“It’s a singular moment in humanity,” said Vincent Tang, the principal deputy director for the National Ignition Facility and Photon Science Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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...
Comments
2008:
ALL LLNS “Career Indefinite Employees” working on the NIF project, were given “exempt” employment status, and could not participate in the LLNS retirement incentive offered at the time given their collective importance to NIF.
June 3, 2009:
“Thousands attend NIF dedication”
https://amp.spie.org/news/0602-nif-dedication
In months approaching September 2012…:
Some longtime NIF upper managers with perhaps some inside knowledge…decide not hang around until September 2012, the month of NIF reckoning, and decide to retire.
By September 2012:
NIF Fails to Reach “Ignition”
Many dedicated LLNS so called “Career Indefinite Employees”, were “NIF’d” into ETA/EBA status while Supplemental Labor employees kept their NIF positions. Once this part of the NIF FTE workforce “axe plan” was complete, then,
November 2012:
Art Wong SHRM AD, announces sweeping changes in the “Career Indefinite Employee” lay off policy that had been secretly in the works with the NNSA for the previous ~6 months. The term “Individual RIF” relating to those now in LLNS ETA/EBA status, was defined in Art Wong’s NNSA approved and published documentation release. Turns out by shear luck, Art Wong was ahead of the curve, and constructed new NNSA approved LLNS lay off policies 6 months before anyone believed NIF would fail to reach Ignition coupled with its associated budget cuts. Impressive. Hmm.
May 16, 2013:
“Feinstein declines to halt NIF budget cuts”
“Feinstein is a member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee and chairs its subcommittee on energy and water development…She rejected their request to support NIF's request for $486.6 million for the coming year, saying it "is hard to justify" as there is no "clear path forward for achieving ignition."
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/feinstein-declines-to-halt-nif-budget-cuts-4523794.php
What undisclosed to the public, high power laser system has been externally peer reviewed that would successfully take the shot rate above of 1 shot/86,400 seconds, all the way up to 10 shots/second? In other words, a 864,000x increase in SUCCESSFUL non-stop 10Hz rep-rate *ignition shots, where *ignition is defined below?
*viable NIF ignition is defined as the (fusion output energy)/(wall plug input energy) ratio that would be practical for an actual fusion power plant
Can someone please hand NIF a new piece of threaded pipe? We need to connect two dreams together.
The DOE/NNSA need to be intellectually honest here, since a prototype fusion power plant is likely 10 to 20 years out, under the best of circumstances.
Tax payers deserve to know how their dollars are being spent, and why new fission plants, far less prone to human error or structural failure than existing fission plants, are not being aggressively pursued as todays bridge technology, while we wait 10, 20, or more years for a prototype fusion plant to go online. Else we are all getting “NIF’d”.
https://patch.com/california/livermore/lawrence-livermore-repeats-fusion-energy-breakthrough-reports
And ~300MJ of input energy from PG&E (the grid) for ~3MJ energy output, so they need 100x more energy out just to breakeven, but it is progress.
Actually NIF doesn’t use any electricity from PG&E, it comes from the WAPA substation across Grenville that has a transmission line that runs back to the Central Valley Project substation adjacent to the Jones pumping plant in Tracy (Mountain House now). When the power plant at Kennett (Shasta)was authorized AEC was given a certain amount of power for free minus the cost of transmission, it an expenditure listed in the CVP budget. PG&E is a backup source for the lab, and the lab actually lost power in I think it was 2020 when the supply from western was shut down for construction and was using PG&E supplemental power. PG&E ended up dropping the lab during a heat wave to keep their customers power on.
Thank you for the correction, but it doesn’t change the 3MJ output to the 300MJ input challenge, but there is hope. Interesting that nobody has responded to the number of failed NIF ignition shots between the 2 energy gain shots(?).