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Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

#21

Post by aeturnum »

chc wrote: post #17
Shivetya wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad shovel ready money wasn't spent on more long lasting impact projects like this. Where has all that money gone from the drawn down of the wars? Where is the investments going in alternative energy? Well that last is easy, groups who contribute politically, hence solar and wind. They receive far too much in ways of support whereas hard science projects like this with incredible payoffs are pushed off because th…

It seems to me that the more plausible explanation is something like "Solar and wind power are proven to work, whereas fusion research is still trying to find something that even looks like it might work." Even after this "milestone," fusion still requires more energy from us than it gives back. Basically, the funding is going toward practical technologies, in the sense that you can actually put them into practice to…

Exactly. If one were to give a hundred billion to fusion research, how much faster would we get results? Would we be funding needs that are critical to help the science into its next phase, or just be funding the N next-best ideas that previously were set aside?

For a community that has such high praise for bootstrapping businesses, there's a surprising love of throwing money at unproven scientific research avenues. We're in this for the long haul, if we get fusion in twice the time for half the money, we'll still have fusion.

Re: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

#22

Post by ErsatzVerkehr »

Shivetya wrote: post #13
Jormundir wrote: post #5

I think Nuclear Fusion is the single most exciting up-and-coming technology. I can't believe we're not throwing a hundred billion dollars at it. Make fusion, not war.

Too bad shovel ready money wasn't spent on more long lasting impact projects like this. Where has all that money gone from the drawn down of the wars? Where is the investments going in alternative energy? Well that last is easy, groups who contribute politically, hence solar and wind. They receive far too much in ways of support whereas hard science projects like this with incredible payoffs are pushed off because th…

Keep in mind that the main goal of this project is to further research into nuclear weapons development.

> Too bad shovel ready money wasn't spent on more long lasting impact projects like this.

Perhaps some kind of "Manhattan Project".... oh.

Re: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

#23

Post by devx »

Wow, I remember seeing this project start up a few years ago, about how they wanted to make a "sun" on Earth. It seems it only took them 5 years to achieve this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3981697/Scie...

In a way, it reminds of Spiderman, too, but let's hope things don't go as badly as in the movie, once we start to make that "sun" big enough to provide a ton of energy.

Re: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

#24

Post by icegreentea »

devx wrote: post #18
Jormundir wrote: post #5

I think Nuclear Fusion is the single most exciting up-and-coming technology. I can't believe we're not throwing a hundred billion dollars at it. Make fusion, not war.

> Soon after, the $3.5bn facility shifted focus, cutting the amount of time spent on fusion versus nuclear weapons research - which was part of the lab's original mission. That was so disappointing to read. Don't we have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the planet 10x over already? Why would that still be the focus instead of inventing new sources of virtually unlimited energy??

NIF's nuclear weapons research was in support of maintaining the current arsenal of nuclear weapons. Most notably, it helps solve the question of how to ensure current stockpiles are reliable without actually detonating a nuke (since that's a huge no-no). It also kept a generation of nuclear physicists and engineers in employment, and also providing a method by which to test future weapons designs.

So really, the answer is, it doesn't matter how many nukes we have right now, NIF was created (in part) to ensure that the capability to blow up the world could be maintained.

As depressing as it is, it's pretty much how it goes with nearly all defense technology spin offs. Why the hell did we spend all that time working on rockets that purposefully crashed back onto the Earth (on top of people!) instead of doing something like getting communications satellites up, or getting to the moon.

Re: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

#26

Post by Jormundir »

aeturnum wrote: post #21
chc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that the more plausible explanation is something like "Solar and wind power are proven to work, whereas fusion research is still trying to find something that even looks like it might work." Even after this "milestone," fusion still requires more energy from us than it gives back. Basically, the funding is going toward practical technologies, in the sense that you can actually put them into practice to…

Exactly. If one were to give a hundred billion to fusion research, how much faster would we get results? Would we be funding needs that are critical to help the science into its next phase, or just be funding the N next-best ideas that previously were set aside? For a community that has such high praise for bootstrapping businesses, there's a surprising love of throwing money at unproven scientific research avenues.…

Excellent points. I certainly know that with much more funding, there could be much more efficient research, though I wonder where the limit is. How many more world-class physicists are there to put on this problem? Are the other theories really "next-best" ideas, or are they simply unexplored avenues, or perhaps more appealing with recent technology advances, but we've already committed to the current paths.

Re: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

#27

Post by mikeash »

germano wrote: post #9
rpedela wrote: post #4

Great, but I don't see how these extremely expensive nuclear fusion projects will ever beat price/kW of coal without heavy subsidies. My bet is that dense plasma focus is the future of cheap, clean power. Only time will tell though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus

I would imagine that the price/kW of coal will become easier to beat as we run out of it.

We're not running out of coal any time soon.

Re: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

#28

Post by gizmo686 »

knappador wrote: post #14

Producing net-energy is a different story than collecting net-energy. NIF just blows up a canister with a pellet and takes forever to reload a shot. On the other hand, an at-least-as-promising technology like Dense Plasma Focus ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus ) is still receiving minuscule funding. I'm hoping to be able to meaningfully support DPF and other fusion technologies soon. DPF has my atten…

What does producing energy mean if not collecting it? The conservation of Energy tells us that we are not actually producing any energy, rather we are converting energy from the mass of the reactants (hopefully into electricity). If you consider the energy converted from mass to be produced, then it is impossible to do nuclear fusion without producing net-energy (as long as you stay on this side of lead).

Re: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

#29

Post by gizmo686 »

rpedela wrote: post #4

Great, but I don't see how these extremely expensive nuclear fusion projects will ever beat price/kW of coal without heavy subsidies. My bet is that dense plasma focus is the future of cheap, clean power. Only time will tell though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus

Much of the cost of these projects likely results from the research nature of them. Once we get a viable model, we will likely be able to produce a cheaper plant because 1) we know what we are doing, and 2) now that we know it works, we can build it bigger.

Re: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

#30

Post by mrterry »

guimarin wrote: post #16

tl;dr - Another article about the US nuclear weapons research facility at Lawrence Livermore, AKA NIF, and its sideshow 57th priority. On a related note. It's been really sad to see the US slowly lose its edge in plasma based fusion tech, specifically tokamaks, which seem to be the only credible long-term method of sustaining a fusion reaction for power-plant purposes.

Just a couple quibbles from a former NIF scientist.

NIF is much higher on the priority list than that. LLNL is already in the doghouse due to NIF failing to ignite on schedule. As goes the 5 giga-buck NIF, so goes LLNL (and the management knows it).

Technologically, I'd put inertial and magnetic fusion about the same place. Even if the physics works, neither has a chamber first wall material that can stand up to the huge neutron loads that a power plant will create. Economically, both are hosed. Fusion wants to be big. Most reactor designs are for >1,000 MW. Electric companies are mostly interested in plants in the 50-400 MW range.

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