11–20 of 28 posts
I'm all for fusion research. Love the idea of clean, inexhaustible power. However, the NIF has consistently over promised and under delivered, and they have no idea _what_ their problems are [1]. They could use a little restraint when making schedule predictions. [1] http://fire.pppl.gov/NIF_NIC_report_rev5_koonin_2012.pdf
to help weapons scientists to care for the ageing US nuclear stockpile Simulating explosions helps determine maintenance for nuclear warheads? I would bet they were more likely trying to make a "nuclear" weapon without radiation/fallout and failed. I wonder what the world would be like with really cheap power though - I'd like to think a better place to live but more likely there would be a lot more war since the ene…
The traditional and easiest way of doing that is to frequently build new warheads, and test explode the older ones. That is expensive and, nowadays, forbidden/frowned upon (I think the test ban treaty hasn't been ratified)
So, one stops building new ones and ends up with thirty+ year old warheads. The radioactive materials inside them have aged, steel may have become brittle, etc. To ascertain whether these devices still work, tests are needed. You could do them on the devices themselves, but it is easier and cheaper to do an experiment with a few grams of radioactive materials than to work with a kg or so from a warhead (all IIRC; corrections welcome)
one thing i never understood about fusion is how you can capture all the released energy efficiently enough. isn't it released in many ways that cannot really be harnessed directly eg: gamma radiation, x-rays, emf. that makes me think that the input:output ratio would need to be not just marginally better, but sufficiently better. does anyone know what the current best input:captured number is?
to help weapons scientists to care for the ageing US nuclear stockpile Simulating explosions helps determine maintenance for nuclear warheads? I would bet they were more likely trying to make a "nuclear" weapon without radiation/fallout and failed. I wonder what the world would be like with really cheap power though - I'd like to think a better place to live but more likely there would be a lot more war since the ene…
Yes. Radioactive material is, by definition, slowly becoming non-radioactive by decaying into other atoms. You can think of those other atoms as 'contaminants' in your plutonium soup.
What this means is if you create a nuclear warhead, and put it on the shelf, if you did nothing you would have a very sophisticated box holding some lead. But long before that it stops working as a nuclear warhead.
So what you do is you take put one on the shelf in the lab and you sample it periodically to see how its content has changed, and run your simulations to see if plutonium or uranium with those makeups would still work within the boundaries of the device, and you try to test it periodically under conditions that simulate, as much as possible, an actual explosion.
They used to do this at the test site, basically explode one warhead from a batch every 2 - 3 years to insure they still worked. But they stopped when we banned such testing.
one thing i never understood about fusion is how you can capture all the released energy efficiently enough. isn't it released in many ways that cannot really be harnessed directly eg: gamma radiation, x-rays, emf. that makes me think that the input:output ratio would need to be not just marginally better, but sufficiently better. does anyone know what the current best input:captured number is?
Since the nuclei are positively charged and moving quickly, the net voltage is around 2 million volts. When done correctly, fusion will create electricity directly. At that point it's just a matter of stepping it down to a usable voltage, but we have lots of ways to do that.
I'm all for fusion research. Love the idea of clean, inexhaustible power. However, the NIF has consistently over promised and under delivered, and they have no idea _what_ their problems are [1]. They could use a little restraint when making schedule predictions. [1] http://fire.pppl.gov/NIF_NIC_report_rev5_koonin_2012.pdf
Yep. NIF is such an old project that it was used as the "digitizer" in the original TRON movie. Still no progress.
I'm all for fusion research. Love the idea of clean, inexhaustible power. However, the NIF has consistently over promised and under delivered, and they have no idea _what_ their problems are [1]. They could use a little restraint when making schedule predictions. [1] http://fire.pppl.gov/NIF_NIC_report_rev5_koonin_2012.pdf
Yep. NIF is such an old project that it was used as the "digitizer" in the original TRON movie. Still no progress.
And to say "no progress" is to belittle the efforts of a lot of people that are pushing the boundaries of physics and the associated engineering problems.
Relevant graph: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusio...
to help weapons scientists to care for the ageing US nuclear stockpile Simulating explosions helps determine maintenance for nuclear warheads? I would bet they were more likely trying to make a "nuclear" weapon without radiation/fallout and failed. I wonder what the world would be like with really cheap power though - I'd like to think a better place to live but more likely there would be a lot more war since the ene…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. NIF is such an old project that it was used as the "digitizer" in the original TRON movie. Still no progress.
What a silly thing to say -- of course there has been progress, even if it's only a better understanding of what doesn't work.
The only real use of NIF is to better understand fusion so as to better understand how nuclear weapons work. I just want them to be honest about it.