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NIF Aims For the Ultimate Green Energy Source
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sunday November 15, @10:16AM
from the crazy-eddie's-discount-power dept.
from the crazy-eddie's-discount-power dept.
theodp writes "Edward Moses and his team of 500 scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility are betting $3.5B in taxpayer money on a tiny pellet they hope could produce an endless supply of safe, clean energy. By the fall of 2010, the team aims to start blasting capsules containing deuterium-tritium fuel with 1.4 megajoules of laser power, a first step towards the holy grail of controlled nuclear fusion. Not all are convinced that Moses will lead us to the promised land. 'They're snake-oil salesmen,' says Thomas Cochran, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Moses, for his part, seems unfazed by the skepticism, saying he's confident that his team will succeed."
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A better alternative (Score:3, Insightful)
$3.5 billion? This is a better alternative than giving the money to the UAW.
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Re:A better alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There would be much less money and fewer jobs to go around for everybody if the banking system had been allowed to fail. It's sort of like saying, "wow, WWII really sucked, look how many GIs got killed and how much money it cost, imagine how much better off we'd be if we'd just stayed out of it!"
Re:A better alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
No, there would just be new banks.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A better alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Mainly to "ourselves". The government borrows money from its own companies and citizens (and pension funds, in particular). To a lesser extent, we owe this money to foreign banks, mainly in th efar east.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The debt is in the form of US Treasury bonds, which are held by many different groups. Chinese investment firms own a very large percentage (somewhere near 60% I believe). The further the US goes in to debt the more risky the investment becomes. Eventually no one will want to buy more bonds, at which point the US will have to print money in order to pay off the old bonds that are maturing. When that time comes, there will be no way of recovering. The dollar's value will rapidly plummet. Everyone will switch
Re:A better alternative (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, nuclear fusion isn't unlimited in the sense of comparing it to infinity. For us puny humans though, it is for all practical purposes unlimited. We know from daily experience that fusion power is attainable. We also know that once we attain it, all other power sources will be obsolete. How this does not deserve a much larger portion of our resources boggles my mind.
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Re:A better alternative (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not going to get far with energy sources if you're not replacing the older gas guzzlers with newer fewer efficient cars. Despite all the ignorance, the UAW workers don't actually make that much more than their non-union counterparts in the South, but you get the same blind rage from people because ZOMG UNIONS~!!1!!11ONEONEELEVEN
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Re:A better alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone doubts that unions did great things for the American workforce. What they tend to bash is tipping the balance too far to the side of the union workers. When their demands become too unreasonable that they threaten the very company they serve, then there is a problem.
Had they been more accommodating, they probably wouldn't be in bankruptcy. The cost of the insurance packages, retirement packages, 3 people to do one job, union rules that prevent simple jobs from being done, even when they could be done safely, etc.
Not all that is union is golden...
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
the UAW is probably the only reason why we have an auto industry in the US at this point
the UAW workers don't actually make that much more than their non-union counterparts in the South
How is that not self-contradictory? And why should we keep using tax money that everyone pays to prop up the companies the use the UAW? If non-union companies compensate their employees just as much, and employ US workers, what's the point? I don't think most people have a problem with unions per se, it's the constant
Re:A better alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Was in $10,000 to $15,000 in profit per SUV or $10,000 to $15,000 in per unit profit per SUV?
Unit Profit is the profit made on production of an initial unit.
Profit is the profit made on the production of a unit with the fixed costs amortized over all of the units produced.
If you really meant unit profit, I stand by my assertion. If you really meant profit: "Okay. Interesting."
Re:A better alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
cheaper power has several positive side effects
- lowers pollution and environmental damage by displacing formerly cheapest-power sources such as coal and oil
- encourages recycling which can sometimes not be worth it due to energy requirements
- raises quality of life pretty much across the board
Basically when power becomes cheaper, "the way things are done" changes in a lot of places because things that used to be more economical to do one way, become more economical to do another way. This almost always works to society's advantage. And as a result the prices on a lot of things gets cheaper because goods and services are cheaper to produce. When products (cost of living) goes down without average wage going down, quality of life goes up.
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Re:A better alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
Seattle has the some of the greatest fuel efficiency in the US largely because it resides in a part of the country with a high gas tax. We've got the same vehicles available to us that are in most parts of the country, but because of the gas taxes we tend to consider more carefully whether we drive and how far and what we drive.
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Mirror of the mirror (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility
Do we have more stick-to-it spirit these days? Or is this another few billion dollars spent with no other purpose than to improve the economy of Livermore, California?
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Re:Mirror of the mirror (Score:5, Interesting)
Bush Jr also canceled all the funding for fusion experiments. It's the only reason we ever even heard of the Bussard Polywell [wikipedia.org], since the scientists were free to talk about it after their contract with the Navy ended. Of course, now that the Navy funding is back, we're not allowed to hear how development is going.
The obvious conspiracy theory is Big Oil doesn't like the threat of an alternative energy source, and they have a lot of clout at the White House when Republicans are in power. Other Bush Jr decisions included halting nearly all new permits for solar array power stations. [commondreams.org] So, the conspiracy theory has legs.
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Re:Mirror of the mirror (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're looking for conspiracy theories, there's a better one that is actually backed by better facts.
Its a common activity of the federal government (and arguably not an unreasonable one) to spend billions of dollars on projects that are not intended to ever succeed in the role they are sold to the public as, but rather to support industries that are deemed critical to national interest or security.
The ISS/Space Shuttle is probably the best and most widely known example. This was hundreds of billions spent to keep engineers and, more importantly, defense contractors, employed and solvent between DoD contracts, and to ensure that the skills they collectively had weren't lost through retirement or otherwise.
The US has the same problem with the skills around nuclear (fission and fusion) research and engineering, particularly since we stopped building and testing nuclear weapons. The argument has been made before, because the scientific justification is so bad, that many of these projects like the NIF are done for the same reason, and focus deliberately shifts around projects as the need for the project to actually produce something starts to come to a head.
IMO, the NIF alone is a giant waste of money, but if it serves as an act of corporate welfare to keep the scientists and contractors involved in the project active and up to date, then perhaps its not a bad investment.
But I don't think any experts who aren't getting a paycheck related to it really expect a viable solution to fusion power to come from it.
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Re:Mirror of the mirror (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The Mirror Fusion facility was closed at the bequest of the Oil and Uranium industries. Many people don't seem to understand that these companies will do whatever it takes to protect their profits even if it means that the rest of the world suffers. Just look at the climate debate.
That's unlikely. Fusion would be a baseload electric power source, and that doesn't compete against oil (it competes against coal).
Now, fast forward twenty years to 2009, and the technology is just beginning start getting available for realistic electric cars, and so some time in the moderate future, there may be enough electric cars on the roads that electrical power may actually make some significant inroads against oil as a transportation fuel-- but not in 1985, and the oil companies are (and were) pe
Proof of Concept (Score:5, Insightful)
Cochran says the NIF laser is still not powerful enough. Even if it were, he says, "these machines are just going to be too big, and too costly, and they'll never be competitive."
Proof of concept devices area always oversized and more costly than the production versions. Once you know it works and how it works, you can start shrinking it down and since the development is done, the cost per unit goes down further.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Proof of concept devices area always oversized and more costly than the production versions.
Uhh.. maybe for electronics, but usually for power generation you start small scale and build much larger versions.
Here's some scale. The article says this thing will produce just over a mega-joule of energy per-fire. They fire the thing a few times a day. 6 GIGA-joules is the amount of chemical energy in a barrel of oil. That means that per-fire, this thing produces the about the same amount of energy as is in
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhh.. maybe for electronics, but usually for power generation you start small scale and build much larger versions.
In terms of power production, yes. In terms of power to physical size ratio, no. The first fusion bomb was the size of a small building. Electrical generators and other devices were much larger in the early days compared to modern counterparts. They are trying to provide proof of concept here. The sheer amount of power required to produce fusion is the cause of the sheer size of this, nothing more. If you could produce fusion using 6 joules of power, there would be no need for it to be so big and you
synchronizing nearly 200 lasers (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anyone wondered how to synchronize these lasers to less than a microsecond? Sure one could measure the path lengths and calculate the delays at approx 9 ns per foot. However, about 12 years ago I wrote the software for a system that sync'd a remote quartz clock to a local cesium clock to within a nanosecond over 10 -100 km of fiber. Changes in path length we automatically compensated. It was fun to write this code and put the system together. A prototype was delivered to the Lawrence Livermore Lab for just this purpose.
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Re:synchronizing nearly 200 lasers (Score:5, Interesting)
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NIF not the only or even best technology (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be great if NIF could produce a working fusion system within the next century, but i find it a bit doubtful. There are two other fusion technologies which have aimed to reduce the size and complexity of fusion systems, instead of building massive billion dollar generators to instead build smaller technologies. These inlcude Polywell and Focus Fusion. Both are developed by engineers and appear to be honest attempts to develop fusion power and to do it with a reasonable amount of money, under 20 years, rather than centuries. While the government has given NIF billions of dollars, the polywell has received about 8 million in funding, despite the fact that if it is possible it could save the planet. Some scientists seem so enamored by the size and complexity, and unfeasibly of such machines as ITER they seem unwilling to consider smaller, cheaper and more practical alternatives, thus fusion always remains something far off in the centuries away future, when it is desperately needed now.
Id like to see polywell, focus fusion and the NIF fully funded however, since it is possible that one may be right and the others not workable, it increases the chance of finding a solution.
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Re:NIF not the only or even best technology (Score:4, Interesting)
The history of fusion energy research is marked by concepts that have not worked as their designers anticipated them to. In the first half of the 20th century, they built pinches, only to discover MHD instabilities. They built tokamaks, only to discover more and different kinds of MHD instabilities. They built spheromaks, only to find that the energy density couldn't go high enough. They built pinches of various kinds, only to find that the particle leakage was too high. They built inertial confinement devices, only to find that the ions would lose their energy rapidly.
So you see, I am skeptical that these "new" concepts will be successful anytime soon. Economical generation of fusion energy is a hard problem. I wish the small-scale guys luck, but I'm not holding my breath.
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Three points (Score:5, Interesting)
Point one: Not spending money on fusion research is incredibly dumb. It's not likely to pan out in the near-term future, but there's plenty of ancillary science to be done on the subject. For example, the VASMIR space drive built on fusion research, it's just not hot enough to provoke fusion
Point two: Relying on fusion power to make for a short-term fix is also dumb. Especially if you think it's going to be safe and clean. The problem with fusion is how many neutrons it emits. Even when you use one of the fusion chains designed not to produce neutrons, you produce a good amount. The reactor core is going to be even more radioactive than a fission reactor core. And even if you get to a "Breakeven" point, that doesn't mean that you'll be price-competitive with other forms of power.
Fusion is easy. Just take a GIANT ball of gas, let it collapse into a star, and put solar panels around the star.
Point three: Calling it the Ultimate Green Energy Source is a cover story. A 2007 report by the National Research Council's Plasma Science Committee concluded that "NIF is crucial to the NNSA Stockpile Stewardship Program because it will be able to create the extreme conditions of temperature and pressure that exist on Earth only in exploding nuclear weapons and that are therefore relevant to understanding the operation of our modern nuclear weapons."
In other words, the NIF will be used, at least some of the time, to re-create the conditions inside of an exploding nuclear warhead so we can design new nukes without testing them and therefore violating the test ban treaties.
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Re:Three points (Score:5, Interesting)
The reactor core is going to be even more radioactive than a fission reactor core.
Why? Other than an appeal to authority, or FUD, I don't see it. And I'm fairly well educated in this area.
The inherent problem with "spent" fission fuel, is we have very little control over how the atoms fission. Generally you get about 1/3 and 2/3 chunks but a graph of the relative weights shows two wide peaks. The stuff thats stable for millions of years is harmless, because, well, its stable for millions of years before it does anything. Likewise for the stuff with a half life of a few seconds, like the silver isotopes, because an hour after shutdown its all reacted. But there are plenty of icky cobalt and strontium and other isotopes that have an annoying half life "around a human generation long" that are really hazardous biologically. So there is no way to run a fission reactor without accumulating icky radioactive waste. Don't want a fission reactor full of cobalt and strontium isotopes? Well, tough luck, that is an inherent byproduct of the fuel itself.
On the other hand, fusion doesn't use "stuff" that inherently involves bad half lives. Don't want a fusion reactor full of cobalt and strontium isotopes? Well then don't build the reactor out of it.
... solar panels ...
Ah I see it was all just astroturfing or something.
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Re:Three points (Score:5, Interesting)
Look up neutron activation. When neutrons are flying around in a nuclear (of any type) reactor core, some of them hit the material in the walls, causing the atoms to absorb a neutron and change isotopes. Which tends to result in a reactor core that is radioactive, even though it wasn't made of radioactive materials and didn't absorb any isotopes.
I know a lot about that topic. Lets make our reactor vessel out of iron. Nice and strong. We need a table of nuclides, but wikipedia is an adequate substitute. So, lets see what horrible long term waste results from neutron activation of iron.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_iron [wikipedia.org]
Most of the half lives are in the ms range. If you manage to strike the same atom simultaneously with five neutrons, you get a 44 day halflife, this is irrelevant in practice. Overall, neutron activation of iron is not a significant issue.
Some materials can be neutron activated, some simply cannot. Don't worry about distilled water, or lead.
The important point, is you choose the structural material so neutron activation is simply, inherently irrelevant. Hence the intense interest in material science in fusion reactors.
You could intentionally make a fusion reactors walls out of U-235 and generate tons of contamination, but why?
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Re:Three points (Score:4, Interesting)
You do realize that iron would become brittle as steel from the neutron flux if you built your reactor vessel out of it, right? It's a vague problem with fission reactors that required some procedural adjustments once neutron embrittlement was better understood, but with orders of magnitude greater neutron flux...
Nor can you rely on a isotope chart of a single element to predict what's going to occur in a high neutron flux environment.
For example, Fe 58 is stable. Capture a neutron it becomes Fe 59, with a 44 day halflife to Co 59. If Co 59 captures a neutron, it becomes Co 60, which is a long-lived radioisotope.
So I guess you do get a reactor vessel with a certain amount of cobalt isotopes, no?
I wouldn't classify this as an "unsolvable problem" but you can't magically wave your hands and make them go away.
For all the "oh my god radioactivity" crap that's going around, the simple fact of the matter is that you can access the core of a fission reactor while it's online whereas you cannot access the core of a fusion reactor while it's online.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If the rest of your explanation is as accurate as that, I'm glad I stopped reading.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What does that matter? It's inner lining for a reactor wall, it doesn't have to withstand hits or bear weight. It doesn't even have to contain the reactant, since that's done by magnetic fields. It simply has to sit there and absorb neutrons.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, it's envisioned that there will be a layer of lithium in order to breed tritium. However lithium cannot be the so-called "first wall" material. You would put the lithium behind the first wall.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Fusion that does not produce neutrons.
Eg, D + He 3 -> He 4 + p vs. D + T -> He 4 + n. The first, deuterium and helium-3 produces helium 4 and a proton. No neutrons. But deuterium and tritium produces helium 4 and a neutron.
The problem is, not perfect. With the deuterium hanging around in a reactor, you'd get some degree of neutron-producing reactions anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with fusion is how many neutrons it emits. Even when you use one of the fusion chains designed not to produce neutrons, you produce a good amount. The reactor core is going to be even more radioactive than a fission reactor core.
That's not actually necessarily a problem, you know. It all depends really on two factors.
Waste of money ... (Score:3, Interesting)
There is big physics that is a good place to sink money, and big physics that is not.
Only the physicists and engineers who are payed by grants in this area seem to think its a good use of money.
And unfortunately projects like this pull billions of taxpayer money from research projects that may actually benefit society.
The NIF is the ISS of the physics world.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be better, if these billions of dollars were pulled from bank executives who were responsible for the economic collapse.
Maybe we can drop by their houses with pitchforks and torches and ask them to kindly donate their bonuses.
Worth doing, but kick the military out (Score:3, Informative)
There was a long (~1 hour) plenary talk about this at a recent American Physical Society conference.
The NIF is exciting scientifically for studying both fusion and "extreme" materials science. No, it's not going to turn into a power plant once we get it working, but fusion power is too promising to not take steps toward it. We won't be able to roll out fusion power in time to avert climate change, of course, so it's not a first priority for energy research. But it is certainly worth doing on its scientific merits alone.
Trouble is, the main intent behind the NIF isn't science -- it's "stockpile stewardship" and weapons development. If it were simply a science experiment I imagine that the science goals could be achieved far more cheaply, and with a higher degree of openness. (For instance, some of the other approaches to fusion seem more promising. But the US's flagship fusion project is this one -- just because you can learn about bombs with it.)
Science that is worth doing (which in my opinion the NIF is) should be done completely independent of the military (so it can be done honestly) and it should be done openly (so it can be useful to society).
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Dense Plasma Focus is more promising. (Score:3, Interesting)
Dense Plasma Focus technology is the next best thing to what cold fusion had promised. Best of all it's real and doesn't use any questionable physics.
Safe, small, low cost, low maintenance and efficient. It looks like it will be small enough that it could be ran from inside a rail car or truck.
It's far ,more likely to work then blasting deuterium-tritium with lasers, but they can't get funding!
Slashdot's reported this several times.
A-Step-Closer-To-Cheap-Nuclear-Fusion [slashdot.org]
And I have posting my research in to this too.
green ideas thinktank [blogspot.com]
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Re:Did slashdot just got slashdotted? (Score:5, Funny)
Greedy databases rose up and demanded free space. We negotiated a settlement.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
speaking for myself, I was deeply disturbed - I'm well used to my clients' mission-critical clustered systems becoming unavailable for days because of databases issues (no free space, someone forgot to trunc the logs, the db monitor says the db is running but it isn't, someone changed a password, the new DBA went into the server room with the db manufacturer's manual in hand and is now missing, the DBA finally applies a year-old patch, etc.) - hell, even Google goes down relatively often (usually when they
Re:Deuterium is hardly "endless" (Score:4, Informative)
Um, except that one factory in Norway in the 40s made 12 tons a year of it and one ton fused contains the same energy as 29 BILLION tons of coal. We also seem to have some 10^15 tons of it out in the ocean before we have to go to space to go shopping.
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Re:Deuterium is hardly "endless" (Score:5, Informative)
I can't tell if you're joking, but everything you said about deuterium is 100% false. There is more D in the earth's oceans (1/6500th of all the water) than we could ever imagine using for fusion. It's also extracted cheaply and easily.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, my. I do seem to have made a fundamental error on this: I'm afraid I may have to chalk it up partly to age, and partly to thinking of tritium. Note that that their pellets call for both, and _tritium_ is normally produced in plutonium power plants from deuterium.
So it's still limited, but nowhere near so limited as I thought.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
deuterium refinement is still only done with stunningly high energy costs
A buck per liter of pure D is not all that "stunning". In insulated liquid tanker car loads, you could probably buy it somewhat cheaper. True, there is an inherent lower limit regardless of bulk purchase or whatever, I'm guessing probably around 50 cents per liter wholesale. The manufacturers are not operating as a charity, they probably use 100% electrically operated machinery, and probably most of their costs are labor and capital, so I feel confident that a liter of D takes only a couple KWh at most.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If he was actually trying to build a working fusion reactor, that may actually be a surprising response (no need for fission reactors means fewer potential nukes out there).
The design at NIF is not relevant to solving the problems in getting electricity from inertial confinement fusion. It takes over 300MJ for them to power their lasers, while the best output they can hope for from their fusion is about 50MJ. They're also focusing on D-D and D-T fusion, which is not actually "clean" in that it will make t
Cheap clean energy will utterly destroy the planet (Score:4, Interesting)
Or rather.
What will happen is it will allow the economy, unlimited growth. With that goes consumption. Humans will literally build, eat and fuck the planet into a desolate wasteland.
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Clean cheap energy will save the planet (Score:5, Informative)
Recycling and clean manufacturing processes will become economically viable because the energy to do it will be cheap.
Planting in the desert will become economically viable because the energy to desalinate water will be cheap.
People will fight fewer wars over geographically concentrated energy resources.
Wealthy people reproduce less than poor ones, so population growth will be slowed or even reversed.
Cheap clean energy will save the planet.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They're right, in a sense. Fusion's not going to solve any problems related to climate change -- we need something else for the near-term. But in a hundred and fifty years, it'd be nice to be able to produce 50x the current energy output of the world with no environmental consequences.
It's long-term, not short-term.