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Monday, August 2, 2021
How far off was NIF?
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?
25 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Well, was NIF externally peer reviewed to be short by more than an order of magnitude or, as Don Adams used to say, "Missed it by that much"?
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?
So what is the mood these days at NIF? Is there a feeling that they are converging on a solution? Or is there a feeling that they’re sort of lost and still searching for a way forward?
8/03/2021 8:58 PM, I think we both know the commenter was not saying NIF was off by an order of magnitude or very close. It was an open question not a statement of fact. External peer reviews of the NIF would not be “anti-science ramblings” wouldn’t you agree? Should we “stop using NIF and miss out?” might not be the right question to ask. Perhaps the better and broader question is given limited national funding, should we throttle back the NIF budget in order to explore and fund other promising DOE lab fusion efforts, nuclear fusion start ups, non-light water reactor nuclear power plant research, etc. so that we don’t “miss out” as a nation on our energy needs.
I don’t think congress bought the “blaze a trail” argument when Moses was shown the door after NIF failed to reach ignition. I understand to Frankenstein history, can be soothing for some.
Oh, c'mon 8/03/2021 8:58 PM, we all know that NIF goals were based on unrealistic computer simulations, and funded by morons in the Forestall building who will forever be mystified by anything done on a computer ! It was truly said by Arthur Clarke, that technology will be viewed as magic by the illiterate.
I don’t think congress bought the “blaze a trail” argument when Moses was shown the door after NIF failed to reach ignition. I understand to Frankenstein history, can be soothing for some.
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.
I love the fantasy fiction that continues to surround NIF [sic]. Just admit it, it doesn’t work, it never will work, and the world’s leading experts said all along it wouldn’t work. Time to close the cookie jar and move on with our lives.
Moses wasn't fired because the ignition campaign failed. He was fired by Parney because he was openly insubordinate. In fact, Parney knew he'd be fired by Pattis if he fired Moses but did it anyway.
“Moses wasn't fired because the ignition campaign failed. He was fired by Parney because he was openly insubordinate.”
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.
The failure of NIC had nothing to do with Moses getting fired (but if had been successful it would have made it harder to fire him). Aside from Moses constantly dissembling about his budget, the straw that broke the camel's back for Parney was that Moses had been directly ordered to not go to the Hill anymore. Moses arranged to get invited to a 1:1 meeting with Weinstein in defiance of that; when Parney found out (through Feinstein's staff) he brought Moses up to his office and fired him. I was in the room for most of that, and heard the rest from first hand sources.
Moses was constantly lying to Parney about his budget, which Parney would easily see through but led to serious issues, since Moses would complain to the LLNS Board chairman Pattis. The straw that broke the camel's back though was Moses openly defied a direct order from Parney to stop going to the Hill. When he found out from Feinstein's staff that he was going to see her he fired him. The NIC failure had nothing to do with it, although if it had been successful it would have been harder to fire him.
Ironically, Moses has done more to inhibit fusion as an energy source than almost any other individual in history with the possible exception of Pons and Fleishman.
From the current Lab Director referencing Sunday's NIF shot on (8/8/21).
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.
Always the big lie. How efficient are the lasers and remainder of the plant? A more honest way to look at this “success” is that despite 50 years of dedicated research, multiple prototypes, tens of billions of dollars spent, and countless broken promises they still aren’t within an order of magnitude of producing a single break-even shot, let alone ten per second with targets that cost pennies.
Always the big lie. How efficient are the lasers and remainder of the plant? A more honest way to look at this “success” is that despite 50 years of dedicated research, multiple prototypes, tens of billions of dollars spent, and countless broken promises they still aren’t within an order of magnitude of producing a single break-even shot, let alone ten per second with targets that cost pennies.
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!!!!!
25 comments:
Well, was NIF externally peer reviewed to be short by more than an order of magnitude or, as Don Adams used to say, "Missed it by that much"?
8/03/2021 6:23 PM
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?
So what is the mood these days at NIF? Is there a feeling that they are converging on a solution? Or is there a feeling that they’re sort of lost and still searching for a way forward?
8/03/2021 8:58 PM, I think we both know the commenter was not saying NIF was off by an order of magnitude or very close. It was an open question not a statement of fact. External peer reviews of the NIF would not be “anti-science ramblings” wouldn’t you agree? Should we “stop using NIF and miss out?” might not be the right question to ask. Perhaps the better and broader question is given limited national funding, should we throttle back the NIF budget in order to explore and fund other promising DOE lab fusion efforts, nuclear fusion start ups, non-light water reactor nuclear power plant research, etc. so that we don’t “miss out” as a nation on our energy needs.
from Nov. 23, 2020:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/laser-fusion-reactor-approaches-burning-plasma-milestone
I don’t think congress bought the “blaze a trail” argument when Moses was shown the door after NIF failed to reach ignition. I understand to Frankenstein history, can be soothing for some.
Oh, c'mon 8/03/2021 8:58 PM, we all know that NIF goals were based on unrealistic computer simulations, and funded by morons in the Forestall building who will forever be mystified by anything done on a computer ! It was truly said by Arthur Clarke, that technology will be viewed as magic by the illiterate.
I don’t think congress bought the “blaze a trail” argument when Moses was shown the door after NIF failed to reach ignition. I understand to Frankenstein history, can be soothing for some.
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.
They did not want Moses to wander in the desert for 40 years. They helped him out get out!
I love the fantasy fiction that continues to surround NIF [sic]. Just admit it, it doesn’t work, it never will work, and the world’s leading experts said all along it wouldn’t work. Time to close the cookie jar and move on with our lives.
8/08/2021 1:39 PM
What?? Speaking facts, and truth to power? Doesn't work around here.
Moses wasn't fired because the ignition campaign failed. He was fired by Parney because he was openly insubordinate. In fact, Parney knew he'd be fired by Pattis if he fired Moses but did it anyway.
Might have spoken a little too soon here...
“Moses wasn't fired because the ignition campaign failed. He was fired by Parney because he was openly insubordinate.”
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.
The failure of NIC had nothing to do with Moses getting fired (but if had been successful it would have made it harder to fire him). Aside from Moses constantly dissembling about his budget, the straw that broke the camel's back for Parney was that Moses had been directly ordered to not go to the Hill anymore. Moses arranged to get invited to a 1:1 meeting with Weinstein in defiance of that; when Parney found out (through Feinstein's staff) he brought Moses up to his office and fired him. I was in the room for most of that, and heard the rest from first hand sources.
Moses was constantly lying to Parney about his budget, which Parney would easily see through but led to serious issues, since Moses would complain to the LLNS Board chairman Pattis. The straw that broke the camel's back though was Moses openly defied a direct order from Parney to stop going to the Hill. When he found out from Feinstein's staff that he was going to see her he fired him. The NIC failure had nothing to do with it, although if it had been successful it would have been harder to fire him.
8/10/2021 10:27 AM
After that Parney was fired from the lab from what he did to Moses?
8:06am: correct. Pattis basically said that ifoaes had to go then so did Parney.
“Pattis basically said that ifoaes had to go then so did Parney.”
Sounds like a fabricated false narrative to disconnect the failure of ignition in 2012 in order for NIF to survive beyond it. Nice try.
Ironically, Moses has done more to inhibit fusion as an energy source than almost any other individual in history with the possible exception of Pons and Fleishman.
From the current Lab Director referencing Sunday's NIF shot on (8/8/21).
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
Always the big lie. How efficient are the lasers and remainder of the plant? A more honest way to look at this “success” is that despite 50 years of dedicated research, multiple prototypes, tens of billions of dollars spent, and countless broken promises they still aren’t within an order of magnitude of producing a single break-even shot, let alone ten per second with targets that cost pennies.
Always the big lie. How efficient are the lasers and remainder of the plant? A more honest way to look at this “success” is that despite 50 years of dedicated research, multiple prototypes, tens of billions of dollars spent, and countless broken promises they still aren’t within an order of magnitude of producing a single break-even shot, let alone ten per second with targets that cost pennies.
8/13/2021 9:26 AM
I bet you are a load of fun at parties.
5:50 let’s just say I don’t celebrate taxpayer funded failures. YMMV.
I’m about the most ant-NIF a guy possible, but if that’s true it’s a tremendous accomplishment.
8/14/2021 3:05 PM
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!!!!!
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