Good News for Future NNSA Funding of NIF Inertial Confinement Fusion Experiments?
"Record Setting NIF Experiment Has NNSA Rethinking Pivot From Fusion"
"An Aug. 8 experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility that dazzled scientists, weapons-focused and otherwise, has the National Nuclear Security Administration rethinking plans to focus the facility more strictly on nuclear-weapons…"
Sorry in advance. The rest of the article requires a subscription. Question: Is this NNSA "rethinking" up to date or just a lag response to the August 2021 NIF inertial confinement fusion experiment, or does the NNSA "rethinking" include the 3 subsequent NIF inertial confinement fusion experiments too?
https://www.exchangemonitor.com/record-setting-nif-experiment-has-nnsa-rethinking-pivot-from-fusion/
Comments
We have concerns over a warming planet. In most cases, todays electric cars simply move local CO2 pollution to power plant CO2 pollution (same planet). A level 2 home EV charger (240VAC/32 amp) can require about the same wattage as a 13 SEER 8 ton air conditioner. Can our grid support this even if EV charging largely occurs at night? Yes we have billions in sunk costs in the National Ignition Facility, so do we shut it down, or continue funding ignition efforts? I say continue peer reviewed funding of ignition experiments.
Shut down.
The idea that NIF will help out with global warming is beyond dumb. Fusion could work in the future for energy but it will never come come from an NIF like approach. Maybe Tokamaks but but not by blasting a pellet with hundreds of lasers.
A fusion plant will only be achievable after ignition by some method, is reached. The NIF was never meant to be a fusion power plant, but a step in that direction. To claim that the NIF will not ever "help out" with global warming suggests you don't understand the steps needed to get there. We need to achieve ignition first, then design a scalable fusion plant based on what was learned from the ignition facility. Yes, there are other facilities working on ignition as well but they are not building fusion plants yet either. That does not mean they or the NIF are not "helping out" by working on ignition that will reduce global CO2 emissions by subsequent construction of fusion plants based on ignition success. Make sense?
Let me clarify, yes it is possible that ignition type fusion by blowing up pellets could someday be a power plant but I think the odds are very low for a number rather obvious reason. I could go through these rather obvious reasons but I figure you have an elementary understanding of multiplication, a napkin and a pencil. All these calculations out there and well known already so I do not need to go through it on this blog.
So far NIF has actually shown that the odds of this approach working in terms of a energy plant are even lower. Now NIF may be good way to do sine science and understand fusion for national security but so far NIF as probably shown this kind of approach to fusion is not feasible for usable energy. Fusion is a worthy goal but approaches like Tokamaks and variations are simply way more feasible and NIF is not going to offer much of value to these approach so the odds that NIF will help reduce global CO2 are very low.
With all that said, I think we should still fund NIF since it is already built getting some useful results. How long it should be funded is another question since the lasers are already pretty old. The cost is high and they cannot even reproduce the Aug event. Perhaps another round of funding and maybe they should think of a different laser approach.
I just get annoyed when someone says NIF could be a power plant or lead to a being a power plant. No real serious person ever thought this kind of approach would ever be competitive as a energy source. Of course once the experiments where done it could have turned that ignition was really easy and needed way less power. Even than it you still have a lot of problems to overcome before the cost might make it slightly worth while. You could argue that it is worth the cost since it is clean energy but if you actually go through the math and look all the energy used to make it, power it, transport the energy and how much you could get out in the best case and it is not actually worth it as a clean source either.
It turned it was much harder to do than thought. There is also question of if whole CO2 global warming is really that big of a threat to earth? Despite what the media say this is not settled science by a long shot.
There is story in the Boston Globe about how Fusion is just around the corner now with all the great success of NIF.