Fusion milestone reached

[n2doc]

NNSA announces important milestone in the National Ignition Campaign

WASHINGTON, D.C. — This week the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), along with officials from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), announced an important milestone in the National Ignition Campaign (NIC) at the 51st annual meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics in Atlanta.

Highlighting results from recent NIF tests, NNSA and LLNL and its NIC partners — Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE), General Atomics, and Sandia National Laboratories — showed that NIF's laser beams can be effectively delivered and are capable of creating sufficient x-ray energy to drive fuel implosion, an important step toward the ultimate goal of fusion ignition. LLE also presented results showing the most compressed fusion capsules to date.

The NIF was built as a part of the NNSA's program to ensure the safety, security and effectiveness of the nuclear weapons stockpile without underground testing. With NIF, scientists will be able to evaluate key scientific assumptions in current computer models, obtain previously unavailable data on how materials behave at temperatures and pressures like those in the center of a star, and help validate NNSA's supercomputer simulations by comparing code predictions against observations from laboratory experiments.

Because of its groundbreaking advances in technology, NIF also has the potential to produce breakthroughs in fields beyond national security. It will help advance fusion energy technology, which could be an element of making the United States energy independent. It also will enable scientists to better understand the makeup of stars in the universe and planets both within and outside our solar system.

more:

https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2009/NR-NNSA-09-11-01.html

[krispos42]

1. "which could be an element of making the United States energy independent"

"an element"


Fuck, it's the Holy Grail of energy production. Deuterium from water, makes helium (which was are running out of) and energy. EVERYTHING except ships, planes, and freight trains would be running off of the electric grid for pennies a day. No more home heating oil or natural gas... all-electric heat in our homes and businesses.

No burning coal or propane or uranium or plutonium. Cars converted to become all-electrics, or electric/ethanol hybrids, with the distillation of ethanol being done by electric heating elements instead of natural gas.

And we could probably incinerate toxic chemicals with a blast of fusion flame, too, breaking up toxins into their elemental particles.

[MUAD_DIB]

2. And how is the oil/coal/newqular industry looking to sabotage this process?

They must be working on a way to slow down the development of fusion engine.

[joshcryer]

3. They don't have to sabatoge it, it's an extraoridinary difficult thing to do right!

Though they will still get most DOE funding because of their extreme lobbying.

[NNadir]

4. Don't worry yourself about it. American ignorance of science is very effective at making

stupid people consume and consume and consume and consume while lying to themselves about even the most basic facts in energy while blabbering on about topics about which they know nothing.

The "fusion will save us" and "solar will save us" and "wind will save us" industries have made the world safe for coal, oil and gas until every last gram of it has become waste.

Please don't even pretend to understand it. It's clearly over your head.

[MUAD_DIB]

7. I'll assume your sarcasm was meant for others. ;D

[krispos42]

5. Defund the federal scientific research, of course.

The technology is being done at places like the Lawerence Livermore National Laboratory or Pentagon research labs.

"oh, oh, we're having a deficit! Quick, cut funding!"

Usual bullshit.

The Polywell project is still moving forward, though, thanks to the Navy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

[Nederland]

6. Fusion will be more expensive than nuclear

It suffers from the same problem: operating costs are dirt cheap, but building the plant kills you. Take a look at all the plans on the books and you'll see. A 1 GW fusion reactor looks to cost anywhere from 10 to 20 billion dollars.

[krispos42]

8. That will reduce as time wears on

Onward to the future!

If we made 8 fusion plants a year instead of occupying Iraq we'd be a hell of a lot better off.

[Nederland]

9. They said the same thing about nuclear plants too

Look what happened.

[krispos42]

10. Well the issues are a little different

The meltdown risk is so great that only the Federal government will insure them, and there are high cots with creating the fuel and storing the wastes. The mining and refinement of uranium is very energy-intensive. During World War Two the centrifuges used by the Manhattan Project were located powered by the damn and hydro plants of the Tennessee Valley Authority and were consuming more electricity than New York City.

Not to mention that the uranium can be used as a weapon (radiological bomb) or refined further to make a nuclear bomb. The leftover materials themselves are a target of terrorists.


With a fusion plant I'm pretty sure it's a hell of a lot safer. No meltdowns. No radioactive waste. Worst that can happen is a hydrogen explosion of some kind. And since you can get the hydrogen basically on-demand, there shouldn't be very much stored on site at any one time.



I suppose the proper question to ask is "how much does a coal or natural-gas 1-GW power plant cost?"

Without knowing that it's difficult to compare.