Bloomberg Article on NIF
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-03/fusion-scientists-see-progress-as-obama-shows-no-ardor-correct-.html
Excerpts:
Moses, 63, wants to raise $1.5 billion, partially from utilities and suppliers, to get commercial fusion technology ready. In a possible prototype, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PCG) and others agreed in December to pay the Livermore lab $150 million to use its supercomputers for improving California’s electricity grid. Wealthy individuals may contribute, and some have expressed interest, Moses says, declining to name them.
Detractors say cost estimates are meaningless because they involve technologies not yet invented.
“Moses is destroying his credibility,” says Burton Richter, a retired Stanford University physics professor.
The Energy Department itself has trimmed expectations:
“Experience shows we didn’t have as good an understanding of the physics as we thought,” says David Crandall, who retired in March as the department’s senior fusion adviser.
Congress is getting tougher, too. The NNSA has spent about $6 billion to build and run the NIF. Lawmakers were planning to press the NIF in May for measurable goals for reaching ignition, people familiar with the situation say.
Obama wants to cut the NIF budget to $329 million in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 from the prior $409 million. The NIF may close the gap by charging outside researchers to run basic science experiments, such as how elements like iron behave under extreme pressure. Moses is allocating time slots with the facility and its laser into 2022.
For now, the ITER is the U.S. government’s preferred path to civilian electricity compared with other fusion choices, says Chris Deeney, the NNSA’s assistant deputy administrator.
Deeney’s thinking puts Moses’s work at odds with the prevailing U.S. sentiment.
A smaller version of an ITER-style machine, in Culham, England, produced 16 megawatts of power after consuming 24 megawatts to get the reaction started.
Comments
So it looks like the con artists are at it again, with the exagerrations and oversell.
I'm baffled as to why so much money and resources are being spent on this LIFE fantasy. Even a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that there are big problems with this concept. An energy release of around 50 MJ per capsule implosion works out to about one dollar's worth of electricity. So for the idea to make any financial sense each capsule assembly - including its hohlraum - has to cost significantly less than a dollar. Apparently, they're saying that they can produce these precision capsule-hohlraum assemblies for 25 cents each. Of course, that cost limit also has to take into any other associated per-unit costs such as filling costs and quality control inspections of each capsule. Who do they think that they're kidding when they say 25 cents per capsule assembly? Hasn't anyone called BS on Moses for this?
How much money does NIF think that it can squeeze out from university researchers who are being funded by things like NSF grants? The problem I've always had in collaborating with outside researchers is that the Lab's cost structure and overhead rates are completely out of whack with that at universities. Those poor university researchers aren't the people to look at in order to close an $80 million gap. Or am I missing something here?
May 11, 2013 at 1:12 PM
What the poster really means is that the US Nuclear Weapons Program needs to eat the full cost of the shots. Basic science at both LLNL and LANL have been sucking at the teat of the Nuclear Weapons Program for decades. All of the facilities like NIF and LANSCE were built by ripping off legitimate weapons work. In the future, with herd-nose austerity, I'm afraid those days of funding subsidized by NNSA are over. I that case, the basic science at will be unable to compete with cheaper (much, much cheaper)research at the universities. Science at LLNL and LANL outside of Weapons work will dry up and blow away. Which will be a good thing -- letting the labs get back to their roots -- Nuclear Weapons!
Yes, a case can certainly be made for shrinking the Lab so that it has a narrow focus on just maintaining nuclear weapons rather than the "broad-front" science- based approach of the past. In fact whether by conscious planning or not, we have already drifted pretty far that way just due to all of the budget cutting as well as the increased oversight by NNSA.
I guess a big question, though, is who is going to want to come to work at LLNL? In the old days, scientists were in the happy position of doing programmatic work while at the same time being able to enjoy considerable visibility outside the due to their high-quality "academic" non-programmatic work and papers. That was a selling point when recruiting bright new young talent to the Lab. It's certainly not as easy to recruit people to come to the Lab as in the past. Many of the best and brightest see greener pastures elsewhere.
May 11, 2013 at 3:19 PM
If you are referring to the proton accelerator that makes LANSCE possible, it was built with DOE (actually AEC and ERDA) science funding in the early 1970's.
A working, reliable, ready-for-service fusion power plant 8 to 12 years after ignition? Fusion-generated electricity at 10.8 cents per kilowatt-hour? Are these serious estimates or are they just pulling numbers out of their a$$es? I have a hard time believing that they're in any position to make any reliable estimates on the time needed to overcome technical hurdles or the costs of running a laser fusion power plant until they at least understand what is required to achieve just one successful ignition.
The problem I have with all of this LIFE stuff is even IF they had achieved ignition by now, exploiting NIF technology to build a working, reliable, ready-for-service fusion power plant is quite another matter. When I first heard about LIFE I thought that they might have some clever designs up their sleeves, but basically all LIFE is just NIF scaled up to popping 10 to 20 capsule+hohlraum assemblies per second. Now the standard capsule+hohlraum assembly might be fine for single-shot, high value expensive experiments. But to expect that they can mass produce capsule+hohlraum assemblies with micron (submicron?) tolerances for about 25 cents each is insane. I looked up the cost of plain 2-3 mm ceramic (alumina) ball bearings for a cost comparison. If you order a lot of 100, they cost about $2 each. Obviously, a filled capsule+hohlraum assembly is a lot more complicated than a solid 2mm alumina ball bearing. Yeah, the plan is to make millions so there will be some cost reductions due to efficiencies of scale, but still I think that 25 cents per capsule assembly is a fantasy. And don't forget that filling, inspection, and other miscellaneous per capsule costs also need to be included in that 25 cents per capsule cost limit.
So how are you guys going to do ten shots a second when you can't ever do one shot a days that works? LIFE is DEAD before it even got started and no one should consider funding any phase of this until every shot NIF does is successful. FUSION