Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24429621

by olegp • 13 years ago

467 214 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

Not really well-informed enough to comment on details, but it's fantastic to see the field is still moving, even if slowly. Proud that we are still funding this kind of research.

rozap• 13 years ago

Sorry to piss on your parade, but..

"Soon after, the $3.5bn facility shifted focus, cutting the amount of time spent on fusion versus nuclear weapons research - which was part of the lab's original mission."

Admittedly that is phrased in an odd way...

mrterry10• 13 years ago

The showers continue. Budget pressures have NIF down to shooting three days a week. To make matters worse, DoE has decided to cut funding for high energy density physics, ie the field covering the physics needed to make NIF ignite and turn laser fusion into a viable electricity source.

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

Not thrilled about that part, but the "Soon after" refers to events past, not the success this article is about.

However, the latest experiments...

So, at least the fusion research is still funded and still moving.

rpedela3• 13 years ago

Great, but I don't see how these extremely expensive nuclear fusion projects will ever beat price/kW of coal without heavy subsidies. My bet is that dense plasma focus is the future of cheap, clean power. Only time will tell though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus

germano• 13 years ago

I would imagine that the price/kW of coal will become easier to beat as we run out of it.

rpedela3• 13 years ago

Pick your favorite energy technology (oil, wind, solar), it still applies.

mikeash• 13 years ago

We're not running out of coal any time soon.

gizmo6862• 13 years ago

Much of the cost of these projects likely results from the research nature of them. Once we get a viable model, we will likely be able to produce a cheaper plant because 1) we know what we are doing, and 2) now that we know it works, we can build it bigger.

rayiner• 13 years ago

Lots of things beat coal on a price/kW basis once you account for the massive externalized costs of coal: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/tallying-coals-hid....

Coal isn't cheap, it just has the desirable property that more than half its costs can be easily externalized rather than being paid by the people who use the power.

Jormundir2• 13 years ago

I think Nuclear Fusion is the single most exciting up-and-coming technology. I can't believe we're not throwing a hundred billion dollars at it.

Make fusion, not war.

angersock• 13 years ago

Right, but what's its viral coefficient? How can we get it as a mobile app?

pyre• 13 years ago

I'm torn. Should we focus on gamifying it or making it web-scale?

kcbanner• 13 years ago

cheeseprocedure• 13 years ago

I giggled at this, but a serious question for those in the know: is computer simulation a significant factor in the development of fusion experiments, and can it be distributed (a la SETI@Home, Folding@Home, et al)?

beambot• 13 years ago

Obligatory Nikola Tesla pitching VCs video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zngK13FMgXM&noredirect=1

Shivetya• 13 years ago

Too bad shovel ready money wasn't spent on more long lasting impact projects like this. Where has all that money gone from the drawn down of the wars? Where is the investments going in alternative energy?

Well that last is easy, groups who contribute politically, hence solar and wind. They receive far too much in ways of support whereas hard science projects like this with incredible payoffs are pushed off because they don't payback in political contributions.

There are a myriad of ways to finance such an ambitious project through clean energy taxes but unfortunately they suffer the changing whims and needs of politicians. Yeah certain industries would go by the way side with this type of power available but many of them have big money invested in energy creation and distribution many would simply shift some columns in their spreadsheets and still balance out.

Considering the deficits the US runs, just in a day or two of deficit spending is more than what this facility budgets for this research.

chc• 13 years ago

It seems to me that the more plausible explanation is something like "Solar and wind power are proven to work, whereas fusion research is still trying to find something that even looks like it might work." Even after this "milestone," fusion still requires more energy from us than it gives back.

Basically, the funding is going toward practical technologies, in the sense that you can actually put them into practice today and reap rewards.

ErsatzVerkehr• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that the main goal of this project is to further research into nuclear weapons development.

Too bad shovel ready money wasn't spent on more long lasting impact projects like this.

Perhaps some kind of "Manhattan Project".... oh.

trevelyan• 13 years ago

In situations of depressed aggregate demand, it really doesn't matter what you spend the money on -- you could even bury it in the ground like gold and "pay" people to dig it up. Whatever you fund is essentially a free lunch.

You don't want to wait months though, which is why "shovel-ready" matters and this sort of research loses out to other sorts of projects. That said, less guns and more fusion would be nice.

devx2• 13 years ago

Soon after, the $3.5bn facility shifted focus, cutting the amount of time spent on fusion versus nuclear weapons research - which was part of the lab's original mission.

That was so disappointing to read. Don't we have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the planet 10x over already? Why would that still be the focus instead of inventing new sources of virtually unlimited energy??

icegreentea• 13 years ago

NIF's nuclear weapons research was in support of maintaining the current arsenal of nuclear weapons. Most notably, it helps solve the question of how to ensure current stockpiles are reliable without actually detonating a nuke (since that's a huge no-no). It also kept a generation of nuclear physicists and engineers in employment, and also providing a method by which to test future weapons designs.

So really, the answer is, it doesn't matter how many nukes we have right now, NIF was created (in part) to ensure that the capability to blow up the world could be maintained.

As depressing as it is, it's pretty much how it goes with nearly all defense technology spin offs. Why the hell did we spend all that time working on rockets that purposefully crashed back onto the Earth (on top of people!) instead of doing something like getting communications satellites up, or getting to the moon.

waps2• 13 years ago

Without weapons research

1) we never would have had nuclear power in the first place. (or it would have taken decades more)

2) It would even have taken a lot longer to develop oil energy and widespread cars (allied research on oil)

3) We wouldn't know about co2 separation (since the nazi state was cut-off -mostly- from oil, they researched liquefaction and nuclear power)

Nobody ever gives cruel losers credit, I guess. Heh. But the nazis certainly did a lot of useful research.

Raticide• 13 years ago

It has the word "nuclear" in it, so the crazies will hate it no matter what it is.

hetman2• 13 years ago

Just take the word "nuclear" out, like they did with Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging. No one will ever suspect a thing ;)

breckinloggins• 13 years ago

I keep seeing this same story pop up (from what I presume is the same September event).

Is there anything new this round? Perhaps some new results from post-experiment data analysis? The article isn't really clear on this point.

knappador2• 13 years ago

Producing net-energy is a different story than collecting net-energy. NIF just blows up a canister with a pellet and takes forever to reload a shot. On the other hand, an at-least-as-promising technology like Dense Plasma Focus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus) is still receiving minuscule funding. I'm hoping to be able to meaningfully support DPF and other fusion technologies soon. DPF has my attention so far because of its scaling characteristics.

gizmo6862• 13 years ago

What does producing energy mean if not collecting it? The conservation of Energy tells us that we are not actually producing any energy, rather we are converting energy from the mass of the reactants (hopefully into electricity). If you consider the energy converted from mass to be produced, then it is impossible to do nuclear fusion without producing net-energy (as long as you stay on this side of lead).

hetman2• 13 years ago

Yes but in the real world there are inefficiencies. We can't even transfer energy efficiently enough into the reaction yet to get a net energy gain from the fusion reaction. And once you reach that milestone, you still have to make transfer of the yield energy into useful work efficient enough to make the whole thing productive. Efficient energy transfer is hard!

kansface• 13 years ago

Producing does not imply the ability to do useful work (power steam turbines).

DennisP• 13 years ago

LPP is planning a crowdfunding campaign for their DPF experiment, so you'll be able to support them soon if you like. http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=c...

knappador2• 13 years ago

I tried introducing them to crowdhoster =) Anyone with the appropriate networking, please do your thing.

guimarin2• 13 years ago

tl;dr - Another article about the US nuclear weapons research facility at Lawrence Livermore, AKA NIF, and its sideshow 57th priority.

On a related note. It's been really sad to see the US slowly lose its edge in plasma based fusion tech, specifically tokamaks, which seem to be the only credible long-term method of sustaining a fusion reaction for power-plant purposes.

mrterry10• 13 years ago

Just a couple quibbles from a former NIF scientist.

NIF is much higher on the priority list than that. LLNL is already in the doghouse due to NIF failing to ignite on schedule. As goes the 5 giga-buck NIF, so goes LLNL (and the management knows it).

Technologically, I'd put inertial and magnetic fusion about the same place. Even if the physics works, neither has a chamber first wall material that can stand up to the huge neutron loads that a power plant will create. Economically, both are hosed. Fusion wants to be big. Most reactor designs are for >1,000 MW. Electric companies are mostly interested in plants in the 50-400 MW range.

nether• 13 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor

What do you think of this?

guimarin2• 13 years ago

Don't get me wrong I think that LLNL and the NIF are doing great work. I just think the work is more weapons based and less energy than we are all lead to believe in the press. and I meant that the Fusion Reactor business is a low priority compared to testing the nuclear stockpile, etc., not NIF in general.

The chamber first wall material keeps me up at night. I think money spent in that area would be really well spent and have many many uses, both in places where you need neutron shielding, and to a lesser extent, protection from heat. When I think of really big, fun, 1960s style energy projects, the only other 'credible' one seems to be laser pro-pulsed power-satellties. Now there is where we might take a lot of the laser tech from the NIF!

jordanthoms• 13 years ago

Well, fusion could radically decrease the cost of power, which would in turn increase the quantity demanded massively. So 1000MW might be reasonable.

nickpinkston• 13 years ago

This is awesome news - I visited the NIF a few months ago and they seemed a little downtrodden when asked about results.

I bet they're all cocky now!

They also told us that the lasers they use, if built with modern tech today, would actually only be the size of a 40' cargo container (as opposed to like 100K sq-ft building), and cost like 1000x less. Pretty epic...

If we invested in fusion power like we did water power less than a century ago, I can only imagine the possibilities...

marvin• 13 years ago

This is so cool. I almost can't believe that such incremental tech development would be applicable to fusion research. But there you have it. Now we just have to throw a few more billions at the problem. If the costs really have come down this dramatically, it is very promising indeed.

drjesusphd12• 13 years ago

They've been cocky many times before. After reading this article, I'm not optimistic that they've learned their lesson.

devx2• 13 years ago

Wow, I remember seeing this project start up a few years ago, about how they wanted to make a "sun" on Earth. It seems it only took them 5 years to achieve this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3981697/Scie...

In a way, it reminds of Spiderman, too, but let's hope things don't go as badly as in the movie, once we start to make that "sun" big enough to provide a ton of energy.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

Well, for one thing I assume they didn't build it in Manhattan.

drjesusphd12• 13 years ago

This is a trite and meaingless comment.

Spiderman? Really?

gnator• 13 years ago

Not much of a physicist myself but I am wondering if the technology developed for nuclear fusion would have any use in progressing other fields

mrterry10• 13 years ago

I can think of two off the top of my head. Low temperature plasma processing (used in semiconductor fab) got it start as the-mess-created-when-a-plasma-confinement-experiment-fails. Adaptive optics were developed for high intensity lasers and are now used in telescopes.

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

Glad to hear that this is continuing at LLNL despite the shutdown. Too bad no politician is going to use this as an example of why gov't investment is not a bad thing.

TallGuyShort• 13 years ago

Probably because "The real story here is that this facility allows the US to do nuclear weapons research without violating the nuclear test ban treaty." -- Another HNer from this field.

Mizza• 13 years ago

Ah, okay, cool!

I remember this being announced a while back, but I didn't understand why it was significant if the energy in was less than the energy out. This article helps to clear it up.

The missing piece was that I didn't understand how this reactor works. I thought they just blasted a lot of lasers directly at the hydrogen isotopes. Instead, it seems like that use the lasers to shoot something else, which then creates a lot of x-rays which actually start the reaction.

The significant thing here is that the energy produced is greater than the amount of energy coming in from the X-rays, but not the lasers which power those X-rays.

Is that correct? (Not surprisingly, I'm not a physicist!)

mrterry10• 13 years ago

Lasers gets fired at the inner surface of a cylinder (called a hohlraum). The laser heat the surface of the hohlraum which then emits x-rays. The x-rays then deposit energy on the surface of a spherical capsule (this is the "energy absorbed" number).

You start with ~2,000 kJ of laser energy, but some of that gets "backscattered" and never makes it into the hohlraum. Other energy is spent heating the walls of the cylinder. Additionally, some of the x-rays leak out of the hohlraum and do not drive the capsule implosion. After all these losses are taken into account, only about 15 kJ is absorbed in the capsule.

unreal37• 13 years ago

If reliable fusion technology were developed, would the government share it with the public or would it be kept hidden away?

Sadly I'm not joking. I think there's a 50-50 chance that any cool science that gets development by the U.S. government just becomes a classified DoD missile project.

jlgreco• 13 years ago

The development of fission technology seems like a fine case to consider. I doubt we are more paranoid and militaristic now than we were during the height of the cold war. Maybe we are, but I really don't see it.

locusm• 13 years ago

From a friend that does research in fusion energy - no single country works on large fusion projects on there own as its too expensive. ITER has something like 7 or 8 member nations tipping cash in.

pslam• 13 years ago

On the article itself: why did it take 6 paragraphs of text to finally mention what the milestone was? I hate this style of article writing, and it's usually a good bullshit-signal for any story. That's a shame, because it looks like this is the Real Thing (in a small way).

dtap• 13 years ago

There was not an overall net gain.

Direct from the source http://1.usa.gov/1e4Na9Q.

8 kJ out from 1.7 MJ (1700 kJ) in. At the end of the month they were able to get 14 kJ. I believe they are referring to the energy released within the hohlraum.

Also, if you are interested there are privately funded companies doing this, General Fusion (http://www.generalfusion.com/) and TriAlpha Energy (secretive and funded by the Russian govt., but in California). The VC fund I work for has invested in GF and obviously we think there is promise :)

sam2• 13 years ago

It is an important milestone. But to have a commercially viable fusion reactor, you'll need a factor of 50-100 more energy out than in to make up for inefficiencies in electricity generation using this kind of scheme.

The real story here is that this facility allows the US to do nuclear weapons research without violating the nuclear test ban treaty. If the goal was to develop a commercially viable fusion reactor, the $3,500,000,000 spent so far could have been put into projects geared towards small scale fusion experiments investigating novel confinement schemes.

Like the one I was working on, http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DPP07/Event/71002 whose funding has since been cut and has been mothballed.

pjlegato3• 13 years ago

Speculating about their "real" motives is just that; speculation.

I'm sorry your project was defunded, but that in itself is not evidence that the facility is actually a sham.

skorgu• 13 years ago

NIF is explicitly and publicly a weapons research facility; it's right there on their website[0]. If they happen to do some useful scientific or commercial work then yay but it's a nice byproduct.

[0] https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/missions/

darkmighty2• 13 years ago

He's not saying the facility is a sham, he is simply saying it's goals are not to generate electricity, it's simply a research tool to provide data to improve empirical models. Those models of course have all sorts of uses, and certainly a big one is nuclear weapon modelling.

njharman• 13 years ago

You say "speculation" as if it were a bad thing.

acadien2• 13 years ago

Finally someone that's actually in the fusion field. Could you say whether or not the NIF research represents a practical path towards a fusion based power source? My understanding is that it would at least be capable of capturing some much needed high pressure empirical data necessary for validating theory.

On a side note concerning the NIF funding, the US gov will spend huge sums of money studying Nuclear weapons (including their disposal) regardless of the NIF project. If it is at all possible to combine that research with other fields then really it's a perk. I'm not justifying the expenditure, simply attempting to frame the situation in a different light.

Finally, as a fellow scientist with funding woes, I feel your pain.

mrterry10• 13 years ago

I've worked in ICF for a nearly a decade. I think NIF research is a necessary step to a ICF based power source. If NIF demonstrates ignition, it can be used to validate our physics models of ICF (turbulence, fusion product transport, thermal conduction, etc). These physics questions are shared by all ICF approaches. However, a fusion power plant will use entirely different laser technology [1], and most likely a different target design [2]. After showing that the physics works, there is still a lot of engineering work needed before building a reactor.

[1] An ICF power plant will be pulsed at 1-10 Hz. NIF is a flash-lamp pumped glass laser, which takes ~12 hours to cool between shots. A power plant would likely be diode-pumped sold state laser since these can meet the required repitition-rate.

[2] The indirect drive target that LLNL is pursuing on NIF is not very efficient. You spend a lot of energy heating the hohlraum. Directly driven targets (blast the capsule directly rather than heating a gold can to make x-rays) should be much more efficient. There are also several ideas for ways to ignite a target more efficiently (shock ignition, fast ignition), but these need additional laser hardware.

@sam Though I work in ICF, I was sad to see the innovative confinement concepts (magnetic confinement) cut a couple years ago. I think it is short sighted. Fusion need to work and get smaller and we should keep our options open. Hope you managed to get a thesis out before the walls fell.

viraj_shah• 13 years ago

"Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a mission of strengthening the United States’ security through development and application of world-class science and technology to:

Enhance the nation’s defense; Reduce the global threat from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction; And respond with vision, quality, integrity and technical excellence to scientific issues of national importance."

https://www.llnl.gov/about/whatwedo.html

cyanoacry• 13 years ago

This is definitely true, and the BBC totally omitted these facts. The official NIF announcement[1] tried a little bit to cover their tracks. They posted some flashy numbers about the total energy output from neutrons, but nestled in the bottom of the page is the total energy dumped into the entire system:

1.7 megajoules.

In comparison, the fusion power produced was a paltry 8 kilojoules, which they compare to the "energy required to form the plasma".

For this technology to be actually effective, there needs to be a multiplier of several thousand. As other commenters have mentioned, this is mostly just nuclear weapons development.

[1] http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition/politics_and_polic...

NegativeK• 13 years ago

The BBC did say:

the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel

As soon as I saw that, I immediately understood that they're nowhere near breakeven -- much less power generation.

tanzam753• 13 years ago

total energy dumped into the entire system: 1.7 megajoules. In comparison, the fusion power produced was a paltry 8 kilojoules

In other words, the National Ignition Facility hasn't achieved ignition yet.

If you can actually achieve ignition, then nobody will care about the megajoules needed to get it ignited. Because once you've got ignition, you can get an arbitrary amount of energy out.

But if you can't get ignition, well, then, that pesky 0.3% heating efficiency will still leave you a couple of orders of magnitude away from engineering breakeven.

TylerE• 13 years ago

If we could get a fusion design that works a bit over unity, couldn't you, well, chain them?

E.g. 1MW basic plant that drives a 1.5MW plant that drives a 2.25MW -> 4 -> 6 -> 9 etc, however many stages you need.

ars5• 13 years ago

Yes, but you have to pay for the power plant, and being just a bit over unity won't cover the expense of the next stage in the chain.

You have to be enough over unity to pay for another plant plus surplus to actually use. In which case you can just build a bunch of plants - you don't need to chain them. There are plenty of other power sources you can use to bootstart the power plants.

Even regular power plants need power to start them see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start

mrterry10• 13 years ago

"50-100 more energy out than in to make up for inefficiencies in electricity generation using this kind of scheme."

Completely true. Theoretically, the NIF target has enough fuel to produce 10-20x the amount of laser energy driving it. Once things work, it isn't a huge step to get to an energy gain (energy_out/energy_in) of ~50. That said, the real world is always more complicated and NIF has yet to ignite.

MichaelMoser123• 13 years ago

I am waiting for the hack of cold fusion;

Now wikipedia says that imploding bubbles create some high energies;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_sonoluminescence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion

Maybe if you shoot up Deuterium bubbles in compressed water and push in some ultrasound waves ....

tsenkov• 13 years ago

I wonder, what more do they need in nuclear weapons? Smaller size? Harder detection? Bigger contamination radius?

Somehow, I am sure, if people start a nuclear war, even the WWII's initial nuclear weaponry will be enough to destroy ourselves, knowing how many countries can now chime in with their own.

XorNot7• 13 years ago

Cover the bases: you can't be sure someone else won't discover a new type of nuclear weapon or something you haven't thought of. The big one would be if someone figured out how to get kiloton->megaton yields, from a weapon which didn't produce radioactive fallout.

Sure, target a city and it's functionally indistinguishable, but what about against military formations or bunkers? It would be a big game changer if someone eliminated the fallout problem, since it changes how one could plan to use nukes in a defensive posture.

So you do the research to make sure you're always within a year or two of whatever the next state-of-the-art will be. Being the dominant hegemon has a lot of cost-of-living expenses.

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

The US now has a notion of "tactical" nuclear weapons.

Some reading:

http://www.fas.org/_docs/Non_Strategic_Nuclear_Weapons.pdf

God help us all.

VLM3• 13 years ago

Its the ongoing expense. Look over time, what does it cost to maintain the ability to use one?

Inflation adjusted cost of the entire B-52 program including all maintenance and crew personnel and their training? I donno, like a billion?

A missile field is cheaper to maintain (I think?) and not much more to develop, so its probably a bit under a billion.

A nuke launching sub might cost a billion but it holds alot of them so divided out is probably only hundreds of millions

Grats you've now got one so small and light a plain old fighter-bomber plane only 10 million or so can drop one.

Finally small and cheap enough to do some million dollar class cruise missiles.

I'm sure we'll eventually have cheap drones as delivery vehicles.

The point is minimizing spent money during peacetime. A bunker full of cruise missiles is infinitely cheaper than multiple operating wings of B-52.

The other (obvious?) idea is burying history. Say Canada wanted to nuke us for invading and regime changing them to steal their maple syrup. It could happen. IF we used 1940s techniques which only require a billion or so and a couple months or a whole year, anything their spies steal is very dangerous. On the other hand, "Go ahead, steal these 1980s kryton switch designs, it'll take you 50 years and a trillion bucks to figure out how to use them not to mention all the extra stuff that goes with those handy dandy trigger mechanisms". A good analogy is the time machine. So you can visit Bavaria in the 1300s if you sneak a 1500s level wooden clock escapement that would probably revolutionize Bavaria in the 1300s one way or the other. On the other hand sneak in a modern AMD64 CPU, just the bare chip, not even a heatsink or a PCB or anything, just the chip, and they're going to be all "WTF" all they have to do is get to the 2000s or so, and this will chip will leapfrog them into the 2010s, but its going to take a heck of a long time to get them from 1300s to 2000s without any help. So, yeah, go steal that modern US design, a mere couple trillion bucks and 70 years experience and you'll be stamping them out like license plates just like us. I guess by the 2080s we should be worried, but right now no problemo.

dekhn16• 13 years ago

A good place to start if you want to understand the purported rationale for the NIF (stockpile stewardship), I suggest reading and understanding this light introduction to modern nuclear weapons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon (the rhodes books, Making of the Atomic Bomb is required background reading, as is Dark Sun, if you want to get into the backstore).

In particular: The NIH experiment recapitulates many of the design aspects of a thermonuclear weapon, but does so in a highly controlled lab environment.

I'm a biophysicist. I know a fair amount of engineering, although I'm not a weapons physicist. Nonetheless, after years of reading about the NIF and various fusion projects I've come to believe that there is little justification for their expenditure. In particular, we can do stockpile stewardship without this device, more cheaply, nor does NIF present an economically viable method to production of power at a large scale in even the most rosy predictions.

I still think the experimental design is cool, but I can't see this as a rational expenditure (HUGE opex and capex) compared to other investments we could be making.

Most likely scenario I see in 20 years is that china will be mass-manufacturing small, safe fission reactors and making a mint selling them to the rest of the world. That's got far less reqiurement for massive capex and opex. It's just that the western nations decided to go stupid about fission because OH GOD NUCLEAR MUTATIONS and stop investing in building more reliable, safer, and smaller plants.

beloch• 13 years ago

The NIF is probably more useful for coming up with new fusion bomb designs than for stockpile stewardship, as you say, but what makes you say hot fusion can never be economically viable? The sun is proof that nature can do this on a grand scale! It may be a long ways off, but "a long ways" becomes "never" without experimental work like the NIF. Yes, the U.S. is probably doing this primarily to create new weapons just as the space race was really about developing ICBM's. However, the fundamental science being done has huge long-term potential. It's a sad, but true fact that, sometimes, scientists have to use the megalomania of states to fuel research that has the potential to benefit all of humanity.

Fission power is a separate matter. The single most important thing that most people still do not understand is that power grids have almost zero capacity for storing energy. That means most alternative energy sources, such as wind or solar, can never exceed a certain percentage of the grid's production capacity or it will become unstable. On-demand energy generation is still needed, and there's absolutely no reason to fear nuclear power while we're still using coal power, which is far more deadly in every sense! It's not just the West that has this fear either. Look at Japan's recent nuclear shut-down[1] (from 30% of their grid to 0%, replaced with fossil fuels), and tell me that isn't going to influence China!

[1]http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/14/us-japan-nuclear-s...

dekhn16• 13 years ago

Whether the sun is capable of fusion isn't super important. We can take advantage of that, but it doesn't mean we can build many safe plants based on an evolution of the NIF design.

If your alternative fuel requires hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the future, just to show viability of the basic research concept, before it can actually be useful, you will be at a massive competitive advantage relative to alternatives.

What I am saying, is that relative to other potential investments, fusion does not seem to be a worthwhile investment, as the risk/payoff ratio is worse.

As for the rest of your comments, I mostly agree I'm aware that alternatives like wind and solar have limits, but we can still use them to great effect (as augmenters, and ways to reduce reliance of less sustainable sources).

crystaln6• 13 years ago

Coal power is more deadly than fission power?

When has coal power ever created the sort of crisis that occurred in Fukushima?

Because of fission reactors, the safety of entire regions of the world is dependent on a consistent power supply and lack of human error, something that clearly we can not rely on. In the event of a cosmic emp or major meteor strike, these power plants are at risk.

ballard3• 13 years ago

Would fusion only weapons be covered under any existing non-proliferation or test ban treaties?

nikatwork3• 13 years ago

It's just that the western nations decided to go stupid about fission

I have many highly intelligent friends who subscribe to your view. Unfortunately they forget that fission is only as safe as the weakest link, and the consequences of failure are severe, especially when near a water source.

I'm not talking about crumbling old soviet-era reactors or even older Japanese ones. Witness Australia's only nuclear facility: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/01/2914548.htm?si...

My fave quote from the article: "None of our instruments could measure it - it was way off scale. We cleaned up everything and we still couldn't get the dose down."

You called out the need for more reliable, safer, and smaller plants. I would argue that there needs to be a significant improvement before fission is publicly acceptable.

hyperbovine• 13 years ago

If the Japanese can't do it safely, it can't be done safely.

bcoates• 13 years ago

That appears to be an accident handling the output of an isotope manufacturing reactor, not anything involving a power reactor.

I would argue that there needs to be a significant improvement before fission is publicly acceptable.

I would argue that fission is already held to a standard well above that of almost any human endeavor, even those with roughly similar risk profiles (compare almost any form of mining, or the shipping of hazardous cargo by rail)

drjesusphd12• 13 years ago

I think you're unfairly dismissing magnetic confinment, the limited supply of fissionable material, and the unprecedented issues that accompany the management of dangerous material (or anything for that matter) for 10,000 years.

Fusion research is worthwhile. Of course it's not the only path to sustainable energy, but it's one of the most promising.

VLM3• 13 years ago

"stop investing in ... smaller plants."

Thought experiment... begin the experiment with the assumption that the "system" can produce and sustain 2000 brains capable of safely operating a nuke plant. You can build 1000 slightly less safe but bigger plants, or 10000 smaller slightly safer small plants, but you've still only got 2000 usable nuke level brains to staff them. Either half the big brains are going to be unemployed, or 80% of the only very slightly safer plants are going to be run by morons. Don't amuse me with deus ex machina about automation; I'll counter by changing my thought experiment to only 2000 nuke-capable sysadmins are available or whatever.

jimmcslim• 13 years ago

What would be the impact of a 'fusion economy', assuming realistic evolution of the technology for the purposes of commercialisation? (i.e. I'm assuming "Mr Fusion" powerplants on top of one's DeLorean aren't ever going to be practically feasible).

What would such a world look like? Does it promote world peace; through greater energy security for nations, would less reliance on fossil fuels for baseload electricity generation have a significant impact on price of air travel/sea cargo?

dreadpiraterob• 13 years ago

Fusion changes everything. Cheaper electricity makes transporting materials basically free. And projects like desalination become possible = no one remotely close to an ocean ever lacks clean drinking water again.

regularfry5• 13 years ago

Or irrigation water, for that matter.

mrterry10• 13 years ago

it is unlikely that fusion energy will be cheaper than current tech. however, it does not emit CO2, is not a proliferation risk, and cannot have a nuclear meltdown.

enupten• 13 years ago

This is wonderful news, go NIF !

fuddle• 13 years ago

I can imagine everyone driving around in Tesla cars powered by Nuclear fusion in the not too distant future.

2muchcoffeeman• 13 years ago

What ever happened to the polywell reactor design?

NamTaf2• 13 years ago

The University of Sydney have continued research of polywell reactors. I'm not terribly across their progress but I try to read papers whenever they're released though I haven't read any of their 2013 papers. It seems the last few years (2010-2012 at least) have focused around minimising point- and line-cusp losses.

More reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell#University_of_Sydney

drjesusphd12• 13 years ago

It's all classified. It may be useful as an economical neutron source, or as a way to keep a contractor in business, but there's been nothing published about its efficacy as a reactor for sustained fusion power.

If there's one thing we've learned over the past few years, it's that "classified" knowledge, with no critical eyes to keep it honest, is often wrong. Science works, not because it's done in secret.

ck2• 13 years ago

Is it plausible this lab is trying to figure out how to make nuclear explosions without the radiation?

Because just imagine how terrifying the world would become from a superpower that didn't have to fear the radiation aftermath.

Fusion research seems like just a complete cover up.

moca• 13 years ago

"the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel" means it is at least 4 orders of magnitude away from being useful.

Since we still depends on nuclear power for decades to come, it is much cost effective to invest safer and cleaner nuclear fission reactors. The kind of fast reactor that can burn down nuclear waste so we don't need to build nuclear waste storage system, which nobody knows how to build anyway. That would give us power supply for several centuries (along with renewable energy). Too many countries wasted too much money on fusion reactors for decades, while we are still running nuclear reactors designed/built more than 30 years ago. Just wrong priority order.

drjesusphd12• 13 years ago

the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel

So what? What if the fueld didn't absorb anything? What do they mean by "absorb", anyway? This article is lacking in details, peer-reviewed literature, or even the names of scientists willing to stake their reputation on this claim.

The BBC should know better.

drjesusphd12• 13 years ago

What milestone? Be specific.

manimalcruelty• 13 years ago

What is the opinion on Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks High beta fusion reactor? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor

How does this stack up against the more conventionally theorised techniques?

abelardx• 13 years ago

It looks cold in that lab. Cold fusion?

Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

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