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...
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Using the NNSA labs common scaling factor of x5 with this 8 year figure and that gives a date 40 years from today.
Fantastic! Young scientist will be able to keep hyping the success of fusion energy generators that are "right around the corner " for their whole career at the lab. This is, indeed, fabulous news for those working at NIF.
It could be done in 8 years if it was treated as a high national priority, and everybody lined up to make it happen (as in Apollo). That doesn't seem very likely, but to scientific types it's not impossible.
40+ years is much more likely, given how hard it is to get and maintain enough consensus to actually do anything.
So, if you're an honest scientist who really feels like this would be a good thing for mankind, what do you say? "8 years" damages your credibility, "40+ years" makes everybody loose interest immediately. So I guess you do as Dunne did: you state carefully that it "could be as soon as 8 years."
Personally, after 30+ years in the fusion business, I think the "8 years" is just laughably misleading. The US no longer has the guts for things like this, and we need to face that unfortunate fact.
The Spanish Christians took 800 years of constant war to throw out the Spanish Muslims. And that is an easier problem to solve that Fusion power production.
There is a lesson here for both Fusion Power salesmen and Middle East peddlers. We are only 60 years along in an 800 year campaign...
Now, go away and let the real scientists perform their ground-breaking work. There is a Noble Prize to be won.
So.... it looks like NIF hasn't gotten much done in the last two years since they had the alpha heating milestone failure."
Students, here we have a perfect example of bloggian logic. By simply attaching the word "so" to the beginning of whatever statement you would like to make, in whatever thread you would like to make it, you can appear to have read and followed the previous discussion, and drawn an actual conclusion. It's just that simple. Your statement need not be based on any facts or any alleged facts, but can be manufactured from whole cloth to suit whatever purpose you wish.
So, it's apparent that the referenced posting is the product of a deviant and probably sociological cold-fusion scientist.
"So.... it looks like NIF hasn't gotten much done that is of significant worth weighed against the enormous costs in the last two years since they had the alpha heating milestone failure that remains a major failure despite any high-foot flag-waving
NIC = No Issues Corrected
It feels like "spectacular progress" or "milestone achieved" or "mission accomplished" is announced every time a butterfly farts.
Yes, that was a reference to George W.
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