National Ignition Facility Takes First Steps Towards Fusion Energy 127
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 (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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meh... the "new world order" will be broke soon anyway... what's the point of hoarding a fuckload of cash that isn't worth anything? ...unless by "new world order" you mean the chinese government, which has been hoarding gold.
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Yeah many years ago one of the Rockefeller's said China was the model society,
and thus the shift in manufacturing there.
As they setup the CFR, and Hillary admits on video they take their orders
from the CFR, I'd say the die has been cast.
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Diamonds are a conductive metal?
Not that I know of, but they are extremely hard and useful for use on cutting/drilling bits.
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i'll be only too happy to take any gold off your hands for you :-)
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> Gold is worthless except as a very conductive metal
It's not very conductive, at least compared to aluminum, copper and silver.
The real value is that it's non-corrosive and soft. Makes it great for connectors and sockets.
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Gold is still only as valuable as people perceive it. Gold as a currency is still a goddamn currency. Sure, it may have utility in the modern age (electronics)..but if half the NWO conspiracy actually happened the shit would hit the fan so to speak.
In an SHTF scenario (in which technology is completely or mostly wiped out..or at least the highest tiers of fabrication) I've always held the belief that gold will be valuable - sure - but goods with actual utility will be much more valuable.
If things got super
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gold was widely valued for jewellery and money long before the age of electronics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
so if you trip over a huge gold nugget after SHTF you'll just leave it?
also, in SHTF scenario, all fiat currencies would be wiped out and unless you had something of real value to barter you would starve... pound for pound, gold has been one of the most highly valued commodies in the world since before the ancient egyptians... no action by any NWO will change that
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Salt was more valuable than gold. Many other spices as well. Currency was only useful in cities in ancient times. Cities are working economies - a post economic world would have no use of currency. Barter would be the norm. Possibly with some trade (scheduled exchanges of goods between communities).
The only scenario this is even remotely plausible is one where at least 999 of every 1,000 people died catastrophically and in an equal distribution around the globe (leaving about 7 million people worldwide and
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Salt was more valuable than gold. Many other spices as well
in what universe?
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As early as the 6th century, in the sub-Sahara, Moorish merchants routinely traded salt ounce for ounce for gold
i'm not sure how credible the article you linked is, but even your own source doesn't support your assertion that salt was more valuable than gold
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i'm not sure how credible the article you linked is, but even your own source doesn't support your assertion that salt was more valuable than gold
...particularly considering that gold is denser than salt (and pretty much everything else), so there would be a greater volume of salt traded for a given volume of gold.
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gold was widely valued for jewellery and money long before the age of electronics
Jewelry has no utility, and in those times (my understanding - I could be wrong) the elite/ruling class were the only ones with gold jewelry.
In a really bad scenario I feel there wouldn't be a highly-priveleged "elite" for a period of time. What I mean by that is I don't think many people will be seeking out jewelry - they'll be seeking out food, tools, etc.
I think Fonik nailed it. I didn't even think of spices and salt, but historically there have been a ridiculous amount of wars fought over them. Salt in
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elite/ruling class were the only ones with gold jewelry
well duh... the elite/ruling class were the only ones who could afford such a valuable commodity
I think I would stock up on salt like a mofo
there's nothing wrong with salt (or other spices) as a commodity... they just aren't as valuable as gold (pound for pound)
if someone with a pound of gold came up to you with your stockpile of salt, do you really think that pound of gold would only buy a pound of salt... in any scenario or any timeline?
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Well of course a pound of gold is a more valuable commodity. However let's do a proper cost-to-cost comparison:
A pound of gold is currently worth roughly $20,000 pre-SHTF. 25 pounds of salt costs $3.75-$4 if bought in bulk (50 cases at a time)...
So for the cost of one pound of gold you could buy 133,000 pounds of salt. Of course no one can say for sure, but I think that's a kind's ransom worth of salt in an SHTF scenario.
Of course no one (well most people) would stockpile THAT much even if they subscribed t
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i'm not sure if you're the real apk or just an imposter, but you probably don't want me bringing up that old buggy python script of yours again eh? :-P
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lol sorry apk i just realized you weren't actually replying to my comment... apparently i haven't drunk enough coffee thismorning :-)
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I just want to know how many first steps they can take, it seems I am always hearing about this first step or that first step
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Actually you're misremembering what's alway been the first step. It's just that before taking a second step, one must go halfway and take the first step. But before taking that first step, one must go halfway and take half a step. But before taking that half a step, one must go halfway and take a quarter step. . .
tl;dr: it's halfsies all the way down.
Reddit title more irresponsible, but better quote (Score:3)
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...
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JET is in the UK, NIF is in California.
Where all those stupid Americans are you know...
Re:Reddit title more irresponsible, but better quo (Score:4, Informative)
"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".
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the world will not be the same again. Cheap energy, without CO2 pollution. Wow.
Except the fuel is radioactive (tritium), and the fusion creates lots of neutrons that irradiate and structurally weaken everything around them, likely producing more nasty nuclear waste than fission reactors, which were also once predicted to produce energy "too cheap to meter."
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likely producing more nasty nuclear waste than fission reactors
I'll need a source to believe that's "likely" rather than "conceivably".
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Actually it was fusion power that was going to be too cheap to meter but it makes a good story to attribute it to fission plants. The prediction was the product of a marketing executive, not someone with any real knowledge of the science, engineering, finance or commercial operation of any such facility. Makes a great soundbite though, doesn't it?
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likely producing more nasty nuclear waste than fission reactors,
It will produce more waste by volume, but it will be short lived, much shorter than fission waste with only a little effort in selection of materials. You can find leftover parts from experiments like TFTR that are no longer radioactive because things like activated iron and copper decay quite quickly. The only reason you can still find it though is it is required to be labeled as radioactive waste as long as it has any measurable radioactivity, even if it is less than background or less than newly create
Now that the Voodoo is swept away (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Now that the Voodoo is swept away (Score:5, Informative)
The issue is that the previous management were attempting to achieve ignition through an engineering approach. They assumed that the science was well understood and all they needed to do was tweak the knobs and dials on the laser until they got the result they wanted.
When this spectacularly failed to work there was a change in leadership and the new guys are actually doing experiments rather than just firing the 'ignition' capsule over and over.
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Voodoo based economics.
They gave the hydrogen a tax break, hoping that at some point it would be incentivized enough to fuse for them.
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Well, it's a little unfair. The problem is that the strong nuclear interactions are totally unwieldy. You can't solve them without giant supercomputers, which are not always up to the task of working on such complicated systems. They used the best models available and figured that a little experimentation would guide them to the right answer. But things turned out not to match the models as well as they had hoped.
Thus, they had to scramble to put together a more rigorous model, which is what has been transl
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The problem is that the strong nuclear interactions are totally unwieldy. You can't solve them without giant supercomputers,
Shhh. Don't tell Richard Feynman and his buddies [wikipedia.org].
Woooo (Score:2)
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My money is on this version...
http://iec.neep.wisc.edu/ [wisc.edu]
This is the reason ppl are talking about mining the moon, Helium-3 is
needed for this method.
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That movie was fucking awesome.
Still this old school apporach? (Score:1, Funny)
if this keeps up... (Score:3)
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.
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May be they should deal with the immense loss trough X-Ray issue?
Re:if this keeps up... (Score:5, Interesting)
The best performance of a tokamak I know of was the JET run back in the 90s where they got about 22MJ out of plasma in about 1.5 seconds, a rate of 15MW for that time. It was nowhere near "ignition", it took significantly more energy to create that plasma than it emitted while it lasted.
The NIF people talk about "ignition" because that's what they do, it's in their name after all. Magnetic fusion people talk about Q factor. Q=1 is breakeven where the same amount of fusion energy is produced as is pumped in to make and heat the plasma. I think the best Q figure JET has ever achieved is about 0.6 and only for a very brief time.
The ITER tokamak under construction on France is expected to return values of Q > 10 eventually, with 50MW input producing more than 500MW of thermal energy in a fusion plasma that can be sustained for hundreds of seconds and hopefully it won't have to be rebuilt after every run.
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Re:if this keeps up... (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody really knows since nobody's ever got a significant amount of fusion to work for long enough to figure out the gas mileage, so to speak.
The golden chalice is deuterium-deuterium (D-D) fusion which can be done with just heavy water, D2O which is expensive but abundant (it makes up about 1 part in 40 million of water molecules), it just has to be separated out from regular water using centrifuges or other processes. Assuming a lot of fusion power plants are built then there would be be cost savings per tonne of deuterium produced the same way uranium mining and processing is a lot cheaper today than it was during WWII. D-D fusion is hard though.
The easier road to fusion is deuterium-tritium, so-called D-T fusion but tritium is only produced in small amounts in nuclear fission reactors. There is a way to produce tritium in a working fusion reactor by using a blanket of lithium to absorb neutrons but it's very experimental and unproven. ITER is being built in part to test the idea of Li breeding of tritium and it's likely JET will also be used to test the concept, it's being repurposed as a materials testbed for ITER.
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That 1 part in 40 million figure, while not wrong, is misleading.
Quoting Wikipedia:
So the hydrogen in the ocean is 1/6420 deuterium. Getting two of the deuteriums into one molecule is rare, but we don't really care. Chemical bonds are unimportant energetically compared to nuclear reactions.
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I did specify D2O as being 1 part in 40 million, not DHO which is a lot more common. Deuterium for plasma fuel needs to be reasonably pure at the moment, it's one of the things the ITER program is tasked with, to see just how crappy the deuterium:hydrogen ratio in fuel can be and still produce good Q levels and burn times. This will reduce the cost of producing fuel in the long run.
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I don't think JET ever reached Q of 1, but it can handle the most energy dense fuel of any current tokamak (The JET Q of 0.6 is still ~100x larger than NIF). However, a Japanese tokamak did reach Q of 1.25 in the mid 90s, and it wasn't something guys in the field I knew talked about as a problem by the late 90s.
There's a big challenge in getting the energy out of a fusion reactor. There are parts of a reactor which need to collect energetic particles so they could even theoretically produce power. This s
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I have a vague recollection the Japanese tokamak you mention (the JT-60?) was running on D-D fuel and they calculated that if they had used D-T they'd have got Q>1 but it wasn't set up to run with tritium. A moral victory if not a real achievement. The Japanese are in the ITER consortium and the JT-60 is being rebuilt and upgraded as part of the total research effort, like JET at Culham.
ITER is being built right now and the designers believe it will give them several hundred seconds of 500MW of thermal e
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Yeah there are are few projects out there that just get ignored because they don't profile
for a long term huge cash cow for the revolving door crowd in DC.
the revolving door is where corporate and government cronies switch jobs
for awhile, whenever its time to change policy to the benefit of select fat cats.
Wall Street and the Treasury department is one of the more obvious examples,
but it happens at other branches of the government as well.
This is what always happens, money, power, sex, drugs, and any other
The other shoe will surely drop (Score:1)
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Cue the anti-NIF greentard hate; "...but just use the big fusion reactor in the sky herp derp..."
3... 2... 1...
Beautiful world (Score:2)
What a beautiful world this will be.
What a glorious time to be free!
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure time for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young.
Call it what it is: A weapon test (Score:2, Insightful)
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 th
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Yeah, I made a mistake there. It's either 200,000,000 kJ per day or 200,000,000,000 J per day or 200,000,000,000 kJ per day to get 1GW and not 1MW.
Re:Call it what it is: A weapon test (Score:4, Interesting)
What did you expect? The funding, building and research the NIF does is provided by the DoD. The primary interest IS to find ways to increase yield on weapons. The fact that the research can also be used towards civilian energy interests is a pleasant bonus.
Unfortunately, doing science like this has to be done under the auspices of other interests or it doesn't happen. Things like alternative fuels, climate change, etc., are happening under the DoD because of it. (Yes, climate studies are done because they're of vital interests to maintaining security. And alternative fuels as well as not having to rely on diesel trucked in has strategic interests - considering by the time it's all said and done, the fuel cost is around $400/gallon. Not counting lives lost)
Hell, any science done that isn't in a nation's interest is also cut. E.g., Canada cut funding to scientists with "inconvenient" topics (like pollution, fish habitat protection, environment, climate change) because they went against let's go sell oil around the world damn the earth mentality.
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It's just that the "pleasant bonus" isn't there. It's red herring.
I would be much less upset if this wasn't being called a fusion power project, because it simply isn't. And it hurts the credibility of the very real fusion power projects out there that can actually be scaled to be what they claim to be. NIF is just going to be yet another example people will hold up when they claim that fusion power is a sham and shouldn't be funded.
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That is a great comment.
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Damned, already spent my mod points.
Hey, idiots, this isn't a troll, it's insightful and informative.
NIF is for bomb testing. It's nothing to do with power generation.
FIRST Step? What have you been doing??? (Score:3)
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.
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First step has many meaning. Clearly it's not the very first thing they did.
Lighten up, Francis.
Meh. (Score:2)
They ALL take FIRST steps toward fusion energy. I'll get excited when one of these machines takes the LAST steps.
This step is going to (Score:2)
Rock you like a Hurricane!
Cool. (Score:3)
-Fusion reactor spokesman, 1960
engineering, not physics (Score:2)
We know how the physics of fusion works. What they are really trying to do now is design a cost-efficient device. That's an engineering task, not a task for physicists, and they don't seem to be very good at it.
If you look at this result, billions spent to achieve a neutron flux that theoretically contains slightly more energy than a theoretical number grabbed out of a hat, it's useless and a gigantic waste of money. They are as far away from energy production as ever.
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The hydrogen bomb IS a fusion bomb. Its been around since 1952.
The match you use to light a fusion bomb is a small atomic (fission) bomb. [britannica.com]
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Actually, most of the yield of a thermonuclear weapon comes from fission, not fusion. The fission bomb triggers the fusion, which then acts as a sort of "booster" for the fission process.
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most of the yield of a thermonuclear weapon comes from fission, not fusion
Wrong. Go read Wikipedia.
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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 t
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So in fact the yield doesn't have to come mostly from fission. Its just usually done that way because its more efficient.
The fact is fusion is 10 times more powerful per unit of weight than fission at delivering explosive power.
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It's at best 5 times better. (21MeV from fusion of H-2 and H-3 vs. 200MeV from fission of U-235 or Pu-239). But since you won't use pure tritium and deuterium, and instead something like partially tritated lithium deuteride, where you breed your tritium from lithium in-situ, the ratio drops further to something like a factor of 3. In terms of volume (which is important for MIRVs), you'll find that using uranium is in fact *better* by a factor of 3 to 5.
And it isn't going to be lighter in any case, since you
Re:Not going to take them long now... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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It's a good idea and, like all good ideas, somebody already had it. It's called subcritical reactor [wikipedia.org]. But it's nuclear fission technology and so, as usual in the last two or three decades, nobody really gives a shit.
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Fission fusion hybrids have been thought of. Unfortunately you tend to get all the problems of both - the fusion part is still expensive, while the fission means you still have a big decay heat problem to deal with.
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H-Bomb employ's fusion ignition, however the uranium fission is the destructive force behind the weapon. This will allow them essentially to turn the ignition of a thermonuclear weapon into the actual weapon, and much more destructive and compact.