Good article in Nature News on progress on Z with a mention of NIF's problems
http://www.nature.com/news/triple-threat-method-sparks-hope-for-fusion-1.14445
Also, a reminder that NIF's breakthrough 14 kJ shot is not break even (see #5 of the list)
http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2013/12/insiders-guide-2013
Not good news on the propaganda front for NIF. Time for new super-duper capsule design?
Comments
Apologies, NIF is the No-Ignition Fiasco
Ha...and where is Parney now? NIF is too big to fail so it will not.
Z cannot explore certain regimes that NIF can, good luck to Z and ITER we are all in this together. If it was 1484 we would only be 8 years away of discovering a new world that no one has ever seen before or set foot on before...think about that! A NEW world...a new realm, we cannot stop now, we must not stop now. Onward to the conquest of a unknown paradise, a paradise that can give rise to untold riches!
So, the sensible thing is to kill NIF, not Z, and keep Omega going. But sometimes the sensible thing isn't what winds up happening.
You Sandians are really delusional about your place in the weapons complex
As a big laser guy I can tell you that some parts of this are actually very easy. As far as the laser is concerned, with better than 10 picosecond timing accuracy between the beam lines, the "flying" cryogenic capsule is basically standing still at target chamber center, even if it's flying at several hundred meters per second. Target tracking, laser pointing and simultaneous firing are not the problem.
And then there's the target. It takes like a day to craft a suitable ice layer, with enormous personal attention from many people. It's not remotely realistic to do this at 10 Hz. One could imagine other designs, wetted foams for example, but those are just ideas and there would be many more problems. They would certainly require even bigger lasers if they are to ignite and burn, for many reasons including the presence of relatively high-Z material in the fuel. And bigger lasers and lower gains from bigger targets starts to look like a bomb, where you save on the rep rate but you have to deal with a giant bomb in the heart of your power plant.
Not going to happen even if NIF manages to demonstrate ignition. Weapons physics justifications, maybe, but not power generation.
I'm more keen to learn about physics limitations for the future, particularly related to a larger laser.
I don't know all the pushes and pulls, but I'm sure there are people who have looked at this in detail even if there isn't a lot published. At least two good reasons here, one is politics and the other is classification and reference to "down hole" data, which wraps back around to politics.
But in general, a bigger driver allows a bigger, slower implosion of more fuel, and this buys margin for things like target imperfections, mispointing, etc., as well as physics margin for things not working quite the way your idealized simulations predict. With a bigger laser driver, pushbacks include a bigger hohlraum with longer laser paths through plasma, obviously the bigger laser, and much higher per-shot yield so you have a harder time dealing with the huge pulses of neutrons, shrapnel, maybe EMP, etc. I doubt anyone can really say where the optimum might be for power production, we would need some "up hole" successful data points and we don't have any. At least not yet.
Somebody get a rope!
January 10, 2014 at 4:58 AM
Says someone who obviously has never read the annual reliability reports.
January 10, 2014 at 8:26 AM
Whyy bother? All we need to read are the Directors' annual letters to the President reassuring him that the stockpile is reliable and safe.
January 11, 2014 at 12:28 PM
If you have access to the letters, which have been classified SRD regardless of content since around 2006, you have access to the reports. I suspect you have access to neither.
I haven't seen any press releases so I assume that the 14 KJ is near the upper limit?
Give me $50M for 5 years, and my choice of 10 LLNL laser scientists, and we will have a 20 MJ UV laser design that the Chinese can build for $5M in China.
$5B not $5M