NIF Aims For the Ultimate Green Energy Source 234
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."
A better alternative (Score:3, Insightful)
$3.5 billion? This is a better alternative than giving the money to the UAW.
Re:A better alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
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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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Because solar power is very finite.
One could argue about what the term endless means. You might say "There will always be more of it." I would then point out that there will always be more oil as well.
All energy in this sense is endless. Therefore, I'd suggest that the world endless here actually implies unlimited.
Don't get me wrong, I love clean energy, I love emission taxes, I love regulation on energy efficiency, etc, I just dismiss anything that promises unlimited clean safe energy.
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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Yeah, I don't get that. How come the US, UK etc all seem to be in so much "national debt". Who do we owe this debt to? And what's to stop us from going further in to debt, if we're already trillions of dollars/pounds into it? What is the limit, and who's meant to come round and break our fingers if we don't pay up?
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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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China is important, but a lot of national debt is "stored" in T-bills and T-bonds, and these are purchased by investment organizations in the US and abroad.
What happens if the US doesn't pay up? The dollar is a fiat currency, which unlike a gold backed currency, lives and dies by the faith people put in it. So, if people lose faith in the dollar, there are plenty of other currencies out there. The Chinese yuan, the Euro, and others have strong backers to be the standard for oil and commodities trading on
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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
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If I understand the system, the bonds generally have a face value, and they are sold at an auction to the highest bidder. Thus if the bidders lose confidence in the government's ability to repay, or if they lose confidence in the currency that the government will repay in (because the currency is predicted to undergo high inflation), the price on those bonds goes down = the government has to keep promising more for less in order to meet it's current expense
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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Doing a little back-of-the-envelope calculation, GMNA (GM North America) sells at least 32 vehicles per North American employee per year (based on their worst year in recent history, 2008)
GM had been reporting between $10,000 to $15,000 in per unit profit for SUV sales, so each employee was *making* the company between $320,000 and $480,000 per year.
Well cry
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Your back of the envelope math fails to take into account facilities and maintenance I suspect. They're going to lose X billion dollars to have all the factories they do, now each vehicle they make makes Y dollars. If they don't sell X/Y vehicles they lose money.
That being said, GM really does/did have serious mismanagement issues.
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Your back of the envelope math fails to take into account facilities and maintenance I suspect.
It accounts for every employee they had in North America (includes Mexico and Canada), and they seem to have sold 32 vehicles per employee in North America in the same time frame, 2008.
The $10,000 to $15,000 in profit per SUV was stated by GM themselves. Thats above all production/facilities/maintenance costs.
If you make your employer a yearly profit greater than a quarter of a million dollars per year, wouldn't you expect.. even demand.. a decent health-care package?
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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."
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In the late 1980's, GM and the other American automakers got raped by foreign competition, and it is the SUV that saved them. They lost market share nearly every year since then on compacts and sedans. By 2003, GM was making nearly 700,000 SUV's per year in the United States alone. Their largest American factory was producing a quarter of a million SUV's annually. GM was still producing several million SUV's per year globally until the first quarter of this year. Yes, GM m
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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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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It isn't easy to repeatedly attach the same three bolts to part after part all day long or to operate a machine doing more or less the same.
Many years ago I had a temporary job at a factory that made tools (drill bits, mills, etc.) It was tedious, just as you say - for about 3 days. And then it was smooth. You have whole day to think, for example. You load the blank part into the machine, press the button - and you have, say, 30 seconds of no action; the machine is doing what it's programmed to do. Then
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Perhaps you'd like to give up your 40 hours work weeks, week ends, OSHA regulations, retirement and disability insurance
First of all, you don't need a union to enforce OSHA regulations. There are plenty of other ways employees can get their employers to enforce OSHA regulations. Secondly, whats this nonsense about 40 hour work weeks and week ends and insurance? There are plenty of industries in the united states right now that don't offer any of those to their employees AND those employees make way less than their uneducated counterparts working in the unions. So please, get a reality check. UAW workers demand stuff they don
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Perhaps you'd like to give up [...] OSHA regulations
This is one of the things that always struck me as interesting.
Way back when, employers created dangerous working conditions because it was cheaper than providing safe working conditions. Employees banded together to create unions to force employers to provide safe working conditions. And we all thought this was a good thing.
Then the government came along and created OSHA--The Occupation Safety and Health Administration. So we now have a government organization that protects workers from dangers in the w
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.
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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. -Oz
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?
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.
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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That isn't conspiracy, that's good policy. In the real world, even the most brilliant scientists have to feed their families. If you don't pay them to use their brilliance, it will be wasted mopping floors or whatever. With the private sector shutting down their R&D (goodbye, Bell Labs) if we want to keep these folks in the US we have to find something for them to do. A far better use of tax money than entitlements.
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That being said, creating initiatives that are just to spend money is bad policy. Spending money on longshots isn't necessarily bad neither is spending money on long term goals. The ISS/Space shuttle despite all the opinions to the contrary has been very productive. There's a lot of technology that gets designed for that whi
Re:Mirror of the mirror (Score:5, Informative)
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Actually, assuming that the would operate the plants, actually the corporations who control the power grid would want fusion power to succeed-- fusion power plants fit very well into their business model.
... Deuterium-Tritium can be picked up off the ground, but not on planet earth.
Not on any planet. Tritium has a 12.3 year half-life; it doesn't exist naturally.
Someone is going to have to go to the moon and get a bucket of the stuff.
You're thinking of Helium-3, another possible fusion fuel. (One that's harder to ignite, but once it's ignited, easier to produce electrical power from).
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The project was cancelled by the Reagan administration the day the facility was finished.
Reagan had a total hard-on for the destruction of ANYTHING that looked even remotely green. Barely a week after he was in office, he wiped out the entire solar initiative-including the panels on the roof-turned up the thermostat and eliminated ALL price controls on domestic oil, which set us up for the biggest oil glut the world had ever seen. Executive order 12881 [utexas.edu]
The popular phrase for such folks, is "They couldn't
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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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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
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Which makes sense. Measuring our fusion progress on the bang-the-rocks-together-guys to steam-engine scale, we're just at the point where we've figured out how to make pretty sparks.
If they break even, it's significant breakthrough, even if they don't net much. It puts fusion power in a different risk category for investing research dollars.
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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
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Just like building software. The first version is never the best version, but it's a good place to start from.
~X~
40 years (Score:2, Funny)
Moses leading a team? Will he stop and ask for directions?
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No, it'll take 40 years again. After all, fusion is always 40 years in the future. It will certainly be now!
Maybe they'll get lucky, but I'm not hopeful (Score:2)
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.
yeah but (Score:2)
cheap energy also means we can get off this planet
so we can build, eat and fuck other planets into desolate wastelands
so it all works out, see?
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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Recycling and clean manufacturing processes will become economically viable because the energy to do it will be cheap.
Recycling already takes less energy than mining for example. Say copper. However it is still *more profitable* to run a copper mine. The low cost of energy makes mining cheap. *Expensive* energy makes recycling viable.
People will fight fewer wars over geographically concentrated energy resources.
So reducing death rates and increasing populations, growing the economy. Concrete concrete, everywhere.
Wealthy people reproduce less than poor ones, so population growth will be slowed or even reversed.
Wealthy people consume vastly more. Compare the USA with Bangladesh.
Cheap clean energy will save the planet.
Take a look around at what cheap oil did. Cheaper energy means more concrete, more steel, more glass. Cheaper energy (clean
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.
Re:synchronizing nearly 200 lasers (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, microseconds are easy. Cheapo function generators synchronize to within nanoseconds, and femtoseconds are common timings for laser systems now.
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.
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.
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.
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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You are clearly not educated enough.
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.
Fusion reactors put off a hell of a lot more neutrons than fission reactors. You can do aneutronic fission, but not with the
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?
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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If the rest of your explanation is as accurate as that, I'm glad I stopped reading.
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As long as you're comparing fusion to fission, you might want to consider the total amount of waste created. Usually we hear about Cobalt-60 in the context of nickel activation of stainless steel reactor vessels. Cobalt-60 isn't long-lived compared to the high-level waste generated by fission; it has a half-life of about 5 years. Just mothball the reactor core for a few decades, as opposed to trucking tons of highly radioactive material out to a vault (that doesn't exist yet) where it's going to have to sit
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A design that I saw called for an inner wall of lithium. Something about generating tritium, though I don't remember the details. They did figure it would need to be replaced occasionally, but that it would be well worth it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think emitting particles that are both massive AND charged is WORSE than particles that are just massive.
You do realize that p is good old fashioned H+ right?
Hydrogen ions,
1) The same stuff that makes acids so corrosive
2) Once neutralized, the same stuff that made the hindenburg go boom.
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You *do* realize how silly you're being, don't you?
Just in case you don't, you are missing several orders of magnitude in the level of effects. And charged particles are easy to manipulate (and extract energy from) with magnetic fields.
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If I recall correctly, the ignition temperature for D + He 3 is considerably higher than the one that's being tried. And this is why nobody's experimenting with it.
OTOH, if you COULD manage it, extracting energy from that expelled proton would be simple electrical generator stuff (It *does* have a high velocity, doesn't it?) rather than the thermal extraction that's needed to get the energy from the neutron.
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Point Three: I'm all for it! (Score:2)
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.
So, this keeps us from having to explode nuclear weapons, and thus violate treaties?
Plus, it has side research benefits like experimental data for inertial confinement fusion?
And it only costs 3.5 Bn initially? That's not much more than an accounting error in a budget the size of Dept.
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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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The NIF is the ISS of the physics world.
A great work that will die early because of the biterness of scientists who don't get to play with it?
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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.
HiPER (Score:2, Informative)
Snake oil (Score:2)
Natural Resources Defense Council objects... (Score:2)
The Natural Resources Defense Council spokesman calls fusion "snake oil". Couldn't have seen that one coming... ;-) Reminds me of "Thank You For Smoking."
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Well... Kinda. If this pans out in 10 years (not bloody likely), and we can build one of these that is actually productive in another 10 years (not bloody likely), then I'd bet all my nickels that China will build a whole bunch of these in 30 years. And while it might not help OUR situation, now, it would sure as hell help ward off the disaster that China will be in 50 years - unless there is a clean alternative.
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).
Re: (Score:2)
True, but resources are scarce. What would that $3.5B buy if it went towards grants and research in wind, solar, tide, geotherm and other renewables? Solving the bird/bat problem for wind for example would be a big economic driver (as a random example of odd solutions that grant programs can help solve but industry might not take on until later in the market cycle).
NIF would never get funded if it didn't have a military benefit driving it. Selling NIF as a renewable energy project seems somewhat like callin
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]
re syncing... (Score:2)
Just a reminder, femtoseconds may be common/easy today, but what we did was done 12 years ago as a prototype an proof of concept. I'm not talking about femtosecond lasers either. This project was to synchronize multiple devices over varying distances from each other and from a source, not to generate ultra short pulses.
Re: (Score:2)
I saw this a few hours ago for a link into the YRO section also - now I'm worried!
Re:Did slashdot just got slashdotted? (Score:5, Funny)
Greedy databases rose up and demanded free space. We negotiated a settlement.
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.
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.
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.
Wow; just WOW (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't a pissing contest.
ALL the possibilities need to be explored. So Mr. Thomas Cochran needs to STFU and deal with his proposed solutions and quite bitching about efforts of others.
Re: (Score:2)
This Cochran guy is just pissed off because he didn't receive funding for his proposed warp drive.
Re: (Score:2)
qz
Re: (Score:2)
NIF is a weapons program first and foremost. I don't know why they've been trying to sell it to the public lately. Perhaps they're worried about a cut in funding?
You've put your finger on one of the main issues with Laser ICF: repetition rate. Let's say NIF is designed to do one "shot" per day right now. I've heard that a reactor is going to need to do one shot per second for the economics to work out.
Related to that is the construction of the Hohlraum that holds the DT ice and also serves to re-radiate the