The 2023 Nobel prize season is coming up. Is this the year NIF gets it?
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
Plasma and fusion have had a lot of money put into them, and NIF is the first big success. This on top of the push for alternative energy to fossil fuels. I give it a 50% chance it will get the prize. Like it or not the Nobel prizes can also be partially political.
The bigger question is if it does win, will be good for LLNL and NNSA in general in terms of more money and more science?
If the *concept* of ICF is up for receiving a Nobel, then the unclassified literature would have it going to the authors of the 1972 Nature paper with lead author John Nuckolls, who would go on to become Director of LLNL: NUCKOLLS, J., WOOD, L., THIESSEN, A. et al. Laser Compression of Matter to Super-High Densities: Thermonuclear (CTR) Applications. Nature 239, 139–142 (1972). https://doi.org/10.1038/239139a0
There were four authors of this unclassified paper, but Thiessen passed away last December, so potentially the remaining 3 authors could be nominated. The problem is that there was classified work with not necessarily the same authorship that really set out the necessary physics. I'm not sure how the Nobel Committee could deal with that.