Laser Fusion Passes Major Hurdle 354
chill writes "The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has performed their first controlled fusion experiments using all 192 lasers. While still not ramped up to full power, the first experiments proved very fruitful. The lasers create a lot of plasma in the target container and researchers worried that the plasma would interfere with the ability of the target to absorb enough energy to ignite. These experiments show that not only does enough energy make it through, the plasma can be manipulated to increase the uniformity of compression. Ramping up of power is due to start in May." The project lead, Dr. Sigfried Glenzer, is "confident that with everything in place, ignition is on the horizon. He added, quite simply, 'It's going to happen this year.'"
So... (Score:2, Funny)
In 5 years I can have Mr. Fusion where I can put junk to power my flying car...
Sweet.
I just hope that fax machines don't come back into style and have multiple for every house.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:4, Funny)
Just don't take it any faster than 85 miles an hour.
Unless you want to visit the '80's, the '50's, or the old west.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
Just don't take it any faster than 85 miles an hour.
Unless you want to visit the '80's, the '50's, or the old west.
It's actually 88 miles per hour.
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speedometer calibration is never perfect. (just ask a traffic court). He was allowing for some leeway.
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
You think the interstate system was a failure?
Well... given that the existence of the interstate infrastructure created the incentives that destroyed the locomotive as the main means of in-land shipping in America, and in other ways promoted the reliance on the automobile that's ended public transit in most areas and greatly exacerbated global warming... possibly yes. : p
But I think the parent's point was actually the same as yours -- cynicism about Everybody Else's willingness to do something that'll have a profit after the next quarterly earnings report.
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No, it killed passenger trains. Rail is the preferred method of inland transportation in the container shipping industry, and is cheaper than trucking. As a matter of fact, the reason passenger trains are so expensive is because cargo shipped on rail is that beneficial to everyone involved that passenger trains can't compete with it.
Interstate Hwys: A Government Program that Worked (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, the interstate highway system did kill trains, especially the interurban trains surrounding urban areas. But that isn't the point. The building of the interstate system, a massive government project, succeeded in reaching its goal of allowing the utilization of vast swaths of under-utilized land, allowing commensurate increases in economic capacity. This was the real goal of pushing automobile transportation. Unfortunately, implicit in this goal was a massive surge in
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and greatly exacerbated global warming
How many times, global warming is NOT caused by man ... it's caused by the sun, you idiot.
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Yes, the fuel/energy companies of today are used to long term payoffs. They will be the ones making these investments. Assuming there aren't liability potentials with Fusion (insurance liabilities are whats really hampering nuclear, and the feds inability to see into the future isn't helping). These companies will be investing. But don't expect them to invest until the science is proven either.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
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What the country needs to do is give me ultimate authority for creating long term clean electricity program.
We would use half the oils we use now in 9 years, and 90% less in 18 years.
So what (Score:2)
However, just as with fission, it's likely nothing will be built without massive amounts of subsidy, and it will pay off only in a span of decades
I think you would actually find a coalition of both democrats and republicans that could be for fusion subsidies. And, the whole lot will get cheaper as the much smaller free electron lasers replace the laser design in NIF.
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Looks like a tabletop fusion wanabe. It is made of laser, that could teoreticaly fit a smaler volume, and pelets of deuterium, that is quite easy to gather from nature. It may quite well lead to fusion machines so easy to create that the governemnt couldn't hope to control. Of course, that is more than 20 years on the future :)
Anyway, does anybody know what are the results of deuterion fusion (is it He4 or it irradiates something)? And about the pelets composed of deuterium and tritium, I didn't know one co
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Yeah, special interest groups wouldn't have any impact on this at all. Especially now that corporate contributions to political smear- I mean, opinion films has been lifted, I'm sure all the oil, natural gas, and coal groups will be glad to jump on it's back- I mean, aboard.
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People who make their money on scarcity fear the onset of plenty.
Everyone suffers from the, "What's good for me is good for America," syndrome, even me.
Put those two together, and you get your friend from Texas - or the MafiAA.
There's no shortage of science fiction that examines the impact of the "replicator" on society, sometimes as a side-item. I know a co-worker who is uncomfortable with ST:NG because it was "too socialistic". The way I looked at the series, the basics of life were so cheap that under
Oil dependence isn't a myth (Score:3, Interesting)
argued that if free energy were discovered tomorrow, then the whole economy of the world would collapse.
I agree this is clearly nonsense in the long run though some countries (Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, etc) who are primarily dependent on oil income would experience very severe economic problems. It is correct to say that oil is one of the underpinnings of the current economy and it would take some time for adjustment.
Of course, he simultaneously argued that oil production was used for so many applications that the world was dependent on it and could not function without it.
For the foreseeable future he is probably correct in that assertion. The number of products we use that have some form of oil-based products is astonishing. Besides fuels like g
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and imagine what the military-industrial-complex will think once we no longer have oil as a reason for war.
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They can still fight over the rare earth elements you need to build stuff like this.
</pessimist>
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Rare earth elements aren't actually that rare, and many are quite abundant. It's just one of those holdover terms, like using "atom" for describing something that isn't indivisible.
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Why would they want to make it cheaper.
It takes the same amount of money to pull it out of the ground, no matter how much they end up selling it for.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
***Don't you think that companies like BP and such will embrace this to make oil cheaper ? Oil is not just used for energy, there are other major uses :***
By the time this results in practical generation facilities, oil will almost certainly be both scarce compared to the number of people that "need" (i.e. want) it and expensive.
BP, Esso, et al know that. Unlike our politicians, auto makers, economists and planners, the oil companies deal in long term realities. Probably BP will own large chunks of the engineering, construction, operating and distribution companies that handle fusion power. ... assuming that fusion power ever turns out to be commercially viable.
I'm fine with that BTW. All I really want to see is enough rational conduct in the system to ensure stability.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're fired.
Terminology ? (Score:3, Insightful)
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That's one of the things the experimental reactor is supposed to determine, no?
Re:Terminology ? (Score:5, Informative)
Ignition means more fusion energy released than laser energy in. Yes, there are issues in scaling it up, but none that are known to be insurmountable. Already there have been experiments to look at target injection (a 2 GW power plant would be at the 5 - 10 Hz region), high rep-rate lasers (Mercury is an example of a high power, high rep-rate laser) and the lining up of the laser in this situation requires less precision than that of anti-missile systems that are around.
Also the Hohlraum approach is unlikely to be used in a power-plant, as it doesn't give the biggest energy gains, so this is basically a significant step towards projects such as HiPER [hiper-laser.org]. If NIF achieves success in ignition as is widely expected the money should be around for projects like HiPER.
Re:Terminology ? (Score:5, Informative)
I agree with most of what you said but I don't know where you got "and the lining up of the laser in this situation requires less precision than that of anti-missile systems that are around". That's definitely not true. Laser irradiation on a direct drive target for ignition requires exquisite precision. We recently demonstrated a significant hit on fusion yield in implosions of cryogenic, layered deuterium tritium ice capsules when beam pointing was off by TEN MICRONS. If you're injecting targets into your reactor chamber at 10Hz, you are going to need some serious, super accurate laser pointing unless you want your fusion yield to be severely diminished. That means real time tracking of the target with hundreds of final focusing lenses that are all about 10 meters (at least) away from the target chamber center. Good luck!
You don't even want to get into the problem of the cryogenic microcapsules melting before they reach the target chamber center. I've seen DT ice filled microcapsules melt, boil and explode within ~3 seconds of exposure to the thermal radiation from the inner wall of the TC at ambient temperature. Wanna take a guess as to how much that time is going to be reduced when your TC is at 800 Kelvin reactor operating temperature? Yeah, that means you are going to need to inject the pellets at extremely high velocity to minimize the thermal exposure time, and your lasers will then have to track it that much faster. Furthermore, how the hell do you deal with the horrible vibration on your focus lenses created by detonating the equivalent of roughly 50 pounds of dynamite (200 MJ) in the TC at 10Hz. Yeah... I'm as excited about this as anyone, but we have a LOT of problems still left to solve.
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I agree with most of what you said but I don't know where you got "and the lining up of the laser in this situation requires less precision than that of anti-missile systems that are around". That's definitely not true. Laser irradiation on a direct drive target for ignition requires exquisite precision.
I think you seriously underestimate the precision required for missile defense.
10 micrometer at a distance of 5m corresponds to about 60cm at 300km.
True the beam is 1.5m across as it leaves the mirror but due to atmospheric turbulence you can never be qu
Ignition = net positive energy (Score:4, Informative)
By definition, when they achieve ignition - there will be a self sustained, fusion reaction - the fusion reaction will sustain itself until its fuel is exhausted. More energy will be produced than was put in - a net positive in energy.
Of course there isn't any mechanism in NIF to collect the energy, but thats not really the point of the project...
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More energy will be _released_ than was put in - a net positive in energy.
your don't produce energy. you release it. just saying.
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Would this basically be like creating a tiny star?
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Re:Ignition = net positive energy (Score:5, Insightful)
AFAIK, this method of fusion is not nor will ever be self-sustained -- it simply doesn't work that way. You have to repeatedly fire the laser, once per fuel pellet. Once the pellet ignites, energy is released. After it's released, the pellet is exhausted. To release more energy, you have to insert a new pellet and repeat. It's not like there's a lot of fuel at the focus of the lasers that just needs one firing to ignite the fuel and it will chain-react. The only way to have a chain-reaction sustain itself with no input of energy would be to have the fuel at the high pressure and high temperature that's found at the core of a star. The laser temporarily creates a tiny spot of such pressure and temperature, but there's no way the reaction can sustain itself without repeated firing of the lasers.
Re:Ignition = net positive energy (Score:4, Informative)
uh... you must have a different definition of self-sustained than I do. Just because it isn't a star doesn't make it a failure. This isn't an infinite energy source they are producing. Its just one that will create a nuclear fusion reaction that doesn't require any more outside help to continue.
The reaction will be self-sustained until the fuel (a single tiny pellet) is exhausted.
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Re:Ignition = net positive energy (Score:4, Interesting)
"self-sustained" meaning positive net energy (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of a "self-sustained" laser fusion device is that it produces more power from each fusion blast than is needed to power the lasers.
The idea is that each fusion blast produces enough energy to fire the lasers for the next blast, plus some additional amount that can be used to do useful work.
Sure, it takes a constant stream of pellets as input, but a fission reactor uses fuel rods the same wayl.
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You know what's really funny - I was in junior high school, 8th grade to be exact, and living in Fremont, CA when we had a school field trip to ... you guessed it, Lawrence Livermore Labs.
That would have been around 1990 or thereabouts. And I'll be damned if they didn't give us a tour of a many-laser fuel pellet ignition fusion system that I thought was frigging cool at the time (I swear it was something like 40 or 60 pulsed lasers), though I recall wondering how they were ever going to get it to keep rele
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I find this incredibly sad. Aren't there any better, new ideas in fusion research to invest money and time into for experimental purposes?
Lots of people are working on different methods. Turns out they all take a lot of time and development to actually get working.
What I find sad is that so many of us don't seem to have the patience for things that are honestly and truly difficult to work out and that could really take many years to figure out. 30 years isn't very long in the history of science. Things m
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there are lots of approaches, that one just happens to be very promising.
Now as for the time it's taken it's not like they haven't been getting anywhere it's just that there's the little problem that what they're trying to do is really really hard.
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It's certainly not a new idea, but ITER (tokamak) is under construction in southern France. Of course, it won't be completed for some 10 years, and then the project is expected to run over 20 years after that. The plan is to sustain 500MW for up to 1000 seconds. Of course, they don't generate any electricity either, it's purely research.
I'm afraid we won't see any actual fusion power plants for quite a while barring something revolutionary.
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I find this incredibly sad. Aren't there any better, new ideas in fusion research to invest money and time into for experimental purposes?
How about Focus Fusion [focusfusion.org]?
Some of the major differences with this technique is that it doesn't produce neutrons as a by-product (which makes it much cleaner - no deadly neutron radiation requiring expensive shielding and disposal), and it produces electricity directly from the reaction, rather than the traditional method of producing heat for steam for a turbine generator.
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..horrendously glacial pace of fusion research...
Well other than orders of magnitude increase in confinement and understanding, i guess its "glacial" (compared to what? Improvments in coal burning?). The whole point of research is to find out what you already know, what you don't know, and what you need to find out. It turns out plasmas are bloody difficult to deal with and there was a lot to find out.
Our energy future need to lose this horrendously short sightedness. Its rather short sighted to assume nothing is been done just because you have no ide
This is wonderful! (Score:5, Funny)
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Now fusion energy is only 10 years away!
And will be for the next fifty years.
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To be fair it used to be 15 years away (admitedly more than 10 years ago) so in 50 years it'll only be 2 or 3 years away.
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I really pity the first person who gets fusion to work for energy:
"Hey Bob, fusion energy here."
"Yea Benny, I know, in ten years. I know that one.."
"No, here, just made it work. See: fusion here in my ignition facility. Energy output meter shows lot's of power. I made it!!"
"You actually realize that you effectively destroyed a years old meme in the Internet? FUCK YOU!"
"..."
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Re:This is wonderful! (Score:5, Funny)
Ha. Unlike CERN, they had the insight to build this thing inside an building that isn't in France. That means it is 99.999% proof against a pidgeon dropping a baguette in it.
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*Scurry*
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I suppose french swallows could carry baguette slices to california, if encased in a coconut shell?
Within a Year? Blasphemy! (Score:5, Funny)
The project lead, Dr. Sigfried Glenzer, is "confident that with everything in place, ignition is on the horizon. He added, quite simply, 'It's going to happen this year.'
Huh. I had always thought that some international police force like "The International Fusion Gestapo" would be dispatched upon hearing this news and show up at your lab and start smashing mirrors and urinating on lasers until you revised your statement to be "15 to 20 years away" so that all their dues paying members would have time to reach tenure before you ruined the party.
I mean, there was no other logical explanation why so many seemingly brilliant scientists continually gave us incorrect estimates of achieving milestones in fusion research. Is this just being overly optimistic or was he carefully picking his words so that they will know if this method is viable (above break even energy production) or not within a year? And if so, where will he get his funding given the if not scenario?
Ignition not economical (Score:3, Insightful)
The 15 to 20 years estimate is always for energy-positive, viable power plant. The one year date is just when this particular device will be fully operational. There are already many operational fusion devices that exist for research, and this adds another that may or may not give us a breakthrough.
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My interpretation is simply that they want to reach the density and temperature required to start fusion within the plasma. This only means that the fusion reaction is starting to happen. Only after that can one start to ask the interesting questions (can enough energy be extracted to have a net surplus? can the energy output be improved? is this economically viable?). So they aren't done for several years yet.
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What you are describing is Frank Herbert's: The Tactful Saboteur. [google.com] An excellent short story.
In Lieu of Red Tape
That's about the coolest or hottest thing ever (Score:2, Interesting)
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Understand just enough to know that I don't understand enough, but this sounds fantastic.
Agreed! Even more so because the picture in TFA clearly shows that they totally built Cerebro!
Except that instead of enhancing the telepathy of whomever's inside, it blows things up with lasers. I'd call that an improvement.
Pocket Fusion for everyone,,, (Score:2)
... something to think about the next time you brag to your friends about your 300mW pocket laser pointer popping balloons & burning wood.
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I don't know about you, but i bring my 300 MW pocket laser pointer to pop baloons.
Re:Pocket Fusion for everyone,,, (Score:4, Funny)
...your 300mW pocket laser pointer popping balloons & burning wood.
You're supposed to take it out of your pocket before using it.
fusion has radioactive waste (Score:5, Insightful)
but its low powered and has quick half-lives. additionally, there are no geopolitical overtones concerning fuel sources: you just need sea water. no climate changing pollution/ city-choking smog for that matter. no peak oil this or that, no bubbles and spikes in supply or pricing
additionally, if everyone had electric cars, there would be no petrodollars funding saudi arabia, a backwards fundamentalist regime that funds wahhabi madrassas in places like pakistan, that give rise to all of these well-funded (from saudi "charities") militant assholes in the muslim world
no funding of gas bag chavez in venezuela, no funding of neoimperial russia and putin, no funding for nigerian graft and corruption...
it will take a long time, but if we can remove the reason for the world to have any vested interests in backwards regimes, propping them up and preserving them unnaturally, and we instead let these regimes instead rise and fall on their own intrinsic value in governing fair societies, then we will have taken a mighty step forward in terms of progress in this world
of course, it will be decades before we're all driving electric cars powered by fusion plants. but one can dream, cant' they?
I can see it now... (Score:2, Funny)
2) June 1st: Flick the switch
3) ???
4) June 2nd: They are now the proud owners of a 2mile wide smoking crater...
5) Tourist industry profits...
Yes, but is it REALLY working? (Score:2)
OK, Fusion within 2010. Great.
The question now becomes: will this generate more energy than it takes? And can it sustain power generation?
And, let's admit everything works: what quantity of nuclear waste will such a machine produce? And of what type?
Don't give me the "it's fusion, so it's clean, duh" line: this machine is going to generate an enormous amount of energy and a lot of that will in the form of a "carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion" (BBC dixit) -- which means radiation, which also means
Re:Yes, but is it REALLY working? (Score:5, Informative)
And, let's admit everything works: what quantity of nuclear waste will such a machine produce? And of what type?
Don't give me the "it's fusion, so it's clean, duh" line: this machine is going to generate an enormous amount of energy and a lot of that will in the form of a "carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion" (BBC dixit) -- which means radiation, which also means neutrons. And neutrons are not really good for your health.
Later in TFA it says they'll eventually be fusing a fuel containing a mix deuterium and tritium. Deuterium-deuterium fusion yields tritium and a neutron, and deuterium-tritium fusion yields helium-4 and a neutron. So the byproducts are Helium-4 (not radioactive in the slightest) and neutrons.
High energy neutrons are very bad for you, yes, but that just means you won't be standing near the unshielded reaction chamber. It's not like you have to dump a big pile of poisonous neutrons somewhere. The neutrons will affect the containment itself, but the biggest problem there is just that it becomes brittle, not necessarily radioactive.
It is basically true that fusion is clean. The waste is minimal.
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Technically the process will generate some radioactive material due to neutron activation of the reactor components, but we're talking small amounts that only need to be stored for a few decades until they are perfectly safe.
One interesting proposal has been to use the neutron flux produced by fusion reactors to transmute long-lived high-level radioactive waste produced in fission reactors into short-lived waste products. So potentially the by-product of fusion reactors would allow us to reduce the impact o
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Re:Yes, but is it REALLY working? (Score:5, Insightful)
And can it sustain power generation?
You're talking about zapping a very small, supercooled, gold-uranium alloy target with a beryllium sphere containing about 1mg of DT fuel, about 10 times a second.
Have a thought experiment about the engineering involved
what quantity of nuclear waste will such a machine produce?
DT fusion produces fast neutrons, so some. You're looking at much shorter half-lives ; the reactor core will have the same activity as coal ash after about 300 years.
And will ITER be quickly refactored to take this into account?
ITER is a totally different design, so no. I think ITER is a far more credible design than laser-fusion, given that the engineering challenges seem some orders of magnitude easier.
NIF is just a testbed for nuclear fusion, without the inconveniently illegal use of real nuclear weapons.
[1]
If you're firing at 1mg of fuel, by mass, 3/5 of it is Tritium or 0.6mg so (60 * 60 * 24) seconds in day * 10 per second * 0.0006 g = 518.4 g of tritium per day.
The total production in the USA between 1955 and 1996 was 225kg ; the stockpile in 1996 stood at 75kg
Lasers? (Score:5, Funny)
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Sharks were cheaper.
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Not enough Tritium.
National Ignition Facility? (Score:5, Funny)
Are you sure it's wise to ignite your nation?
I'm glad that there's plenty of water between me and the nation in question.
Re:National Ignition Facility? (Score:5, Funny)
They didn't say which nation they'd be igniting. I'm looking at you, Cyprus.
Bullshit until it's peer reviewed (Score:2)
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Please calm down... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Of course laser fusion can't provide a sustained burn for seconds, that's not how it works! Your car engine doesn't burn fuel in a sustained way, but it does a pretty good job of providing enough average power right?
The key point here it's a step towards getting gain in a fusion plasma. And hopefully in 2010. The earliest a tokamak is likely to achieve the same is 2020. The steps towards a powerplant are different for tokamaks and lasers, but high rep-rate lasers exist and projects like HiPER [hiper-laser.org] will
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Re:Please calm down... (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing in the article or summary said the temperature was important. Temperature is a bit more of an abstract concept in this type of experiment, as the overall energy is small (kettle boiling energies). For fusion however it's temperature x density x volume that's the important thing, and laser fusion achieves very high densities.
The important points were that a) this is a record laser energy and b) the absorption in the holhraum from the laser was 95%, much higher than was expected. This means gain in a target (ignition) is looking very likely.
*I'm also in the field
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Temperature is important if you take it to mean the energy that the particles have; naturally it has nothing to do with the total energy in the reactants. The product of temp., density and pressure is crucial but if the reactants aren't moving fast enough to overcome the coulomb barrier then you won't see fusion happening at all.
Temperature isn't necessarily the best metric to use though, because not all fusion machines have their reactants' energies forming a Maxwellian distribution. Such a device has the
Trying to source a quote (Score:2)
.. which said that it was never that fusion was 50 years away, but that it was 500 billion dollars away. The fifty years was just an estimate based on how much funding, brainpower, and so forth went into it. Let's face it, you can't just put a basket in a storage locker with a placard atop it reading FUSION, then come back in fifty years and expect to find something in the basket.
We have not spent the large amounts of money required to do the research. When we do, it's in fits and starts, buffeted by peo
steam?! (Score:2)
as a physicsist... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a physicist, I love these experiments, but...
The people running this thing need to think really, *really* hard how their comments play out in the media, maybe try and be a little more clear. The difference between getting fusion (the physical process) to work and getting fusion (the power generation system) to work is huge! Should they accomplish their goals in a year, they will still be a very long way away from thinking about building an electricity generating system. The line of "getting more power out than we put in" for fusion in the lab was crossed decades ago, and it's still unclear how doing this with yet another method of creating a fusion plasma is going to result in a more straightforward commercial reactor design.
This is how we end up with government officials who think we're all full of hyperbole, and don't actually do any work. I know they're fighting for their jobs at Livermore, but I don't see how they can keep this up long term. At some point, some Congressional committee is going to ask them to deliver on what has been promised, even if it was a confused, incorrect promise mis-translated by the media.
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The line of "getting more power out than we put in" for fusion in the lab was crossed decades ago..
Care to back that up. Other than nuclear bombs, there is no fusion device that has achieved ignition (which is not the same as getting more power out than you put in) that i am aware of, and i keep up with the field.
Ignition can be described as fusion energy output is higher than losses from the plasma.
Polywell (Score:3, Informative)
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Just a minor point - the Death Star had more than three lasers. I think it was more like 12 or so. Just didn't want you to provoke the dark side of the force by underestimating the power of the 'Star.
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For a gas/plasma Temperature is simply a statistical measure of the molecular kinetic energy that exists in a group of particles.
Like you may have learned in high school physics, opposites atrract and like particles repel each other.
In order to fuse two hydrogen atoms you have to make contact between two positively charged hydrogen ions, this means that you need enough energy to overcome the electromagnetic repulsion between those ions.
So yes, since temperature is a measure of the translational energy(also