Dry-run experiments verify key aspect of Sandia nuclear fusion concept

https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/nuclear_fusion/

by kposehn • 14 years ago

72 44 14 years ago

share.sandia.gov

ck22• 14 years ago

Isn't this the laboratory that is doing weapons research under the guise of helping people?

Or am I confusing propaganda? Their logo creeps me out too.

jff2• 14 years ago

Sandia does weapons research, but it does more than just that. One of the main goals is indeed stockpile stewardship, and to that end Sandia produces a lot of hardware and software. On the other hand, it also does a lot of research into energy generation, such as fusion, wind, solar, and improvements in combustion-operated power sources such as coal plants and internal combustion engines. There's also work in robotics, biology, chemistry, physics (beyond nuclear explosions!), math, computer science; most of these are not for the development of weapons. It's a DOE lab, so it does things which fall under the DOE mandate, which includes maintaining the nation's nuclear stockpile among many other things.

I think fusion energy is a big enough win for everyone that you don't need to assign some sinister backing to it. The Department of ENERGY damn well should be interested in a safe, clean method of generating electricity.

The logo is a thunderbird, after the mythological creature of the Native Americans.

fintler2• 14 years ago

Also, sometimes the nuclear stuff goes beyond weapons. Like destroying asteroids for example.

http://insidehpc.com/2012/01/08/video-visualizing-the-los-al...

ck22• 14 years ago

Ah okay, I guess the Nazis ruined a lot of symbolism.

Logo reminded me of something out of Wolfenstein 3D

The paranoia in me always suspect they are all trying to make nuclear weapons without the pesky fallout which would be a horrible "advancement" as it would remove resistance to use them.

dfc• 14 years ago

How do you find the sandia logo creepy? Do you think all Native American imagery is creepy?

pyre2• 14 years ago

He's somehow associating it with this:

http://www.thegrandoldgame.com/Bob/Bayern/NaziEmblem01.jpg

javert• 14 years ago

doing weapons research under the guise of helping people

You're presuming those are different things, when they aren't necessarily. Good weaponry is a prerequisite for world (or even domestic) peace.

Of course, good ideas are also a prerequisite, and in that area, we're far more lacking.

dsr_• 14 years ago

Clean fusion power may only be fifty years away.

(Seriously, it's great that there are fundamental research programs still going on. Even the spin-offs are generally worthwhile by themselves.)

gus_massa• 14 years ago

It's really very difficult to predict which technologies will work in 50 years. Try to imagine yourself in 1962 and try to predict what would happen in 2012.

I googled http://www.google.com/#q=1960+technology+predictions , there are a lot of results, some of them are very interesting. But it is difficult to choose the sites with good reliable information.

Or in other words: http://xkcd.com/678/

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

Well, 1952 to 2002 would be even more challenging (42 even more so). The transistor was new, lasers hadn't been invented, no orbital satellites had been launched, computers were very primitive, etc. So much of our modern communications infrastructure is based on lasers, satellites, and micro-chips.

What invention will render our predictions utterly useless? Consider the potential of memristor technology, for example, which could put vastly increase the power and space efficiency of computers and lead to micro-chip sized supercomputers. Or maybe we invent some form of nanofabrication, or room temperature superconductors, or some invention that wouldn't even make sense to us today.

jostmey• 14 years ago

I would not rush to call fusion "clean". But it would be an amazing power source.

DennisP6• 14 years ago

It's pretty close. Has a high neutron flux that makes your equipment radioactive, but there's no waste from the fuel itself.

If one of the boron fusion projects works out, we won't even have the neutron flux.

adaml_623• 14 years ago

Less radioactivity release than coal I think. Due to the levels of radioactive material naturally occurring in coal deposits.

DennisP6• 14 years ago

If Sandia's idea works, they'll exceed breakeven next year. After that they just need to build a machine two or three times bigger and they'll have a high enough energy gain to easily be practical. And they only need a new fuel element every ten seconds, which gives them a practical advantage over NIF's approach.

Meanwhile there's focus fusion (could get to net power next year with boron fusion), NIF (a couple years away, already working on a practical power plant design called LIFE), General Fusion (five years to commercialization if it works), Tri-Alpha (slightly more), picosecond laser fusion (simple high-gain boron fusion design, needs a laser six times bigger than our best now but lasers are advancing fast), polywell (Navy's doing it, could be five years if it works, they're not talking much), and a couple more that look promising but need funding (Helion, levitated dipole). And tokamak of course, which is still decades away from practical use so of course that gets the most money and press.

What people don't realize is that fusion has been advancing exponentially since 1970.

But still every fusion article gets the inevitable "fifty years away" joke. I'm on the verge of making a record of every one I see, just so I can send them all a "nyah nyah" when one of these projects comes to fruition.

kposehn• 14 years ago

Interesting. What are the benefits to any of these approaches in your opinion?

What seems key to me is having a large enough energy output to harness without waste in the flare window while being able to manufacture fuel in sufficient volumes to power the sucker.

zrail• 14 years ago

If I'm interpreting this correctly, each liner is a one-use consumable and all of the power it can generate comes out in one big burst. How does long-term power generation work in that scenario? Is there a big feed tube that drops liners into a chamber, fuse them, then dump them out the bottom?

jff2• 14 years ago

I think the idea is closer to shooting the liners into the chamber, but essentially yes. I saw a video at one point (don't have it handy) that one of the labs put together, illustrating a conceptual plant based on current work, in which fuel pellets were fired into the fusion chamber one after another.

Retric• 14 years ago

Think internal combustion engine. Lot's of detonations fast enough + Flywheel (or in this case large heat sink) = steady power. As to cost 1GW of electricity is worth ~50,000$ an hour so there is room for a fair amount of consumables.

MattGrommes• 14 years ago

I worked as a webmonkey intern with these guys back in the late nineties. When they "shoot" the machine it shook the ground for a hundred yards around, which they neglected to tell me during my first week. I had just gone through radiation training and I'm standing in the room next to the giant warehouse that housed the thing when there's a huge boom and the ground shakes. Nobody else batted an eye so I played it cool but great googly moogly that was scary. And that was before they add a great honking laser that comes over from the next building and zaps the core of the machine. A lot of those guys were stereotypical crazed geniuses, it's fun to see their work carrying forward.

adlep• 14 years ago

meanwhile Adrea Rossi's ECAT LENR device is getting closer and closer to reality. http://www.e-catworld.com/

http://rossilivecat.com/

http://youtu.be/tjOoGtTFpNk

http://youtu.be/JWoaJ5NEj-w

http://youtu.be/2cOEHQmnG-I

http://www.e-catworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/EFA-rep...

vectorpush• 14 years ago

It's been almost a year since this guy promised to deliver a working prototype of his supposed "low energy nuclear reaction" device, but of course, he's actually just a scammer.

mrb• 14 years ago

Rossi did deliver a prototype to his first customer at the end of a demonstration day in October 2011. A few dozen scientists and journalists were also invited to this event. Are you claiming the customer hauling away the device in a truck was fake and staged?

The general consensus from the scientists present at the event was that "yes, something strange appears to be going on, we need to attempt to replicate this". As a result, Rossi's research has triggered a non-negligible renewal of interest of Nickel-Hydrogen fusion (which has been going on for 15+ years), especially in Italy and Greece. A few well-recognized researchers openly and publicly admit that Rossi's research appears promising and deserves more research (such as Dennis M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist at NASA Langley Research Center).

Recently, Celani has been able to reproduce anomalous heat in Ni-H cells that cannot be explained by current physical theories (other than with Ni-H fusion being real): http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/08/celani-demonstrates-excess...

I am following the latest developments very closely.

The only reason Rossi is not taken more seriously is because current physical theories predict cold fusion should be impossible, and because he publishes barely enough information to reproduce anomalous heat in Ni-H cells without giving away all the experimental tricks he found to make the reaction more pronounced (he appears to be driven by greed and wants to commercialize the tech before letting the secret out).

Still, I don't think you personally can call Rossi a scammer, since you obviously don't follow Ni-H research that has been going on in the last year.

nisa2• 14 years ago

Here: http://psiram.com/en/index.php/Focardi-Rossi_Energy-Catalyze... is a sourced detailled write up on the Catalyzer. There are no signs that anything serious will develop out of it.

cletus• 14 years ago

I remain skeptical that fusion will ever be an economical or even viable source of energy. The major problems are that:

1. The Sun, by comparison, produces less energy (per volume) than compost [1];

2. Heavier isotopes of hydrogen, used because they provide a faster reaction, emit more neutrons, which tend to have a devastating effect on the container. Thus you have two conditions at odd: speed of the reaction vs viability of containment;

3. The Sun solves the problem of containing the reaction with gravity. Magnetism has yet to yet to be shown as viable of effective in energy terms; and

4. People focus too much on the fuel cost, which is near-zero and supply is effectively unlimited. But that's H1. Deuterium is relatively plentiful [2] but tritium is one of the most expensive substances (by mass) on Earth. Helium-3 is an alternative but is also incredibly expensive [3] such that recovering it from the Moon may actually be economically viable relative to cost (that should tell you something about how rare/expensive it is). D-D reaction research I think is currently far behind anything involving Tritium or He-3.

Fuel costs aside, that's only one input into the cost equation. Even if the fuel is free the power plant will cost $X to produce, will require $Y in maintenance per year for Z years and produce W MW of power. Plug all those numbers together and that power still has cost even with "free" fuel.

For automobiles at least, petrochemicals have some incredible advantages. They are relatively stable, cheap and the machinery for turning them into usable energy is cheap and mass-produced. Of course it has two major problems:

1. Emissions; and

2. It is a limited resource.

I tend to think at some point in the next few centuries genetic engineering will allow us to solve (2) by sustainably "growing" more fuel with something like algae or (to borrow an idea from Anathem) "fuel trees". Of course something must be consumed to produce this energy.

Battery technology will have to improve by an order of magnitude at least to be a viable alternative to fuels that are easily transported and don't require the infrastructure that charging stations otherwise would.

For fixed power generation I'm really not sure what the future holds. If we're not careful we'll simply exhaust a number of readily available fuels and the population problem will "correct" (as it often does) with war.

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.ht...

[2] http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/FAQ.aspx#Depletion

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Fusion_reactions

Daniel_Newby4• 14 years ago

1. The sun is in equilibrium. Increased power would cause it to expand, and the power density is an exponential function of density.

2. You capture the neutrons with a lithium container, which produces tritium.

3. The Z-machine is an inertial confinement machine: a powerful electric arc produces a radiation pulse that compresses the fision target.

4. I suspect if you can achieve ignition with tritium, you can use the fusion flash to ignite deuterium in a two stage process.

Daniel_Newby4• 14 years ago

"the fision target"

I meant fusion target. Oops.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

1. The Sun uses gravitational confinement and will run for over 10 billion years, producing nearly 400 yottawatts of power all throughout that time. The relationship to the average power density of compost is utterly, utterly irrelevant.

2. Oh no, neutrons! If only we'd spent 7+ decades working with neutron reactions and their interactions with materials. It's a shame there are no functional power reactors anywhere in the world that are subjected to a high-neutron flux.

3. Magnetic confinement of fusion works just fine, we're at a point where it looks like it's simply a matter of scaling things up to get to greater than break-even energy-wise. How practical and competitive such reactors might be remains to be seen, but it's fairly unlikely that they just plain won't work.

4. The biggest advantages of fusion as an energy source are that it's safe and clean. It won't be until quite some time in the future when we have the ability to make use of something like p-B11 fusion reactions (which are far, far beyond our capability at the moment due to the much higher plasma temperatures required) when fusion will be, potentially, much cheaper and easier than competing alternatives (due to the potentially lower capital cost and conversion efficiency of an aneutronic fusion reactor which wouldn't even need a steam turbine).

DennisP6• 14 years ago

Some recent modeling suggests that by using side ignition of fuel with a petawatt picosecond laser, boron fusion would only be ten times harder than D-T. By comparison, for the spherical arrangement NIF uses, boron is 100,000 times harder. Here's one paper, google brings up more: http://ocs.ciemat.es/EPS2011PAP/pdf/P5.037.pdf

The lasers are almost good enough to try this and advancing fast.

Another approach to boron ignition is focus fusion. They published a peer-reviewed paper recently showing they'd achieved the temperature required for boron fusion (they're up to 1.8 billion degrees C). They need higher density though, they're working on that and hope to get to the level they need in a year.

DennisP6• 14 years ago

You're right that an expensive fusion device will make expensive power. But some of the alternative approaches would be quite cheap. (See my other posts in this thread.)

And you're right that batteries are a long way from being competitive with hydrocarbons. But with cheap enough power you can make hydrocarbons from CO2 in the air. The hardest part is concentrating the CO2. In theory the energy cost is only about a tenth as much as the energy content of the fuel you make. In practice it's quite a bit higher, but there are several research teams working on fixing that, including one by Nobel chemist George Olah.

Once you've got the CO2 you can use pretty standard chemical processes to take it the rest of the way. Olah advocates turning it into methanol and using that directly, but the oil companies have had an efficient methanol-to-gasoline process in production for decades.

One proposal to use that process is called Green Freedom, from Los Alamos. Their design uses a GenIII nuclear plant, and they think they could produce gasoline at $4.60/gal conservatively, or $3.40 assuming a couple modest technological improvements. They have their own way to concentrate the CO2, unrelated to Olah's work.

Get something like this and you can have carbon-neutral transportation using the vehicle fleet, gas stations, and pipelines we've got right now.

Dry-run experiments verify key aspect of Sandia nuclear fusion concept

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