Greg Mello on NIF

 I found this gem from From Greg Mello on NIF

15 January, 2023

There is no potential whatsoever to create useful energy from matter in this extremely expensive boondoggle. It is not even necessary for "stockpile stewardship." The Naval Research Laboratory, cognizant LANL scientists, the then-director of Sandia National Laboratories, dissident senior Livermore laser scientists, and pretty much everybody without a conflict of interest ever since would agree with that assessment, as would -- in my opinion, anyone with a quantitative bent to put pencil to paper, slide rule to hand, or computer to use. Many of us brought up these points before this laser-the-size-of-the-Rose-Bowl-stadium was built. Perhaps the most telling comment was provided on the sidelines at that time, in Oakland, by one MIT physicist to me: he thought it was his job to provide jobs for physicists, many if not most of whom work in the defense and nuclear weapons industries.

That was the goal. Oh, let's also count stockpile stewardship "founder" Vic Reis, who said to me, in the presence of then-LANL director Charlie McMillan, that NIF would be retiring before long, leaving Livermore without a clear raison d'etre. In fact, Reis said, the maturity of the stockpile stewardship would leave both of the huge physics labs without a clear mission. The answer to the first problem, said a White House official to me (in case it wasn't clear enough to anyone with eyes in their head) would be a new Livermore-designed warhead, the W87-1, for which LANL would make the plutonium pits, under Livermore's direction. The answer to the second problem, the LANL problem, would be assisted if LANL took it upon itself to build a small nuclear reactor, McMillan and Reis told me. Would I help in selling this idea to Governor Grisham, they said? No I would not. Unfortunately the lack of scientific literacy in our population makes it easy to con people, as Nakhleh is doing here. He scratches Livermore's back and Livermore scratches LANL's. 

Perhaps he has conned himself. Maybe he really believes this crap. It's never possible to sift the lies from the self-deception. As the cognizant White House official said to me a couple of years ago, LANL pit production is a gigantic scheme to keep Livermore well-funded. Deception on this scale confuses ordinary people. It doesn't jibe with the democratic and techno-magical fairy tales many people have gradually come to accept, like children. Both "fusion energy" from inertial confinement or from magnetic confinement are fairy tales. The former serves the nuclear weapons community, and both employ physicists and are essentially physics demonstrations, not steps on any ladder to practical energy sources. In this case, the supposed net energy gain isn't real, not by a long shot, but rather arises from the omission of the vast energy inputs needed to create the laser beams, and of course the vast energy needed to create and run the machine. NIF is a gigantic energy sink, not a source.