Fusion breakthrough: NIF achieves 8.6 megajoules, shattering previous record
https://www.techspot.com/news/107971-fusion-breakthrough-nif-achieves-86-megajoules-shattering-previous.html
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OK, fine, now design and build a GW power plant, firing say 10 shots a second, with required reliability. Design an economical target production line. Find some tritium, we only have enough worldwide to fire up ITER. Remember we lose 5% of the tritium every year due to decay. The studies on breeding so far say you will not be able to build a fleet of power stations. I strongly agree and feel that handling loses have not been considered. The standard reply to this is these are just engineering details and if there is failure, blame the engineers. BS. Even Fermi and others worked on fission reactors.
That is less than what a 1 watt solar cell produces in a year, taking into account daylight and cloudy weather. And solar cells might have a service life of 30 to 40 years.
Right apparently some people / LANL still thinks NIF was built for electrical power generation research.
we are a decade plus into the “sunk cost” era for NIF
The original stated purpose was for weapons research. But it soon was hyped for power generation and an effort, since shut down, was looking into designs for such. The laser fusion hype has continued for NIF to today and LLNL along with DOE and the whole laser fusion community world wide has strongly pushed that story. Hype.
5:44 -- Actually it is just an interesting fact, I didn't mean to imply that. As solar cells can be made very thin, they probably have a volumetric energy density comparable to the NIF targets in fact, at least for the cell itself and not the panel or mounting hardware.
We should have ChatGPT show us how to improve NIF and get it working on powering the Bay area in no time.
I am all for turning ChatGPT loose on NIF. It should be interesting to watch. Suggestions; heating of lasers, quality, cost, and rate of target production, design of breeding, optics damage at higher energies, radiation damage and neutron activation, remote handling, rapid processing of target debris, efficient tritium handling, speedy and accurate target positioning in target environment, etc.
“The original stated purpose was for weapons research.”
I was at this all star 2009 NIF
dedication. I call BS on your statement. So much so, that Senator Diane Feinstein called for a major LLNS annual award fee cut and contract extension termination when NIF FAILED reach ignition in 2012. But the “good ol’ boys” at the NNSA decided to extend the LLNS contact anyway. Soon after, Ed and Parney left LLNL.
2009 Diane Feinstein at the NIF Dedication
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gEuJ4vAmWJ8&pp=ygUYMjAwOSBuaWYgbGl2ZXRtb3JlIGRpYW5l
The purpose of NIF has always been weapons research. They had to hype it as a possible source of "fusion energy for the masses" in order to get congress to fund it, especially with Feinstein - she wasn't going to give an OK to something that was weapons only. When they made the breakthrough to breakeven, they gathered the NIF scientists for dog and pony shows and they stated that the design was NEVER going to be something you could use as a production system for supplying power to the masses.
If you don't like it, then let the labs go back to testing.
“The purpose of NIF has always been weapons research.” ?
Two LLNL projects that overlapped in time, NIF and LIFE
from Wikipedia:
“LIFE, short for Laser Inertial Fusion Energy, was a fusion energy effort run at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory between 2008 and 2013…
LIFE used the same basic concepts as NIF…but aimed to lower costs using mass-produced fuel elements, simplified maintenance, and diode lasers with higher electrical efficiency…Through 2011 and into 2012, NIF ran the "national ignition campaign"…NIF failed in this goal, with fusion performance that was well below ignition levels and differing considerably from predictions. With the problem of ignition unsolved, the LIFE project was canceled in 2013.”
LIFE was just a part of the hype that was to get funding for NIF. So yes the original and later real purpose of NIF was weapons. I was around and part of the discussion in those earlier days.
Incredible spin.
The thinking that NIF is for power plant research is analogous to asking The UC Los Alamos Scientific laboratory on July 17, 1945 or August 10, 1945 where is our Nuclear electrical power plant.
While scientific discovery during that time period lead to commercial power plants in the 1950’s. What was detonated in New Mexico and later Japan were vastly different in many respects than any commercial nuclear power plant. Likewise anyone that knows anything about NIF target design and the physics of the widely published Teller Ulam design would understand what is being tested. In both cases a one time extreme event vs a controlled continuous chain reaction that must last decades.
As written above on 6/04 if you don’t like it… cool let’s pull out the oldest pit out of the stockpile and the newest one from LANL and make a few new holes in the ground at area 19. I can think of a few side tests that would go right beside these tests if we were to go back to that type of testing.
9:09 -- Commercial nuclear power didn't significantly ramp up until the 1970's:
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/usa-nuclear-power
11:47 - December 23,1957 the first commercial nuclear power plant came online in Shippingport, Pennsylvania… And on July 12, 1957 in Morepark CA the SRE fed nuclear power onto the grid. Before that in 1954 the Navy commissioned the USS Nautilus, first nuclear sub. And before that in December of 1951 the EBR-1 came online at what is now INL so yes quite a bit commercial Nuclear electric power occurred in the 1950’s I can say the news didn’t reach New Mexico for another 20 years. Heck by 1970 the navy had 41 Nuclear powered SSBN’s carrying our work.
8:58 -- You're correct about the naval nuclear program, the history goes back to the 1950's and it was a great success. Prior to 1970 nuclear energy as a source of commercial electricity was 1-2% of the US electricity versus around 20% now,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Electrical_Generation_1950-2016.png
6/08 2025 and 6/07/ 2025 so you are moving the goalposts to a certain % of us power production and pretending that shortly after the dropping of the bomb there was not any great research and strides in commercial applications of nuclear technology.
Like what was written above… none of that has any resemblance of what came out of the manhattan project and likewise getting back to the original point of this thread I know it’s hard for you folks to stay on topic. A commercial fusion power plant will look nothing like what is being done at NIF additionally in terms of stockpile stewardship at this point in time this is the only device that can come close to the localized energy to perform EOS experiments to verify that the models are correct. The funny thing is since ignition has been achieved the only people talking about commercial electric power generation are the folks in New Mexico….
The error bars on the EOS data from NIF are so large that models are not tested. This is because NIF can only drive small targets. The data is useless. I have analyzed some of the data. An example of this is if you are looking for shell structure on a Hugoniot, it is wiped out by the error bars.
8:22 -- I agree with you that it could be viewed as great in a sense, although not a significant source of US electricity until the 1970s.
It is not true that NIF is the only way to get to high pressures/high energies. There is a decent amount of data in the decades old published literature from LLNL, LANL, and the Russians using nuclear devices to drive the shock waves. A number of materials were studied to very high localized and none localized energies with error bars smaller than obtained with NIF.
Yes, I’ve looked at the EOS data from NIF too. It’s garbage, especially the isentropic compression data. Z gets much better data, although at a lower peak pressure. Cool X-ray diffraction diagnostics though.
Don’t forget the Z machine at Sandia. Very small error bars and generally reliable data.
Agreed, Z is much better. Z got the first data showing the LLNL laser data on deuterium was bad. This was followed by the Russians and Rochester.
I am reminded of a myth from NYC. On an island in the East River off the UN in NYC is a jet fountain, similar to the one in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The myth is that this was paid for by a rich dude who, when he was young, would always lose p****** contests with his friends. This is similar to some of the arguments for NIF. Yes, you can get to high pressure, but can you get data and are they any good? There is one published paper in a respected journal in which only one number was measured. Just one single number. To plot on a graph you need two numbers; this is not data. To know what pressure they got to, a model had to be used. Nothing was learned from this experiment. They just p***** further.
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