11 years later, is there a viable path forward to a LIFE 2.0?
LIFE (Laser Inertial fusion energy) was suppose to be a fusion power plant design based on the success of NIF, with the benefit of current technologies not available during the NIF construction phase.
When NIF failed to reach ignition in 2012, it took the air out of the funding for the LIFE project. LIFE would need to reliably generate more energy out than facility “wall plug” energy in, at a rate of 10 times per second. NIF fires ~once a day or so. A tall order for the LIFE project.
Comments
This was never credible.
This is fine if it's critical analysis of how an actual concept might work in the future, given advancements in technology, it could illustrate how given parts of the system might work and so on. It could be used to motivate research programs to address some of the shortcomings of current technology or scientific understanding.
I assume you may be right that it could require "not credible" or incredible technology advances to work, but part of the exercise could be to scope that out.
The echoes of LIFE should not take away from the achievement of getting alpha heating and ignition in laboratory fusion. That's a NIF milestone to be celebrated.
Back to LIFE....
Ignoring the problems (which are formidable) with creating a fission "blanket" to use fusion neutrons to fission the U-238 in spent fuel (or another source of U-238 or a Th-based fission fuel), a practical indirect-drive ICF fusion device would need to ignite a hohlraum target at a rate of at least 10Hz, and targets would need to cost less than $1 each. When I retired from the Lab, a good target took weeks to months of effort by a large team of PhD scientists and talented technicians to produce. I doubt that degree of effort Figure many $100K/target. A reduction in production time and cost of many orders of magnitude would be required for a practical ICF power source.
Next, consider that the target must be aligned *perfectly* with the laser beams to insure ignition, and that must be done at least 10 times per second. The rep rate of a NIF-class laser is, at best hours (credibly decreased by transitioning to diode-pumpe lasers instead of flashlamps), and a rep rate at the laser power thus far need to achieve ignition would destroy the optics in very short order. Furthermore, a reliable tracking system would be needed that could provide exquisite tracking of each target into the "firing chanber" and equally exquisite timing and firing control of the lasers. None of that is possible today or for the forseeable future..
For LIFE, the idea was to use the high-energy fusion neutrons to fission non-fissile (i.e., isotopes that do not fission when exposed to low-energy neutrons) actinides like U-238 or Th-232 and to use further those neutrons to transmute the radioactive fission products in commercial spent nuclear fuel to stable nuclides That idea is noble, but has an enromius set of different issues, ranging from the form of the "fission blanket", to the lack of neutron-reaction cross-section data on excited nuclear states so we current;y have no reliable way of modeling the neutron-capture reactions in a very-high-flux neutron environment.