What's Happening at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). LLNL sure has been "mum" about it's billion dollar showcase failure.
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
Great team. Great facility. Great science.
Great team. Great facility. Great science...just not a a Great price.
Sorry, you can't get the best USA science and engineering on the cheap. Our competitors in Russia, China, Japan, and France (yes France) have all failed to make a weapons science simulation/ignition machine even close to NIF. Our only mistake on NIF was to not be "bold" enough. We all knew from underground tests that we needed a 10 MJ UV laser driver, not a 1.8 MJ machine. Scale is important when instabilities are critical to control.
That is not a very accurate way of saying things as NIF has also completely failed
at actually simulating ignition, so as many have of little value to the weapons scientists.
A question you can ask is for that price that was paid, could the same results
that have been obtained by NIF or will be could have been obtained by other far less expensive methods, and if you know anything about this than the answer is yes. Much more and better science could have been with the money that was spent on NIF.
Big science projects often fail to live up the expectations. NIF is a bit more odd since it is not really a discovery machine like the LHC, it either gets ignition or it fails. If the LHC finds new particles than that is a discovery if it does not find new particles it is also a discovery since that is telling us something deep about the universe. NIF not finding ignition is telling us what everyone had already been saying that 1.8 MJ was not enough, so when they don't get ignition it is kind of obvious. The LHC was driven by science but NIF was driven by politics so one sees the outcome.
There is one argument about for NIF which I kind of agree it and it is an economic argument. If one asked for 2 Billion for a series of smaller experiments
the Congress would never fund it. If you ask for something big but dubious the Congress may fund it. If the Congress decides it will not fund it, it is not like that money will automatically go to other science projects, it will probably go to keeping us in Iraq one or two days longer. In other words even though NIF failed to get ignition the number of ways the money could have been even more wastefully spent is much higher than not having spent the money at all. You have to remember money is not a conversed quantity.
at actually simulating ignition...
September 14, 2017 at 8:14 AM
NIF wasn't designed to "simulate" ignition. It was designed to ACHIEVE ignition. It didn't.
September 16, 2017 at 4:16 PM
It matters not. Ignition has not been achieved. Therefore, the National Ignition Facility is not. Plus, how did you expect NIC to prove a negative?
September 16, 2017 at 4:16 PM
True, but that can always be said. The only way to disprove it is to ignite something, short of that it will always be true that lack of ignition does not prove it cannot possibly be done. The real question is, do we as a nation have the free resources available to tackle such a daunting problem, especially given the bad PR NIF has received after Moses and Miller oversold it? The answer is almost certainly no, therefore ignition won't be achieved on the NIF regardless of whether or not it is technically possible.