Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Prospects for NIF Success?
Since retiring from LLNL last year, I’ve been occasionally checking the news for progress concerning the NIF effort. I see that there’s recent news about NIF breaking a new energy record and news about the successful development of 2-micron fill tubes (down from 10-micron tubes) to reduce perturbations. But what’s the bottom line? Is there a sense at NIF that there may actually be a realistic possibility of NIF achieving ignition in the foreseeable future?
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10 comments:
zero.
However there is still plenty of science to learn.
NIF has become an excellent platform to fabricate EOS data, similar to what they did on NOVA with D2. I remember an all hands meeting where Parney showed NIF Tantalum data to 20 Mbar, calling it the highest pressure achieved above ground. Turned out it was completely fabricated and is no longer mentioned.
It doesn’t matter. Look at Physics of Plasmas. There’s a whole industry in talking about the conditions for ignition. Most of it is what we would call dimensional analysis, setting different energies equal to each other. I think Rochester Omega publishes a paper on this once a month. There are an infinite number of permutations of Lindl’s basic design. Again, this months Physics of Plasma shows that an enlarged holoraum gives 40 MJ of yield. This field isn’t going away. It will become entrenched like the Tokomak community.
Article claims ignition possible with new hohlraum design:
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5099934
NIF always has been, and always will be, a multi-billion dollar plaything for the kiddies, but absolutely necessary to keep Livermore afloat. And the 4th floor mousies at the Forrestal need Livermore to keep Los Alamos at bay.
The question is, why is NNSA funding Sandia’s crackpot fusion scheme, MAGLIF? They use a slow moving cylindrical implosion (10 cm/us) and claim they can get 10 Gigajoules of yield with the right design and a larger machine. So far they get negligible yield- 10^12 neutrons. Also, their Z machine has been broken since it was upgraded. They never were able to get full current delivery into the load. Anyone who has seen their presentations has to be embarrassed by the amateurish nature of their effort. At least the NIF people are smart. Oh, I forget, it’s more welfare for NM. Just like the Omega machine is welfare for NY.
Original poster here. Sounds like there is not a lot of optimism here that NIF can eventually achieve ignition. Too bad. I remember listening to a talk at LLNL about the proposed NIF project before NIF got funding, and the speaker sounded cautiously optimistic about NIF being able to achieve ignition in view of all of the energy and power it would have.
-Doug
I remember Lindl’s yield plots with 20 MJ divisions on the Y axis. Also, the NIF people believed, based on the code, that ignition would be achieved on the 3rd shot. I don’t remember any caution. Lindl also used to brag about the “million man hours” that went into designing the capsule, as if that guaranteed success. Finally, high-level managers bragged about how LIFE, the fusion energy scheme based on NIF, would bring billions into the lab.
The only people who didn’t like NIF were the old school weapons designers. I was told they were given a come-to-Jesus meeting where they were ordered to support NIF.
9/18/2019 5:01 PM asked:
"The question is, why is NNSA funding Sandia’s crackpot fusion scheme, MAGLIF?...So far they get negligible yield- 10^12 neutrons..."
Hokum Smokum, BatDude, we got that yield from our puny Dense Plasma Focus using less than one tenth of the input energy. Where is that DOE guy with the checkbook?
3:34 is exactly right about the DPF. The Sandians dismiss this by saying that, well, other z pinch experiments get higher yield but only MAGLIF scales to high yield. Yeah, right. Sandia approached the Russians to ask them if they wanted to collaborate on MAGLIF. They said “no thanks!”
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