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Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

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Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#41

Post by lisper »

Oculus wrote: post #22

> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars > government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons I think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the…

The problem with sinking a lot of money into science is that it only pays dividends if solutions to the big problems actually exist. They may not. It may in fact not be possible to do better-than-breakeven fusion on a small (relative to a star) scale. The only way to find out for sure is the hard (and expensive) way.

By way of contrast, when it comes to military technology you're not competing with nature, only with other humans, and so a "solution" (if you'll excuse the irony) is almost certain to be found by one side or the other.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#42

Post by stcredzero »

One of the proposed drives for the Daedalus starship design involved laser fusion. The pellet would detonate and would push against a magnetic nozzle to produce thrust, like the Orion nuclear craft, but more efficient. Also, the expanding magnetic fields could cause induced currents in networks of wires designed to capture energy, powering the ship and the next detonation.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#43

Post by deletes »

valarauca1 wrote: post #34
Oculus wrote: post #22

> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars > government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons I think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the…

The cost of the B-2 Bomber program has cost as much as ~5 Large Hadron Colliders. B-2 bomber program cost 44.75 billion[1] LHC cost ~7.5 Billion Euro ~9billion USD.[2] [1] http://www.fas.org/man/gao/nsiad97181.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost

Yeah... I see no benefit in those, having a few more colliders instead would be really great.

Or just start building the next version already!

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#44

Post by JackFr »

fophillips wrote: post #24
JackFr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this even basic science? It sounds more like an engineering problem, albeit a very hard one. I am not a physicist, but I would consider this more like the Manhattan project -- the science being done is not of the 'deeper under standing of nature' type, but rather 'how do you make a controllable explosion' type. Given that, the way to evaluate the project is not on grants received, articles published or citations i…

You go tell Feynman the Manhattan project wasn't about science.

You mistake my point -- the nature of the work Feynman did at Los Alamos was different than the nature of the work he did at the Institute for Advanced Study. All of the work was science, but at Los Alamos the target was a working bomb, at Princeton it was a deeper and more fundamental understanding of nature, and thus criteria for judging is different.

The Manhattan Project can be judged by the simple question, is there a working bomb? Evaluating basic research is much harder.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#45

Post by jws »

diydsp wrote: post #27
dj-wonk wrote: post #5

This sentiment is interesting "Over the past few years, NIF has been getting a fat 'F.'" Perhaps now that 'grade' will change. Actually, I think framing it as a grade is beyond silly; it is irresponsible. Giving a letter grade to long-term scientific project makes little sense. It is not a one-shot thing with a predefined notion of correctness. What can we compare such a grade to? Instead, we should be asking what we…

Newspapers love to act as if it they call the shots. NPR in particular styles itself as the stalwart of the disenfranchised - has its shit together more than Occupy, but is unsullied by big corporate interests. They're not much worse than other papers, but unfortunately, it sometimes maintains its readers disenfranchised in order to maintain the illusion. I mean, why don't they admit that this is four-month-old news?…

The paper was published in Nature today. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#46

Post by Gravityloss »

valarauca1 wrote: post #34
Oculus wrote: post #22

> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars > government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons I think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the…

The cost of the B-2 Bomber program has cost as much as ~5 Large Hadron Colliders. B-2 bomber program cost 44.75 billion[1] LHC cost ~7.5 Billion Euro ~9billion USD.[2] [1] http://www.fas.org/man/gao/nsiad97181.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost

Here's another article that looks at some acquisition programs just by the US Marines. Navy, Army and Air Force acquisitions are often much bigger. Scroll for the tables.

http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/article/ace-ate-marine-co...

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#47

Post by hotpockets »

lisper wrote: post #32
Kroem3r wrote: post #18

This is newsworthy despite "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser"? After decades of work they are orders of magnitude away from break-even. Makes me wonder if the goal is actually break-even and/or power generation. Not really; but it's a revealing question. I'm no great fan of the budgets these huge projects pull down; I think the bang-for-the-buck is greater elsewhere. But modelling…

> This is newsworthy despite "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser"? It's not newsworthy, but most reporters are not educated enough to tell the difference between a real breakthrough and a bogus press release.

It is newsworthy. We generated fusion be shining light at molecules, which never has been done before. Aside from that, if you read the article you became slightly more science literate.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#48

Post by VladRussian2 »

lisper wrote: post #41
Oculus wrote: post #22

> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars > government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons I think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the…

The problem with sinking a lot of money into science is that it only pays dividends if solutions to the big problems actually exist. They may not. It may in fact not be possible to do better-than-breakeven fusion on a small (relative to a star) scale. The only way to find out for sure is the hard (and expensive) way. By way of contrast, when it comes to military technology you're not competing with nature, only with…

> It may in fact not be possible to do better-than-breakeven fusion on a small (relative to a star) scale.

the H-bomb is better-than-breakeven and much smaller than star scale. What you say may be true for Tokamak like confinement schemes whereis H-bomb is inertial confinement, and it works. And it is pretty clear that inertial confinement in several orders of magnitude smaller scale than H-bomb would work too. Look at Sandia Z-machine - an order of magnitude up, and it would get breakeven. Not that anybody really needs it :)

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#49

Post by twelvechairs »

icegreentea wrote: post #37
Oculus wrote: post #22

> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars > government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons I think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the…

Do not want to argue with the main thrust of your argument (because I agree with it), but at least part of the reason why people had an issue with the NIF as energy research, but less so as a nuclear test simulator is because the NIF as a device is pretty clearly designed to simulate nuclear detonations. If the problem is "you're wasting taxpayer money", the issue isn't the dollar amount spent, its the return on the…

there's two ways you can take 'return on investment' - the wholistic qualitative way (if x has a tiny chance of improving the whole world then its worth it) or the narrow quantitative way (once we research it, we'l probably have to give x away basically for free and its is likely not to work out anyway and will take years so its practically valueless to our organisation on this years financial model).

unfortunately the latter is used almost exclusively. even in public organisations who should be able to take the broader of public good.

Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

#50

Post by willvarfar »

DougMerritt wrote: post #31
fophillips wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You go tell Feynman the Manhattan project wasn't about science.

Good way of putting it so that people can understand. Feynman was a scientist, not an engineer, so that's a clue that the Manhattan project involved science, not just engineering. The same is true of fusion research. That's why it's "research", not merely "development". In particular, the physics of plasma instabilities has always been quite imperfectly understood, and that has been one of the key problems with contr…

I thought his role on the Manhattan project was keeping the IBM calculators going?
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