power plant, it may be used as an exceptionally intense neutron source for various experiments. Spallation sources can generally achieve high neutron fluxes and neutron energies, but an inertial confinement fusion device would generate orders of magnitude higher neutron intensities still. Moreover the fusion neutrons are virtually mono energetic, and this is impossible to achieve with most present spallation designs without drastically reducing the number of available neutrons. Essentially the only way to do it is to use some criteria like time-of-flight or neutron diffraction to select for only neutrons of a given energy, thus wasting all other neutrons, and this is only practical at low energies. At higher energies you would likely need to exploit the kinematics of some form of knockout reaction, like Li(D,n)Be, and since the large yield requirement would likely cause you to ionize your target, such a scheme would have challenges similar to those faced by inertial confinement devices. It also seems to me that it would be tricky to generate such a powerful deuterium pulse, if it is at all possible.
I'll give you a hint (Score:4, Informative)
He should probably wash his hands next.
A thousand years? Come on. That's the difference between the viking raids and landing on the moon. A lot can happen in a thousand years.
And FYI, RTFA. The thing has a maximum theoretical payoff roughly ten to one in terms of input/output, which they're predicting by 2010. 2MJ goes in, 20 comes out. If they only manage half that, you still have a x5 payoff. Which is still a massive win.
I don't know about you, but that much energy out of a nugget of 2mm nugget of beryllium sounds pretty freakin commercializable to me.
I'm thinking all sorts of great things can come from this. Uber cheap electricity, plug in hybrids to end the fuel crisis, shutting down coal/oil electricity plants, ion drives...there are lots of applications.
And you're not going to have to wait 1000 freaking years for them, either.
Re:Still problems? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Energy Independence (Score:2, Informative)
Well..Duh!
http://islaminaction08.blogspot.com/2009/01/michigan-muslims-attack-free-speech.html [blogspot.com]
Re:indeed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Still problems? (Score:2, Informative)
Bad/misleading summary (Score:4, Informative)
They testfired the lasers they're going to be using for fusion later. Those beams (attempt to) put out a fixed amount of energy. They reported the total energy. No fusion happened, no energy was net produced, the only thing that happened was the lasers fired at 420J each.
This is pretty clear from the article, but not like anyone would RTFA anyway.
Re:little help! (Score:4, Informative)
What's so great about nuclear fusion?
Fuel for nuclear fusion is more abundant than fuel for nuclear fission, by a couple of orders of magnitude.
If this works does that mean we'll have clean energy without radioactive byproducts?
Not quite. The "waste" of fusion isn't radioactive, but most fusion reactions generate neutrons that will activate whatever the reactor is made out of. So there will be some waste that needs to be dealt with.
If not, why is this better than nuclear power plants today?
It doesn't depend on heavy elements as fuel, and doesn't produce waste that's a mix of all kinds of crap (unfissioned material, fission products, unfissionable (but still toxic) heavy elements, activated materials), but just one kind of crap (activated materials).
Next, assuming we get this working, what material does it require to make it work successfully?
We have the materials, we need to get the processes right.
And really, what then becomes the bottle neck to producing infinite cheap energy?
Possibly, waste heat. You'll still need to get rid of that, provided that the fusion reactor drives a standard turbine setup.
Right... Non OPEC oil peaked in 2004 (Score:2, Informative)
It looks like Saudi peaked in 2005. Virtually all of the anthracite coal is already gone leaving only the lower grades. Renewables are only capable of making up a fraction of current energy usage. Which means we're just about to fall off the energy cliff. Not in 20 years, but now.
Why are Iran building nuclear reactors? Their oil is already running out. Where will the next war zones be? Canada, Australia, Khazakstan.
Re:indeed (Score:4, Informative)
Do tell? Citation needed. Cause last I remember, unless you're dealing with Muon-catalyzed fusion, the temperatures and pressures you need for bulk fusion are a few orders of magnitude higher than you want to get in a fission reactor if you want it to remain controlled.
I hope you're talking special research reactors using exotic neutron moderators and coolants because most moderators in commercial reactors (graphite/heavy water) just can't stand that much heat. I expect you get much higher temperatures in your average blast furnace. Otherwise you would have some big problems with containment of a very hot radioactive pile and there just seems to be less dangerous ways to study fusion. Sure you could get a blob of fissioning material hot enough to melt through your equipment and all the way to the mantle, but that's not generally considered a good environment for study. Let's not forget that magnetic-containment plasma fusion has been studied in the lab for a few decades now. Although I would expect that the initial experiments in fusion probably involved collisions between ions accelerated by cyclotrons or fusors [wikipedia.org]. Seems a lot more controllable and accessible than super-hot fission piles.
The H-Bomb trigger and compression jacket is certainly. That's how they get the compression and heat for the fusion ignition of the hydrogen isotopes, which produce additional neutrons that pump back into the fission reaction. The later stages in a multi-stage bomb could be tuned more for fusion energy release though, or at least so says the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]. Because the H stands for Hydrogen and hydrogen can only fuse - it can't undergo fission (although tritium does decay) - there's gotta be some fusion in an H-Bomb.
Re:Energy Independence (Score:3, Informative)
mod parent up! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:indeed (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, the oil that you will get out, will be useless for your coal plant.
Shoulda have buried some plants...
Re:Energy Independence (Score:3, Informative)
The long time line is primarily due to the budget and results needed from ITER so we can build DEMO properly. The neutron fluxes are rather crazy.