Argon Fluoride Laser Could Lead To Practical Fusion Reactors (newatlas.com) 55
The US Naval Research Laboratory (AFL) is developing an Argon Fluoride (ArF) laser that may one day make fusion power a practical commercial technology. New Atlas reports: The wide-bandwidth ultraviolet laser is designed to have the shortest laser wavelength that can scale up to power a self-sustaining fusion reaction. [...] The NRL's ArF laser is intended for a test facility based on the principle of Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). In this, a bead of deuterium or tritium, which are heavy isotopes of hydrogen, is fired upon by multiple lasers, heating and compressing it in a fraction of a second to such an extent that the hydrogen atoms implode, fuse together, and release enormous amounts of energy.
The new deep ultraviolet laser, also known as a laser driver, is claimed to transfer energy to the fuel bead with greater efficiency and produces much higher temperatures to generate the implosion. Using radiation hydrodynamics simulations the NRL scientists say that performance could be increased a hundredfold with an efficiency of 16 percent, compared to only 12 percent from the next most efficient krypton fluoride laser. Because of these improvements, the ArF laser could lead to smaller and less expensive fusion power plants. However, the team stresses that there is still a long way to go before fusion is hooked up to the national grid. The laser will need to provide the required energy, repetition rate, precision, and billion-shot class reliability for a practical plant.
To move towards this, the laboratory is running a three-phase program with the first dedicated to the basic science and technology of the ArF laser. This will be followed by phase two, which will concentrate on building and testing a full-scale high-energy ArF laser, and then phase three where an implosion facility consisting of 20 to 30 lasers will be constructed. "The advantages could facilitate the development of modest size, less expensive fusion power plant modules operating at laser energies less than one megajoule," says Steve Obenschain, Ph.D., a research physicist at NRL. "That would drastically change the existing view on laser fusion energy being too expensive and power plants being too large." The research was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
The new deep ultraviolet laser, also known as a laser driver, is claimed to transfer energy to the fuel bead with greater efficiency and produces much higher temperatures to generate the implosion. Using radiation hydrodynamics simulations the NRL scientists say that performance could be increased a hundredfold with an efficiency of 16 percent, compared to only 12 percent from the next most efficient krypton fluoride laser. Because of these improvements, the ArF laser could lead to smaller and less expensive fusion power plants. However, the team stresses that there is still a long way to go before fusion is hooked up to the national grid. The laser will need to provide the required energy, repetition rate, precision, and billion-shot class reliability for a practical plant.
To move towards this, the laboratory is running a three-phase program with the first dedicated to the basic science and technology of the ArF laser. This will be followed by phase two, which will concentrate on building and testing a full-scale high-energy ArF laser, and then phase three where an implosion facility consisting of 20 to 30 lasers will be constructed. "The advantages could facilitate the development of modest size, less expensive fusion power plant modules operating at laser energies less than one megajoule," says Steve Obenschain, Ph.D., a research physicist at NRL. "That would drastically change the existing view on laser fusion energy being too expensive and power plants being too large." The research was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
So now fusion is only (Score:4, Funny)
20 years .. oh never mind.
Re: So now fusion is only (Score:2)
performance could be increased a hundredfold with an efficiency of 16 percent, compared to only 12 percent from the next most efficient krypton fluoride laser IANAS but I take it the goal is greater than 100%. I reckon 20 years is still many decades away. Not that they shouldn't research fusion but it's gonna be lots of baby steps.
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It's a standard trope for newly-discovered physical devices/systems, the rule is "$new_toy could lead to cheaper/faster/smaller/cleaner $speculative_thing", where $speculative_thing is fusion power, faster-than-light travel, monorails, space elevators, Mars colonies, teleportation, or whatever.
In this case $new_toy is "argon fluoride laser" and $speculative_thing is "fusion reactors". Feel free to unplug/plug in anything else. I'd have set $speculative_thing="faster-than-light travel" if I'd been writing
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It's a standard trope for newly-discovered physical devices/systems, the rule is "$new_toy could lead to cheaper/faster/smaller/cleaner $speculative_thing", where $speculative_thing is fusion power, faster-than-light travel, monorails, space elevators, Mars colonies, teleportation, or whatever.
Yup - the interesting thing is that this new wonderlaser only helps a tiny little bit in lessening the biggest issue of fusion power.
Parasitic energy loads.
And this is why I consider the public facing side of fusion research - the side that wants to whip up support for spending huge amounts of money to be functionally dishonest.
Here's my favorite physicist - Sabine Hossenfelder, dishing out a handful of truth about fusion power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
And let's not forget that the mantr
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Here's my favorite physicist - Sabine Hossenfelder, dishing out a handful of truth about fusion power. https://www.youtube.com/watch [youtube.com]?... [youtube.com]
Oooh, interesting, thanks! As she points out, I don't think the Qtotal vs. Qplasma "confusion" is accidental: Who would fund a fusion experiment if you give performance as Qtotal rather than Qplasma? So I suspect most physicists aren't overly motivated to point out that Qtotal << Qplasma.
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To be fair, previously we were 20 years (and one hour) away!
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Well, practical, reliable, industrialized fusion power never was only 20 years away. It is more like 100 at the moment. But there is steady progress, it now looks like it will work in the end and the pay-off is huge. Hence this is very much worthwhile research. You just need to ignore the utterly moronic reporting on it.
But will it (Score:1)
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It will. So well that there will not be any teeth left. Likely not even an attached head. Beat that!
bullshit yo (Score:1)
yo I already tried laser beams and toothpaste
fused some shit cant even see outta my left eye no more
Yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
This was known well before they built the NIF using the wrong kind of lasers. I remember the NRL guys being VERY pissed about it.
References:
https://physicstoday.scitation... [scitation.org]
http://firefusionpower.org/Obe... [firefusionpower.org]
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
Re: Yeah (Score:3)
It will work, and definitely has a future especially if tokamak or stellarator does not work out economically viable. Even if the NIF achieves ignition, barring something spectacular, tokamak seems like the most viable path to me right now. The NIF uses a lot of energy to power its laser flashlamps (the next version, if approved will use DPSSLs instead.) Laser ICF or Laser MagLIF is a good back up plan to keeping working on. There are a number of obstacles laser has to overcome .. rep rate, hohlraum mass pr
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Lawrence Livermore, yes. The NIF, no. Care to share anymore lies?
Re: Yeah (Score:2)
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Lawrence Livermore, yes. The NIF, no. Care to share anymore lies?
NIF exists almost exclusively for stockpile stewardship. Its existence is a running joke in the fusion energy community. Fusion research aspect is PR BS used for political / funding purposes. The LMJ in France is basically a knockoff of NIF and is more explicit about its purpose.
Re: Yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
It will work.
Well, not based on any actual demonstrations thus far. Entirely ignoring the issue of laser efficiency NIF showed their projections (using a sophisticated 3-D code called LASNEX) for the required pulse energy were an order of magnitude too optimistic. They only just now got the first fusion to be ignited by other fusion reactions (assuming the pre-pub claims are correct), instead of just the laser heating, and it took a million dollar target to do it, a decade late.
But this Navy work is just a 1-D simulation and uses an entirely different drive technique, direct heating instead of indirect drive used by NIF and most ICF sites around the world. They don;t have any actual tests, just simulations, so this is basically at the same maturity that indirect drive was at 30 years ago when they thought 100 KJ pulse would reach scientific breakeven with simple targets. NIF has shown that indirect drive requires 12 MJ pulses, so 120 fold increase.
Maybe this direct drive approach will work better, but they are 20 years away from having a system like NIF to test it (that's how long NIF gestated before its ignition campaign failed, it is now a 30 year project). And that will just be a laboratory demonstration (ITER will be in operation then).
Tokamaks in comparison are already in operation close to break-even and have established engineering scaling that can go to commercial proportions which will be demonstrated in ITER (though still a demonstration system). Other MCF methods are dark horses but promising alternates exist and may prove better.
I support continuing this work, its not that costly in the scheme of things, and may have spin-offs of value, but there is no prospect that any fusion approach will cost only as much as renewable plus energy storage, much less be a penny cheaper. At worst an all-renewable grid can be made using synthetic chemical fuel (say, hydrogen or carbon capture methane) for gas turbines to handle long periods of poor conditions, and that will be cheaper that fusion under even the most optimistic projections The tech required for fusion is just too costly, compared to wind turbines and solar panels (plus batteries, electrolysis and turbines).
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I support continuing this work, its not that costly in the scheme of things, and may have spin-offs of value, but there is no prospect that any fusion approach will cost only as much as renewable plus energy storage, much less be a penny cheaper. At worst an all-renewable grid can be made using synthetic chemical fuel (say, hydrogen or carbon capture methane) for gas turbines to handle long periods of poor conditions, and that will be cheaper that fusion under even the most optimistic projections The tech required for fusion is just too costly, compared to wind turbines and solar panels (plus batteries, electrolysis and turbines).
Neither of you are on a path to solving global warming. Fusion won't work because we just don't have the materials or technology to efficiently harness 1000000C heat. An all-renewable grid with batteries couldn't be built with material found on earth because there just isn't enough of it. In fact we are probably have less than 10% of the Li we would need and Earth is very Li rich. At our current rate of Li consumption, we will run out in 2080. And that is before Telsa uses it all for car batteries or y
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Neither of you are on a path to solving global warming. Fusion won't work because we just don't have the materials or technology to efficiently harness 1000000C heat.
https://www.iter.org/mach/Dive... [iter.org]
An all-renewable grid with batteries couldn't be built with material found on earth because there just isn't enough of it. In fact we are probably have less than 10% of the Li we would need and Earth is very Li rich. At our current rate of Li consumption, we will run out in 2080.
Hogwash, first of all you don't even need batteries with a sufficiently large sufficiently interconnected grid. Second you are relying on malthusian perspective with no purchase on reality. There is not a fixed production capacity and as we have seen play out continuously there is no such thing as "peak oil" or peak anything. Production scales with demand and necessary extraction technologies are implemented to meet demand. Current production / reserves are a meaningle
Re: Yeah (Score:2)
Fusion = Duke Nukem Forever (Score:2)
Always just one more gadget out of widespread practical usability yet somehow never really ready for use in the real world. In the US we'd be better off investing in rugged/modern nuclear plant designs and then reprocessing spent fuel at a large scale.
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Really? What are you referring to with that statement?
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In the US we'd be better off investing in rugged/modern nuclear plant designs and then reprocessing spent fuel at a large scale.
Nuclear doesn't make sense at large scale. If you're going to reprocess spent fuel you have to plan for that spent fuel. And reprocessing fuel doesn't make economic sense, it costs a lot more than new fuel because your fuel is more dangerous than it would be in a "normal" reactor. France has been doing it, and it's raised the cost of their program dramatically... and it already costs too much. Nobody is going to spend that kind of money in order to waste that kind of money.
woo (Score:2)
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I read that as the efficiency of the lasers. The efficiency of the fusion power so far is negative.
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It's electricity into the lasers versus laser power out. NIF's most recent shot was about 70% laser power into the target versus energy (not all of it capturable) out. You have to multiply 0.16 and 0.70 to get Qtotal.
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Negative efficiency? They've discovered how to make negative energy? Hello warp drive!
The 16% is for the lasers. NIF fusion efficiency is likely somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10%.
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Yeah, they are. The laser people neglect to mention the losses in the laser, and all fusion people neglect to mention that most of the energy produced can't be used to make electricity.
ITER is designed to produce more power (all kinds) than it uses, and maaaaybe break even on actual harvestable energy. Actually producing net harvestable energy is left to its successor though. The confined plasma type fusion people benefit from a scaling law that gives them much more efficiency for a bigger containment vesse
yeah, that and.... (Score:1)
yeah, that and some fundamental new scientific theory/understanding.
throwing endless sums of money at the old theories doesn't seem to have worked.
2021 continues in 2020's wake (Score:3)
This fusion future sounds truly ArFL.
Hold up... (Score:4, Funny)
You're missing the important bit: it can make your teeth whiter in just 30 days with new Colgate Advanced Whitening with Argon Fluoride! And for those extra tough stains, Colgate Extreme with Argon Fluoride Lasers to melt away the stains (and the rest of your molecules)!
(toothpaste marketing has ruined the elemental name "fluoride" for my brain, probably forever)
Sharks, don't forget the sharks (Score:1)
How did we go half a day on a laser story without mentioning sharks???
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Chemistry Question (Score:2)
Is Argon Fluoride a mixture of gasses in the lasing chamber, or is it actually a doesn't-want-to-exist Noble gas molecule?
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Looks like both, a mix until lasing by forming ArF, then splits after lasing. Wiki article has more info.
Who cares? (Score:2)
I could be way off; fusion is only something I've followed tangentially.
Deep UV? (Score:1)
A question about LIC (Score:2)
It seems to me that if this works, the energy released by the fusion reaction is going to hit the apertures that the laser light is emitted from. This would I think destroy them in very short order. Tokomak designs at least have the energy hit a surface that does not have to be transparent, it's main limitation is that it has to be thin enough that the magnets are close enough for the device to work (there is also some kind of ports for introducing and removing fusion materials but they also seem less vulne
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That sounds reasonable. Actually now that I think about it, it seems LIC has an advantage: all the neutrons are coming from the same point and in the same direction, allowing such schemes to work. It may help with whatever method is used to collect the energy, too (though as far as I can tell what this is is still pretty vague in all designs).
Neutrons (Score:2)
It is nice to see improvements, but we still talk about hydrogen, deuterium or tritium fusion, which produce uncontrollable neutrons.They will damage the surrounding structure, making the design unusable for real production.
The real game changer would be hydrogen+boron fusion, which does not produce neutrons.