Z Machine Makes Progress Toward Nuclear Fusion 151
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.
John Titor (Score:2)
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Seriously dude, try this [mozilla.org] and this [mozilla.org] and this [mozilla.org]
Flashblock (Score:4, Informative)
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 [bespokerealities.com], you'll have to click before Flaxo will start.
Re: Flashblock (Score:2)
Flashblock is built into my iPad.
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Flashblock is built into my iPad.
Flashblock for iPad produces "This content is not available on mobile. Click here to send yourself an e-mail to remind you to view it later on a desktop computer." on sites that use Flash for not-advertising purposes. The version for PC at least lets you click through.
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Whoosh!
What I'm saying is that iOS doesn't support Flash in the first place.
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Ultimatum (Score:2)
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Gotta be a downside somewhere (Score:2, Interesting)
Wouldn't it suck (literally and figuratively) if we discovered that the waste product of a fusion reaction are gravitons?
I'm worried (Score:2)
Re: visualizations and lists of whirled peas (Score:2)
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 [sonoma.edu] 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 avoid
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The problem with a black hole target, other than the obvious inability to make a miniature black hole that can be stable enough to fire something at it, would be that while the two protons may or may not fuse in the heart of the black hole, we will never know because they have crossed the event horizon and the energy they may or may not produce is now beyond our ability to detect and to a greater degree use.
Just saying
Re:Gotta be a downside somewhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and all the stars in the sky would have collapsed, and we would have created black holes at H-bomb test sites.
There might be nuclear waste to worry about given stray neutrons, but gravitons aren't something I'm worried about.
Re:Gotta be a downside somewhere (Score:5, Interesting)
uh... there's actually no minimum size for a star to collapse from to form a black hole. The only real requirements are that the star reaches the Fe phase at which point nuclear reactions become endothermic and the core collapses, rebounds at the neutron threshold, collides with the plasma outer shell sending that out and imploding with enough force to collapse again - this time beyond the neutron threshold. For a star with a start mass of ~1.4Msol, this would mean the core containing at least 50% of the stellar mass (0.7Msol) collapsing to a neutron sphere no more than 11 miles in diameter. The average mass of a Milky Way black hole is estimated to be 10Msol (or a start mass of 20Msol or thereabouts). The Fe+He phase (also known as the neutrino phase) of stellar evolution is estimated to last somewhere in the region of twenty millionths of a second and produces all the heavier elements in the universe in a supernova explosion. Less massive stars will die less violently, shedding outer layers over time and/or simply cooling. Few if any with masses less than about 0.75Msol will even reach the Fe phase before simply expiring. I do subscribe to the notion that Jupiter is a failed star, particularly given that it does radiate more than it receives from Sol.
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I do subscribe to the notion that Jupiter is a failed star,
I, on the other hand, view the sun as a failed gas giant.
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Aspiring future gas giant. Wait a few billion years.
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You are thinking of a Red Giant.
Re:Gotta be a downside somewhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Jupiter radiates more heat than it recieves not because it is a failed star, but because of gravitational contraction and something called differentiation, which is the layering of lighter and hevier elements sorting out (like dressing separating after you shake it).
The notion that Jupiter is radiating excess heat and, therefore, is a failed star is a tempting idea, but it is far from being a star. By an order of magnitude or three.
Jupiter needs 100x more mass to be a star (Score:3)
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
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You could have e.g. lithium burning, but from a quick google search it is expected from about 65 jovian masses and above, and deuterium fusion would occur at 13 jovian masses.
So let's imagine Jupiter had been 20 times as big in terms of mass (radius would be virtually the same). It would have been kind of a star, but the "fuel" would have been depleted for billions years anyway.
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So does the Earth. 47 terawatts [wikipedia.org] is a considerable amount.
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So does the Earth.
No, it doesn't.
Your link only talks about one side of the energy budget. The whole equation takes the energy coming in from Sol into account [wikipedia.org].
In fact, your own link says, "Despite its geological significance, this heat energy coming from Earth's interior is actually only 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface, which is dominated by 173,000 TW of incoming solar radiation."
47 TW is less of a considerable amount than 173 PW.
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Re: I just hope (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly in fission you are trying to hold the reaction back. That's why it can run away. Think of it like holding a dog against a leash. It the leash breaks the dog is gone.
Fusion is the opposite. It's like trying pull a mule. You can barely get the thing moving.
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> Let's just hope that fusion turns out to be really, really hard to achive (meaning ITER), not a table-top experiment.
> Or else we are doomed.
I'm not sure what fallacy you've invoked, but certainly you should be able to imagine that the amount of substance fused per unit time could be proportional to the volume of the device used to produced said fusion, with a small-enough proportionality constant that we'd all still be safe, no?
Or were you still joking? Sorry if my detector got confused...
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> at least for a fraction of a second you get conditions for fusing a large amount of deuterium
You didn't read, or understand, my post. It could very well be possible that the amount of fuel the reactor can fuse is proportional to the size of the reactor --- just because you have a tiny amount of very hot plasma doesn't mean you can use it to fuse more fuel than that. If it were that simple, we'd have had viable fusion power long ago.
> it is explosive in the same way as classical explosives
Yes, with a
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Uh, no. The containment is only going to rupture from the excess pressure long before the pressure is even close enough to, itself, produce fusion (no material known to man, or likely to exist at room temperature and pressure, is strong enough to contain the pressures necessary to produce fusion).
I'm certain you'd be better off just using the electical power from your Mr. Fusion to produce chemical explosives (see my other post [slashdot.org]).
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if I understand correctly, fusion reactions (and explosions) are much cleaner than fission in terms of the types of radioactivity produced. The initial release of energy and burst of gamma rays sucks for everybody, but the subsequent fall out is not as bad and the isotopes decay a lot faster.
Can anybody help with their further insights here?
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Can anybody help with their further insights here?
Allow me to introduce you to wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. Keep it under your hat. Barely anyone knows about it. [/teasing]
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> The initial release of energy and burst of gamma rays
If we manage to get to aneutronic fusion [wikipedia.org] (much more difficult than most of the fusion reactions being examined currently), then the reactor theoretically could run for a very long time without having to have parts replaced. Lawrenceville Plasma Physics [lawrencevi...hysics.com] is trying to attain proton-boron fusion in a dense plasma focus machine, but most people think they're being a bit optimistic. I'm rooting for them, nevertheless.
My impression was that the major proble
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hm.
A tactical nuclear warhead holds enough fuel hydrogen to fill a party balloon. That's several quadrillion atoms.
Atom smashers you're talking about smashing *a few dozen atoms* together. Per *year*.
No where close (Score:4, Informative)
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...
Re:No where close (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words they aren't even remotely close to a meaningful breakthrough. Nothing to see here, move along...
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.
A factor of a hundred here, a factor of a hundred there, and pretty soon you're talking about orders of magnitude.
Just a cry for funding (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Just a cry for funding (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't know that, unless you have foreknowledge of exactly which steps will have proven necessary to accomplish the ultimate goal.
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We've been "making progress" in fusion research for 50 years now
I know that seems like a long time, but put it in perspective. It's not even a single human lifetime.
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Rubbish - it works, just far too well to be useful (Score:2)
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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.
So what you are implying is, that we should just cut our losses and scrap all fusion research, give the finding money to others, and never try this again.....all because progress is not fast enough for you.
wow.....just...wow.
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With tokamaks there's precisely been exponential progress over 50 years, which got us around Q=1 these days (which is not actually enough and we need more than seconds or minutes or operation too). That makes tokamaks somewhat credible and ITER/DEMO have a chance of working.
Yes funding should be higher. I don't think fusion research costs that much. I would rather see all manned space programs abandoned, and maybe too many resources (minds) are wasted on string theories for example.
Re: No where close (Score:2)
I wonder how many factors of 100 you need to get to orders of magnitude... I'm thinking at least one.
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Extrapolation (Score:2)
Nonsense! At this rate they should have 10,000 times as many by next year!
Obligatory XKCD on extrapolation [xkcd.com]
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Easy to double a small number (Score:2)
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?
But that's not what they are saying. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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100 times as many as the team achieved a year agoâ"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...
The words are hard to parse to establish the baseline, but it either says that they need to make as much more progress as they made last year (100x), or they need two more years like last year (100x * 100x) to achieve breakeven.
What's unclear is if they made methodical o
okay, but... (Score:2)
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.
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Advancing at 100x per year, they're only 2 years away from breakeven.
Of course, advances are rarely regular, so they could be much closer to breakeven, or further.
Actually its Democrats that kill Nuclear ... (Score:2)
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,
Re:Actually its Republicrats that kill Nuclear ... (Score:2)
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 [opensecrets.org], 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) a
Re: Actually its Democrats that kill Nuclear ... (Score:2)
What I'm longing to see is the epic matter-antimafter collision that is about to occur between the Warmists and the No Nukers. This is why I'm secretly hoping for the worst-case greenhouse gas scenario to be validated.
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As a left/liberal who realizes that nuclear power is the only stopgap which might prevent a fatally large amount of coal from being burned before fusion reactors can be worked out, the opposition of the environmental movement to nuclear reactors simply bowls me over. Thanks to those fucking assholes we've seen a resurgence of coal burning.
The problem is that there's real environmentalists and there's the luddites who want to force society back to 1850 levels of energy utilization. And in the classic downfal
More information: (Score:1)
"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
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US spent a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq. If the billion is spent in US and it uses US manufacturers, then it's basically an infusion into the economy.
Re:More information: (Score:5, Informative)
Can you imagine if we put the war on drugs budget against fusion power instead? If we had started 40 years ago we might already have it.
Money Has Never Been The Problem. (Score:2)
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 [worldsfairphotos.com]
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 [wikipedia.org]
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They already had fission power, and the fusion bomb, seemed reasonable at the time.
Question is: what would society look like with unlimited free energy? Even without greenhouse problems, can you imagine every hut in India, China and Africa powered with 500 amps of unmetered 220VAC? Stick a 50,000BTU wall unit in the side of an uninsulated hut, and you can have any temperature you want inside. Carbon arc perimeter lighting for the village, turns night into day. Melt the sand to make glass roads... it's a
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Can you imagine if we put the war on drugs budget against fusion power instead? If we had started 40 years ago we might already have it.
Control of people is more important than control of energy. I feel certain the rulers of this world would be happy to go back to stone age living conditions if the alternative would mean losing control.
Meanwhile in a suburban garage... (Score:5, Interesting)
... A high school student working on a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor [wikipedia.org] 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.
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... A high school student working on a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor [wikipedia.org] 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.
How do you accelerate an ampere?
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You take one Ampere-second (i.e. 1 Coulomb) of electrons per second, and accelerate them.
Text Adventures (Score:4)
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Breakeven != economical (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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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
Yes they are relatively efficient (much more so than ICF with lasers), but even 8 shots a day is way off. When I worked there it was 1 shot in an average ~12 hour day if nothing went wrong or broke. The turnaround time between shots is huge since so much hardware is destoyed each time ...
Viablity (Score:2)
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Pulse generation - why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Cost is about $15 billion. If there was real confidence it would work, the private sector would fund it.
What I think is telling is that at $15B you could have something like 5 GW sized fission plants. Even many research reactors have provisions to use utilize it's heat to produce electricity. Yet for all that money there are not only no provisions to produce electricity using ITER, but no provisions to even be able to install components to produce electricity.
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Why woud the private sector fund it? There is not much to patent as IP in a tokamak that wont be expired by the time it's built, all the private sector would be doing is spending the initial capital while the competitor copies the design.
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No. The scientific theory is that a tokamak design will work if you build one large enough. However there is a risk involved since nobody has actually done it. Therefore, somebody has to spend the $20 billion to prove definitively that it works. After that $20 billion is spent, there is no (meaningful) intellectual property to assert because you can't patent a large version of an existing design especially when it wasn't even your idea that scaling up works. Also, the next guy to build one would be able to
E-cat is also making headlines (Score:2)
Busard's Polywell is more interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
My submission of a couple of days ago.
"The EM2 corportation has submitted a paper to axiv.org http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0133 [arxiv.org] 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... [nbcnews.com] . 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.
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Dude, this project (MagLIF) is a few million, not billions.
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No, the Z machine's budget for the last 30 years is much more than that
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It is dark. You could be eaten by a grue.