Will the NIF ever achieve break even or is that no longer a realistic goal?
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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Total BS !
NIF (and the LIFE conceptual design project) are now and where never failures. The NIF user groups and shot requests are lined up from the NIF building to the Livermore Lab entrance.
March 20, 2016 at 8:28 PM
NIF was/is a failure, the idea that lots of users want access does not does not fully negate its failure. For the time and money spent on it, it could have been used to make much better facilities for the same people that want to run shots on it now. Even you should know this. Is NIF a total failure, no, and now that it has been built it can be used for some things to help mitigate the failure but to say it is a great success and kudos to all is just out and out delusional and no not even the people that use would say that. I am not exactly sure but you could just be a troll.
>Whoever started this thread with his seemingly innocent question SHOULD BURN IN >HELL!!! AAUUGGGHH!!!! ENOUGH ABOUT NIF!!
>
>March 20, 2016 at 8:44 PM
I thought you are the same guy who says stop talking about LANL this is an LLNL Blog. The blog finally talks something at LLNL and you lose it.
Yes, NIF is useful for some other things, provided the money keeps flowing from Washington to the tune of several hundred million dollars a year. Is it worth the money? You decide, but I guarantee most taxpayers will have a two-letter answer to that question, so it is a matter of time until it gets mothballed. That might happen under the next administration.
Maybe it has something to do with 5 billion dollars spent on something that didn't perform as advertised? You think people should just dismiss that and move on? I think that is a topic worthy of discussion. And this discussion centers on whether or not NIF will ever make the fusion power breakthrough that was promised.
5 billion may have been better spent on anything other than the dismal failure that ICF has been.
Really? Tell me where LIFE stands currently. LIFE is still being funded? Must be a covert project cuz' I sure haven't heard anything about it. Please, tell us more about this covert project.
NIF? It failed to achieve one of the major design goals, ignition. That is a fact.
The French, Russians, Chinese and India have undertaken efforts to copy NIF. Kudos to all now and previously involved.
These efforts are not billed as fusion energy projects. Big difference.
Even at the height of NIF's failure this was seen as a move up.
I don't think so!
It is now seving a giant very happy user community. Having delivered data from somewhere near 700 "experiment shots". It will pass 1000 late this year. It is being imitated by all of our nuclear arms competitors ( ~ 20B$ planned). In this science based stockpile stewardship role, helping to develop both the science and the scientists necessary to certify the stockpile for many years without UG tests. (The last scientist to participate in a UG test will retire in the next five years.) So it is kinda important.
And that could be the end of the story. But new scientists can use the data from this operating regime to create new ignition models, with new targets, snd more campaigns to develop a 2020-2030 prediction of what it takes to achieve ignition. That too is a significant advancement in the understanding of fusion.
The underlying science doesn't care a whit about what you think about it. It is a challenge perhaps of many lifetimes of some smart people to pursue it.
Meanwhile hundreds of experiments illuminate weapons science each year. It is pretty remarkable to behold.
NIFs are not popping up around the world, weapons science has nothing to do with 300 eV holoraums and plastic ablators, and failure is not an advancement.
$5 Billion is a lot of money for a starting point. And we need lifetimes to understand why it doesn't work.
Meanwhile hundreds of experiments illuminate weapons science each year. It is pretty remarkable to behold. "
6:58
Come on this guy is a troll. A decent troll at that but not the best one. He seems almost credible until this last statement where he cannot keep the facade going. Nice try.
Meanwhile hundreds of experiments illuminate weapons science each year. It is pretty remarkable to behold. "
Thank You ! I'm glad that I made major contributions to ICF and Large Laser Science (Novette, Nova, Beamlet, NIF and LIFE) in my rewarding career at LLNL !
You should quit responding to your own post. One thing I will say though, your contribution has helped demonstrate ICF has no place as an energy source. Thanks for your time.
"Perhaps once beam pointing and energetics during a shot are better characterized, they can be combined with tailored beam designs, more precise target fab technology and updated target physics for another fusion energy campaign to better characterise the challenges in the science of that mission."
Nuts, and here I thought we were making progress.
March 22, 2016 at 9:53 PM
NIF showed that mediocre scientists who make huge crazy claims will not deliver as promised. This is one of the most valuable lessons the nation and humanity can learn and NIF is shinning example of this for all of human history to look at and learn. This alone is worth every penny and indignation. Sometimes we have to accept that we are put on earth to be examples for others as to what to leads to failure and for this NIF should take pride at being such an example.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/03/23/nuclear-fusion-reactor-research/#.VvLvvn-9KSP
“I don’t think we’re at that place where we know what we need to do in order to get over the threshold,” says Mark Herrman, director of the National Ignition Facility in California. “We’re still learning what the science is. We may have eliminated some perturbations, but if we eliminate those, is there another thing hiding behind them? And there almost certainly is, and we don’t know how hard that will be to tackle.”
Says it all. The dumbass doesn't know s**t, but is plowing ahead regardless. Gives a new slant on the old adage to "Do something, even if it's wrong."
Clearly an apparatchik for the weapons program. Will never push for ignition, since he doesn't have a clue or the inspiration to find out.
Information bias is a type of cognitive bias, and involves a distorted evaluation of information. An example of information bias is believing that the more information that can be acquired to make a decision, the better, even if that extra information is irrelevant for the decision.
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/pop/23/5/10.1063/1.4943527
Difficult to read because it's 19 pages of excrement. I guess they blame everything on "degradations" they see in the code. They're lucky that no one there has the ability to engage in inductive reasoning.
Symmetric compression ratios as high as 40? What are these guys smokin?! More to the the point, are their funding managers at NNSA mainlining?
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/pop/23/5/10.1063/1.4943527
great article !
Detailed simulations compared to the shot data. Nobody ever said that ICF would be easy.
March 28, 2016 at 11:51 AM
You are wrong ! ICF was launched at Livermore by charlatans who said that it would only take 10 kJ to reach breakeven. Only the numbers have changed.
10 kJ of incoherent x-rays uniformly irradiating and ablating a perfectly spherical plastic target containing a perfect cryogenic DT inner layer with a perfect ICF pulse shape of 20-ns duration.
What don't you understand ?