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Weapons Complex Morning Briefing
July 11, 2012
LLNL Director: Despite Missed Milestone, Lab ‘Tantalizingly Close’ to Ignition
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Parney Albright defended the laboratory’s quest to achieve fusion ignition in a memo to senior laboratory officials Monday, suggesting that the lab should get more time to pursue the challenging scientific breakthrough. Albright’s memo comes on the heels of revelations last week that the National Ignition Facility missed a key ignition milestone and the National Nuclear Security Administration’s admission that the facility was “unlikely” to achieve ignition by the expected target date of Sept. 30. Suggesting that lab officials had made significant progress in the three-year ignition campaign, Albright estimated that the lab was 75 percent of the way to achieving ignition, but conceded that it might be another two years before that goal is reached. “A year ago, most external reviewers of NIF believed that it would take up to three years of high quality experiments to either achieve ignition or fully explore the ignition regime offered by the NIF laser as currently configured,” Albright said in the memo. “We have regularly been doing these high quality experiments for only about a year. So, the data and progress to date show that we should continue the current vigorous investigation of ignition before making any decision about next steps.”
Albright highlighted the fact that NIF laser operated on July 5 at 1.8 million joules and 500 trillion watts for the first time. That represents the power needed to achieve ignition, but laboratory officials have thus far been flummoxed by inconsistencies between predictions of how the capsule will implode and the actual results of experiments. He said that experiments this summer will focus on meeting the “alpha heating” milestone that the lab missed in June, which is viewed as a necessary stepping stone to achieving ignition. “Based on all the data taken to date, we are tantalizingly close and have found no fundamental reasons that would preclude us from achieving ignition. We could have major successes in the next few months or it might be longer. In either case, the timescale is short compared to the 50-year journey we have been on.”
Comments
July 13, 2012 9:07 PM
So does a simple handgun cartridge, or for that matter a log set fire by a match. Nothing special there. But nobody ever counts the total energy it took to manufacture it, just like nukes.
There are no measurable fission products in the shot chamber?
Yes, you can thank LLNL Alumni Charlie McMillan for all that additional work coming from LANL. He and his LANS LLC team seem to love throwing out huge chunks of weapons funding from Los Alamos and then getting rid of large segments of the LANL workforce once the funding has left the lab.
In honor of Tomas, I couldn't resist.
Didn't Tomas hire who he considered to be the top laser surface interaction researchers in the world to help deal with this issue? Maybe performing due diligence on those researchers and their trail of published research can shed light on what their approach was to deal with the increasing model complexity (if at all) or whether it was swept under the rug.
I'm sure one can go through all of the scientific committee reviews and their recommendations, and then perform due diligence to see if the reviews might have been missing something, or whether the recommendations weren't followed, or were misunderstood, or whatever.
It sounds like a good ole fashioned GAO investigation is warranted here.
July 16, 2012 4:05 PM
Sure, they are at Los Alamos. Unfortunately, one peep out these folks and Knapp will run them over with his Porsche Cayenne. Oh come on! Jas Mercer-Smith has been touting for years that "NIF has no value to weapons program and will never achieve ignition".
July 16, 2012 12:41 AM
There's a rumor at Los Alamos that McMillion was rewarded with a $1,000,000 bonus for "pulling off" the VRIP.
July 16, 2012 5:44 PM
Jas Mercer-Smith. Now there's a guy with some credibility. Anyone know what his publication record is in peer reviewed journals?
July 17, 2012 4:33 AM
Wrong criteria for a weapons researcher. If they are publishing in peer-reviewed journals, they aren't doing actual weapons work. If "weapons research" is useful, it is classified.
I am always reassured when Curly and Larry tell me that Moe is doing great work.
July 19, 2012 1:10 PM
Oh, BS! This is just an excuse. Why didn't this rule apply to Hans Bethe, Feynman, Teller, Lawrence, Von Neumann, Fermi, .....
Fact is, I met Hans Bethe and Jas Mercer-Smith is no Ed Teller!
July 21, 2012 5:43 AM
Apples and oranges. Those guys never published weapons work, and never published during the short time they did weapons work. They weren't career weapons scientists.