In 2012, NIF failed to achieve ignition, and subsequently, Dr. Ed Moses left LLNS employment. Have any external peer reviews estimated how far off NIF was in terms of peak power or energy to achieve momentary fusion?
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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If you consider the different number scales in nature such as the size of the election got the size of the universe, the mass of the neutrino to the mass of the Higgs, the size of a virus to the the size of a blue whale, these are 10^10 or more so NIF being off by only 10 is actually a great success and shows that were are on the right rack, the machine is built, it works as designed, we can all agree that it has been successful., do not let the anti-science ramblings on this blog give you the wrong impression.
It was not "missed by that much" it was not trying to hit a target it was trying to blaze a trail and it indeed blazed that trial, it should that one could even throw a dart at the board in the first place, now that we now that we have darts and their is a dart board the most important steps have been taken. We now need to keep through the darts and yes the target will be hit, just like in all dart boards, it is just a matter of time. Do you think we should stop using NIF and miss out?
from Nov. 23, 2020:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/laser-fusion-reactor-approaches-burning-plasma-milestone
8/06/2021 5:18 PM
The same was said when the Vatican condemned Galileo. Yeas from now when fusion energy powers us to the stars, there will be monuments to Moses who lead us out of a doomed earth filled with people who will not even get a vaccine. No one will ever remember the congress people from Alaska who threw out Moses.
What?? Speaking facts, and truth to power? Doesn't work around here.
How was Moses openly insubordinate? Did he disagree with someone in good faith based on his principles? Not buying it. Moses was fired as the fall guy for ignition failure, unless you believe the 2012 NIF ignition failure itself, falls under a willful act of insubordination. Again, not buying it.
After that Parney was fired from the lab from what he did to Moses?
Sounds like a fabricated false narrative to disconnect the failure of ignition in 2012 in order for NIF to survive beyond it. Nice try.
Colleagues,
You have all heard me talk many times about the central role that pursuit of fusion ignition as a gateway to high yield plays in stockpile stewardship and the importance of facilities like NIF to advance our knowledge, test our hypotheses, and challenge our people. These complex inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments seek to very rapidly compress a small pellet filled with deuterium (D) and tritium (T) (essentially ‘heavy’ hydrogen) to extremely high temperatures and pressures, causing the DT atoms to fuse together and release significant energy before the capsule falls apart. Over the past year our ICF research teams have made significant strides toward that goal, achieving record yields over 150 kJ with two different target types earlier this year. Those results were our first clear indication that we were moving into the realm where the physics changes fast and the ignition threshold was perhaps within sight.
On Sunday afternoon, another barrier was shattered. Our most recent ICF experiment produced a yield of more than 1 MJ, a 6X improvement over the prior record and a yield from the fusion capsule that was more than 4X the energy that the capsule absorbed. This result is historic in many respects and represents the culmination of more than 60 years of hard work, innovation and ingenuity, and relentless focus on the ultimate goal. Because of the extremely high yield of this shot, the full analysis of the data will take some time and the team will be hard at work vetting their analyses and preparing publications for the peer reviewed literature. Of course, this is only the first step and significant work remains. The team is already planning future experiments to explore the conditions that led to this remarkable advance and working to repeat and build upon this result.
This experiment, which produced a fusion yield of about 2/3rd of the delivered laser energy, puts us within striking distance of the “gain greater than unity” benchmark, where the fusion yield produced would be greater than the laser energy delivered, put forward in a 1997 review of the NIF by the National Academy of Sciences. To understand the importance of this we need to remember the context. In 1972, John Nuckolls first published the idea that high power lasers could be used to implode a capsule containing DT fuel to achieve thermonuclear burn in the laboratory. Over the intervening decades, numerous approaches were tried and steadily our understanding and the required technologies were advanced, starting from ~1 kJ lasers to today’s 2 MJ at NIF, a more than 1000X increase in laser energy to cite just one. Controlled thermonuclear fusion in the laboratory remains one of the defining scientific grand challenges of this era and this is a momentous step forward.
Sunday’s experiment built on advances and insights developed over the last several years by a Lab-wide team working on NIF and included advances in theory and simulation tools; new diagnostics; target fabrication improvements in the hohlraum, capsule shell, and fill tube; improved laser precision; and design changes to increase the energy coupled to the implosion and the compression of the implosion. This result was enabled by sustained support from an enormous range of partners, collaborators, and stakeholders including our partners at Los Alamos National Lab, Sandia National Lab, the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics, General Atomics, the academic community, industry, and the DOE/NNSA. This advance opens the door to exciting new NIF applications to support stockpile stewardship, enables us to study robustly burning plasmas for the first time since underground testing ended, and creates new possibilities to get to much higher fusion yields on NIF. It truly is the first step into a very bright future and a moment of enormous pride for the entire Laboratory.
Take care and stay safe,
Kim
8/13/2021 9:26 AM
I bet you are a load of fun at parties.
I also concur, I am also not a fan of NIF but NIF is one the greatest engineering achivements of mankind. Sunday's experiment is something special, a new era. They said what they need and it was actually built and the dam thing works. Magnificent, tremendous , it is real, it functions, lux...lux...lux!!!!
On to discovery my friends, the universe awaits and NIF will light the way!!!!!