Was the LIFE program at LLNL totally mothballed, or is the NNSA still funding at some level, efforts to improve NIF efficiencies and to lower costs for a future fusion facility?
2 comments:
Anonymous
said...
LIFE was a great program on paper. Its weakness was some managers didn't believe in it! With LANS always focused on safety, that was the least of their worries.
LIFE never made sense to me. If you work out the market price of the amount of electrical energy that could be generated with each successful shot, it works out to about a dollar’s worth of electricity per shot. That means that in order to break-even financially that the cost to fabricate each capsule+hohlraum assembly and fill the capsule in preparation for firing has to be less than a dollar. Hard to believe that that’s going to be possible. Plus, there’s the problem that dozens of shots would have to be rapidly fired each minute to generate sufficient electricity for the purposes of an electrical power plant.
2 comments:
LIFE was a great program on paper. Its weakness was some managers didn't believe in it! With LANS always focused on safety, that was the least of their worries.
LIFE never made sense to me. If you work out the market price of the amount of electrical energy that could be generated with each successful shot, it works out to about a dollar’s worth of electricity per shot. That means that in order to break-even financially that the cost to fabricate each capsule+hohlraum assembly and fill the capsule in preparation for firing has to be less than a dollar. Hard to believe that that’s going to be possible. Plus, there’s the problem that dozens of shots would have to be rapidly fired each minute to generate sufficient electricity for the purposes of an electrical power plant.
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