NIF scientists set the controls for nuclear fusion
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Mar 31st 2009 11:14PM
posted Mar 31st 2009 11:14PM
It looks like nuclear fusion is no longer just for precocious teenagers. Among the flurry of experiments going down worldwide, significant work will start rolling at the US National Ignition Facility sometime this June. Under construction for twelve years, the lab will focus 192 giant laser beams on two forms of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium. Combining these isotopes at high temperatures generates a colossal amount of energy, recreating conditions "at the heart of the sun." The goal is to find a way to achieve controlled, sustained nuclear fusion and energy gain in a lab. According to the director of the facility, Dr. Ed Moses, "When all NIF lasers are fired at full energy, they will deliver 1.8 megajoules of ultraviolet energy to the target." Lasting just a few nanoseconds, the system is capable of generation 500 trillion watts of power -- more than the peak electrical generating power of the entire United States. Significant results are expected sometime between 2010 and 2012.
Nice
Nice it is.
500 trillion watts of power is nice. Imagine what everyone saves for shutting down all the power plants in the country (US and/or Canada) for this one.
It's even nicer when you realise it's powered by the humble potato fairy.
No not nice. Those mad fools! Have they not seen Spiderman 2!
they dont use all that power at once, they charge up using less power but taking more time.
Two questions. Where and how will they store this burst of energy ? I mean are they gona do a capacitor like thing that can charge and release it over a period of time ? second, how are they going to control this under laboratory conditions ?
Its gonna be a real interesting and turning point in the history of science if they can get it right and really achieve it.
+1 to science and the guys doing this.
Oh my..forgive me for not reading lines in the article that have asked the same 2 questions. LowRank mania.
So the video through the link, is the narrator Samuel L. Jackson?
March 31st? Euhm, I think I missed the memo that March has an extra day.
30 days has September,
April, June and November
All the rest have 31
And February’s great with 28
And Leap Year’s February’s fine with 29
Yeah... guess you did
;-)
Wow dude, how old are you? I think you've been missing the memo for quite a few years now.
Abuzar: He's probably only missed the memo for 12 or 13 years.
Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty one;
excepting February alone,
which hath twenty eight days clear
and twenty nine on each leap year.
Screw that shit. Use your knuckes.
No seriously. Start from your pinkie knuckle - that's January. The gap between the next finger is February, ring finger knuckle is March. Once you get to July, repeat the same knuckle for August and go backwards. Just have to remember February is 28/29 days not 30 days. Knuckles are 31 days.
Easy. No need to remember a damn poem.
So your saying I gotta remember the names of the months in order?
o baby. im telling you, the achievement of nuclear fusion is going to be a major stepping stone in the history of humanity.
also, there are NUMEROUS spider man references in that article. i was going to make a joke but then realized that it will get dissolved into the rest that are sure to follow.
It's actually happening ...
So long power crisis! :D
Desalinated water and computers for everyone!
as they say;
Nuclear fusion is the power souce of the future
and always will be.
after all, it is the power source for, oh i dont know, the whole rest of the damn UNIVERSE!
;)
What about entropy?
what about it?
@ wyman
E=mc2
Er - perhaps not.
The problem with nuclear fusion is the end to end budget when the costs and problems of disposal become a real problem.
A containment vessel for a fusion reaction reactor will do more than just glow in the dark,
So the problems are exactly the same, fission or fusion.
Fusion solves nothing, except it keeps some scientist off the streets.
Now if they were going to find a way of designing and buiding a breeder reactor that was safe.
That would be an achievement that would bring us all many benefits.
But the eco-feakos don't like that thought.
We will run out of fission fuel eventually. Breeder reactors just postpone that. We will never run out of fusion fuel, since the sea contains insane amounts of deuterium, and lithium is pretty common too.
@Dan
While it is true we will run out of Uranium, we can use Thorium as nuclear fuel which is even more abundant than Uranium.
@David Gayler:
What disposal problem? The byproduct of fusion is helium. Use it to fill a fleet of efficient airships, fill a gazillion balloons and release them, or release it to the atmosphere. So what if we all talk with funny voices after a while.
@BradS: Helium isn't the only waste product. High energy neutrons are also created which activate the reaction chamber. Eventually the reactor itself becomes radioactive waste. (As I understand it.)
What don't you understand about "almost limitless clean energy"? Clean = clean...as in no harmful waste products...at all! The fusion plasma is all contained by the elecromagnets. If "high energy neutrons" were to escape there would be no sustained reaction and the whole chamber would be useless after one run.
It's still March 31st?
reading the article tell me:
"This process will create temperatures of 100 million degrees and pressures billions of times greater than Earth's atmospheric pressure, forcing the hydrogen nuclei to fuse and release many times more energy than the laser energy required to spark the reaction," said Dr Moses.
This "energy gain", as it is known, is key. If it works, NIF will release 10 to 100 times more energy than the amount pumped into the lasers to kick-start the reaction.
That was supposed to be a reply to someone else.
I wonder if Engadget will be able to fix their comment system before we achieve fusion? Something tells me that fixing the comment system is actually harder...
Looks like we finally have a sustainable fuel for the delorean.
But the Mr. Fusion only powers the flux capacitor and the hover conversion, the engine still runs on regular gasoline!
I've got it! We'll simply roll it down a steep hill!
We would never find a smooth enough surface!
Morons, its an Aprils Fools joke.
How the hell is this an April Fools joke?
Here's some article that came out last month about it..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7891787.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7655016.stm
I don't know bbc that much, but I wouldn't think a news source so big would pull an April Fools stunt like that...
@Precurse : actually the BBC is known to have pulled some quite succesful hoaxes on its viewers. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_tree
However, this i dont think is fake.
After having personally met Ed Moses, I can tell you, he does not have a sense of humor. Sorry...
Sorry, but my dad works there, and I have also met Ed Moses. They are in fact real people, despite what you think.
so do we need a rap to convince people this won't potentially cause the Earth to blow up?
yes, I think that would do the trick nicely.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
I don't know what to think of this, I just finished playing Fallout 3.
I hope this makes air cleaner to breath at least!
Jerome Garot ~
Black hole here we come! Non-stop fusion halting suddenly lke the sun burning out? That sounds to me like what happens when a sun burns out and goes SUPER NOVAAAAAAAA forming a black hole due!
When did those crazy Mayans say the world was going to end? 2012? This project should show noticeable results by 2012. Noticeable indeed. :d hehe. Just kidding, but, I wonder what happens if something goes wrong as all the energy the United Sates using at peak times is concentrated in one tiny little room. After the creation of Dr. Manhattan of course.
there is only 1 sun and it isn't capable of becoming a black hole. it'll become a white dwarf one day and i don't even think it'll go nova let alone supernova since a white dwarf needs to steal the hydrogen from a nearby start for it to be able to cause an explosion
The sun will not got supernovae. It is to small for that.
The question is (and always is), will it generate more power than is required to power the lasers in the first place?