Anonymous said...
"What happens if Z Machine reaches breakeven before NIF? It was rumored that they are closer than NIF.
Comment:
October 13, 2012 6:07 AM"
Than the Z Machine will be closed down and the money will be moved to NIF.
Tri-Valley Cares needs to be on this if they aren't already. We need to make sure that NNSA and LLNL does not make good on promises to pursue such stupid ideas as doing Plutonium experiments on NIF. The stupidity arises from the fact that a huge population is placed at risk in the short and long term. Why do this kind of experiment in a heavily populated area? Only a moron would push that kind of imbecile area. Do it somewhere else in the god forsaken hills of Los Alamos. Why should the communities in the Bay Area be subjected to such increased risk just because the lab's NIF has failed twice and is trying the Hail Mary pass of doing an SNM experiment just to justify their existence? Those Laser EoS techniques and the people analyzing the raw data are all just BAD anyways. You know what comes next after they do the experiment. They'll figure out that they need larger samples. More risk for the local population. Stop this imbecilic pursuit. They wan...
Comments
NIF and Z do about the same number of shots-Z even uses Pu! but NIF costs about 4 times as much! not worth it! and Rochester costs even less and does >1500 shots! Give me Z and Omega anytime!
That a hell of a collision!, Even more interesting mass stability with 400 plus nucleons...
Congratulations on the breakthru?
October 14, 2012 10:15 PM
You don't, idiot. Try to pay attention to the "relevant to weapons" part of this.
Ok than.
There have been many pivotal moments in humankinds existence where we we came to juncture that could lead to a path of greatness. In many cases the intial goal may have been lofty but the end outcome was history changing.... I contend that NIF may well be just that point of us. Think about it the future of humanity will depend on our ability to create cheap energy, to build new kinds of cities, and ultimately go the stars. We have now hit a roadblock which could mean that new physics unexpected is the underlying cause. We can now explore this realm and if this is the case it could lead to the great breakthrough that will allow us to control the energy of the sun itself and radically change the world. We may have wanted ignition but we could well be getting way more than we bargained for. We may have built a ship to sail around the world but it can not float because unbeknownst to us we have really built a star cruiser that is not meant to explore the world by sea but to fly through the entire universe! The naysayers are the types to be left behind like the dinosaurs but to those who dare we are like the mammals at the end of the dinosaur age. Become a mammal and crawl not just out or the sea but out of the land into space and join the NIF cause!!!!
Ya ya the next milestone will be to show that NIF is not a caribbean cruise liner but a galactic starship. It will take off one night and when it comes back Ed Moses will come out and say "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost if funding for NIF is cut.
Wow, that's some mighty fine Kool-Aid you're drinking!
I want more PR. I miss the days of amped up expectations and promises of pilot fusion power plants in 10 years. I think they just need more celebrity power. More blockbuster movies filmed on location at the facility. More articles by Friedman and other luminaries. More movies like Wall Street: Money never sleeps, or whetever it was called. If you ask me, NIF mgmt just didn't put enough resources into PR. Getting rid of Tomas was the worst move they could make. He was a PR animal on the warpath."
I am not a fan of the people tomas empowered. There is a lot of people who feel they are above the law, but they get there for a reason and Tomas was a great at selling science. It is too bad this type of talent always goes along with corrupt behavior.
"The principal tool for assuring reliability of stockpile weapons is surveillance, in which samples are periodically disassembled and examined. This has been pursued for decades and, of the rare defects found, the vast majorities are associated with nonnuclear components that can be tested in the laboratory", says Seymour Sack
While neither may actually reach ignition in a reasonable time-frame, one regularly meets core mission objectives while the other struggles to just make that case.
What Seymour and other say may actually apply to the many various platforms, not just NIF, dependign on the specific reasoning being used. So they may not be the best argument to be made unless the position being taken is to advocate shutting down many or all those platforms supported by NNSA.
But if science is to be the new sole mission objective of NIF, then it needs to learn to survive on a greatly curtailed budget and be managed out of DoE.
If studying contained fusion leading to breakeven is the objective, NIF, then, is the only game in town?
A question.
If studying this regime was the sole goal than much cheaper devices and approaches could and can be done.
A statement.
Now there's a guy we should listen to. A guy that got married on top of the Sudan Crater at NTS to another weapon designer (her highness), spending their honeymoon at the NTS in separate dorms.
It must be pretty harsh at LLNL to be forced to rely on only non programmatically relevant arguments. But this is all self-inflicted pay-back.
" If studying this regime was the sole goal than much cheaper devices and approaches could and can be done..."
something else has the likelyhood of achieving scientific breakeven before NIF and then ITER?
Well if you think about it. If the "regime" of failure which was not the goal of NIF or ITER, was the main goal of what you wanted to study, than ya I think a number of existing devices could be modified to do that better or a new one could be made that is far cheaper. The "regime of failure" or whatever your version of the the "regime" as you keep saying over and over again was not nor was ever the goal nor the actual regime that was meant to be studied. By the way ITER is really a different thing altogether from NIF so what is your point anyway or are you just trying to show that you are clueless.
.....Alight you win NIF is the best thing ever, give it money for 20 years or as long as poster 6.43PM is working. They are the best ya ya ya pure science, study the regime, exciting times, ship going to a Mexico port, it is all true and it is all yours.
Is there an operational alternative for observing controlled nuclear fusion approaching the breakeven point other than NIF? Is another on the horizon sooner than ITER in 2025-2030?
I am not aware of another one in progress or in the mind of men that can be begin experiments before 2030.
So this country commits 500-1000 manyears per year of its 100 million man labor force and over the next decade completes the path we started down.
The near term is clearer, farther down the path is terra obscura, but in the end, the science will be clearer.
And no, to keep the chaff down, I haven't worked on NIF or for LLNL for years and I don't speak for LLNL.
The content of this post stands on its own dubious merit.
"...Los Alamos physicist Rod Schultz wrote in a lab publication that NIF's touted importance to the weapons stockpile does "not reflect the technical judgment of the nuclear weapons design community..'.
Taking the longer view, the scientific programmes at both weapons design labs allow the gestation of "Rod Schultzes", who ARE the most important long-term element of the weapons stockpile.
Even if they can't see it unless they look in the mirror.
Fortunately, my oversight is corrected by the fabulous talent that was developed in the design and execution of NIF, where ordinary men were forged into technical experts by the challenges they overcame. That kind of career forming event happens once to twice in a lifetime, an now the country will benefit from 500 - 1000 technical masters for the next 20 -30 years.
A fabulous spinoff that may dwarf the scientific benefits.
Keep fooling yourself dude. You didn't facilitate the creation of a generation of great minds. You are just playing the game and trying to find ways to pat yourself on the back even in light of all of the lies and disgraceful behavior. Don't try to make yourself appear better than anyone else currently or formerly in the game. You will be forgotten.
NIF had it their way for many years, and now we have had a huge failure. It does not make any sense to give them a second chance, since nothing has truly changed, and they still continue to play the PR con game. 1kJ yield from neutrons just from the compression tells you how far off they are from reality. The fact that they say they are "tantalizingly close" tells you that there is a con in play.
B: Evidence suggests that NIF is far off and the alpha heating milestone failure and the persistently low neutron yields support that.
A: But there is great science to be discovered by NIF in conditions not replicated in any other facility and there is no other alternative.
B: Z is making progress in it's ignition strategy and it is an alternative. Plus it is a proven platform for programmatic mission experiments. Plus it's a better value based on cost, and mission work is not at risk.
A: But NIF is already built, and it works.
B: Z is built, it works, it delivers both scientifically and programmatically, it is scalable, and the technology exists and is mature for the next upgrade.
A But NIF will produce a small star. We can easily imagine one or two Nobel prized emerging out of NIF.
This is a kind of prototype aggregated dialog after removing the obvious deceptions. You can clearly see that one is supported on the basis of delivery and value while the other is based on hope, faith and PR. NIF is unable to make a convincing value based case and must rely upon its technical reviewers statements about the merits of the science while unable to address any of the programmatic irrelevance problems nor the high cost elements. And on a comparative base, arguments in support of NIF are weak at best. The reliance on the fact that it is built and that it works is an insult to many people working on even more complex projects in both the public and private sector.
Back in the day LLNL management routinely showed slides to nnsa behind closed doors showing slides comparing the two for the purpose of making a claim that Z should be shut down. There were many suspect claims being made. Some were clearly intentional lies and misrepresentations. Now that the issue is out in the open, we see what arguments withstand scrutiny and what is just PR.
Breathe buddy breathe.....
And Osama Lives! Allah should smite all NIF naysayers! "You are too easy a target against your intellectual superiors like ourselves. You are do stupid that we may even end up stealing your SSN and credit card numbers." Yeah, that's a really convincing logical argument. Nice parody - but don't quit your day job - if you have one.
I agree the race of Ubermensch created by NIF could not done anywhere or for such small cost as was done in NIF. This will be NIF's legacy, these simple ordinary men transformed into the super 12 sigma tech masters of the world with skills like no others, and work ethic second to none. They are the agents of transformative science that we are all stake holders of now. They have created a machine...A MACHINE...the likes of which are planet has never seen. If other life forms view earth and see NIF they will know just what humanity is capable of.
Also there is the problem of the NIF geometry; simulated Raman scattering is a significant problem. Remember that the Lawson criteria is density, temperature and time. Illuminate for a long time and wall-created plasma stands in the way of more laser energy. Yes you can do pulse shaping but you struggle.
NIF is at the end of its power roadmap; Z can scale to dozens of MJ. Guess who will achieve breakeven first?
Like an H bomb? Fission initiation driving a D/T fuel?
How does this help the clean nuclear power development? Fission already is mature, and well-controlled but has long-lived decay products.
Say what you want about graffiti but history has shown time and time again that graffiti is usually the truth bubbling through. You might want to try another analogy to make your point. Also it is graffiti not grafitti.
It sounds like someone is simply trolling.
Please be clear. The question has been berated a few times, but not answered clearly.
The solution is self-evident to those who employ reason in decision making
There is also fatigue about the use of the argument that the machine is state of the art and that it works. You can only set the bar one notch lower before you have to conclude that the project was failure whose lessons learned were not proportional to the cost. Alpha heating milestone failure is what is called a "show stopper.". Dude, that's gotta really suck to have to swallow a bitter pill like that, especially after all that irrational exuberance from past years.
The solution is self-evident to those who employ reason in decision making
October 25, 2012 12:30 PM"
That was not scientific objective so your point is mute.
NIF @ 1.8MJ in 2012 or Z @ 3MJ in 2007 and in the initial phase of testing 3 significant improvements.
Even if Z does not achieve breakeven in 2013, it can easily scale x8 for a fraction of the cost of either NIF or ITER.
The real legacy of NIF will be how it turned 500 ordinary people to beyond expert scientists, techs and engineers. Can Z or any other current scientific endeavor say anything close to this? Gentlemen, explore the realm, much treasure awaits.
October 25, 2012 9:42 PM
I think you meant "moot."
That was not scientific objective so your point is mute.
October 25, 2012 9:42 PM
I think you meant "moot."
October 26, 2012 9:45 AM
Works either way --
NIF @ 1.8MJ in 2012 or Z @ 3MJ in 2007 and in the initial phase of testing 3 significant improvements.
Even if Z does not achieve breakeven in 2013, it can easily scale x8 for a fraction of the cost of either NIF or ITER.
October 26, 2012 5:42 AM
Another "back of of the envelope" scaling calculation similar to the way NIF was designed. Unfortunately, Congress took the line-and-sinker on this "disaster".
that's moot. As in mooted. Look it up Cicero.
NIF is operational at LLNL, with $3B invested over 10 years, now employing a highly capable team investigating the key topics related to controlled inertial fusion. Opponents assert the key model is flawed. Based on their interpretation of UG test data, more power is required than NIF can reasonably be expanded to. They suggest cancelling the current investigation on this premise rather than completing it.
It has been suggested here, as an alternative, that a current machine at the competing national lab, LANL, called Z, can be modeled, validated, scaled up and reconfigured to achieve the required power levels and target configuration and diagnosics to achieve current controlled inertial fusion scaling to breakeven, faster, better and cheaper than continuing with NIF. The current NIF funds should be shifted to this effort, which has less risk than continuing NIF.
Is this a correctly and fairly stated summary of this thread?
Some may argue Z has less risk but that is not yet settled (for reaching ignition). Ignition on both platforms are moonshots. Each faces different and somewhat unique challenges. Both platforms would need expensive upgrades in the future, with Z claiming to be more readily scalable and at a lower cost, while NIF suggesting that they are closer to ignition. Part of the argument is regarding comparisons of what capability NNSA has with each platform assuming continued (expensive) funding. One can reach higher pressures whle the other can handle special nuclear materials. This can delineate the kind of programmatically relevant experiments that can be done in support of the stockpile.
A question from a civilian. What does SNM have to do with achieving controlled thermonuclear fusion energy production?
So is it also likely that with a head start of perhaps 5 - 10 years, that NIF will complete it's investigations sooner than an thermonuclear fusion breakeven demonstration on an upgraded Z?
But controlled thermonuclear fusion topics are fair game, since they are so unlikely in our lifetimes as to be philosophy or fetish as much as observable science, hence not worthy of classification.
Might as well classify angels.
Z had undergone an upgrade, and now has enhanced capabilities. Likewise, NIF experiments can also compress materials, with diagnostics to pull out material properties.
This strategy would allow NIF to perform the science, at a reduced cost, to examine the technical difficulties behind ICF, and to begin to perform technical feasibility and engineering reliability studies for potentual upgrade options. I've always been someone skeptical about the value of the EoS work overall (not just on NIF). However, funding for Laser EOS could be reinstated if there are improvements in the budgetary environment in the future.