NIF scientists set the controls for nuclear fusion
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted March 31st 2009 11:14PM
posted March 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...gee, funny how it looks like a video card...
APRIL FOOLS!
It's not an april fools joke... theres a good BBC Horizon documentary about it (and fusion)! Watch it!
Mike? Again... are you seriously going through each post and saying April Fools? ^^
192 giant "frickin "laser beams !
"Significant results are expected sometime between 2010 and 2012."
Before that, they'll mainly try lighting each others' farts.
What they don't tell you is:
a.) this has been done before, I used to work at a facility that has been doing it for years: http://www.lle.rochester.edu/
b.) 500 trillion watts for 1 nanosecond would be equal to 500 kWh, if they could store it. A "few" nanoseconds would be maybe 1.5MWh, which means if they could fire this twice an hour they'd be generating 3 megawatts, but since they can't efficiently store that kind of power for that long, it doesn't really matter
c.) It takes a lot more than that 1.5MWh to fire this thing in the first place.
couldn't they store the power from the laser shot in the capacitors that where used to fire the lasers in the first place ?
maybe that's the idea?
Whoopety doopity doo.
Hmm, lets see how about we start a 100 million degree C fire in CA - USA and if it gets out of control, all we have to do is use our trusty lab safety protocols! Pull the pin, Point it at the fire source and Push down the handle! Oh wait did you say "100 million degree C?" Hmm, something tells me that my trusty fire extinguisher isn't going to help much in this situation!
If the US taxpayers are going to finance this, investing what I'm sure are untold millions of dollars, does that mean they have already succeeded in building a smaller scale fusion reactor producing a surplus?
I mean... someone must have asked for proof before investing all that money. Right?
Hmm... isn't the world supposed to end in 2012?
Ok did no one learn anything from watching Spiderman 2!!! No good can come from this!!!
This article omits the true aim of the project - to discover a saucerful of secrets.
maybe now we can send Marty back in time, i mean we only need 1.21 Gigawatts
> Where and how will they store this burst of energy ? I mean are they gona do a capacitor like thing
Yes. If you look a the schematic you will see greenish boxes on either side of the laser lines at the top of the image. Those are filled with lots and lots of caps.
> second, how are they going to control this under laboratory conditions ?
By only making a very small amount of fusion, and enclosing that in the huge steel ball on the bottom of the image.
> the achievement of nuclear fusion is going to be a major stepping stone in the history of humanity.
Not in this case. NIF cannot be developed into a useful energy-producing system. It uses 300 MJ of electricity to make 4 MJ of IR to produce 1.8 MJ of UV which produces ~30 MJ of fusion. It's 10 to 1 the wrong way.
> 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.
No they are not. Fission byproducts remain very dangerous for hundreds of years, and dangerous for thousands. Fusion byproducts remain very dangerous for a year or two, dangerous for a couple of decades, and mildly annoying for about 150 years. That's an entirely different problem.
Maury
Win on the floyd video.......
SIM CITY 2000
Even it's not working yet the Vatican is already claiming this is work of God if it works and not if it doesn't.
"Significant DISASTROUS results are expected sometime between 2010 and 2012."
Strikethrough tag doesn't work I guess. :(
Risking double post... (I hate blogsmith.)
@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.)
The narrator on the video sounds a lot like Samuel L. Jackson...
They should build the fusion reactor in the space and convert the generated energy to microwave and send it to earth.
Nvidia GeForce Fusion 1.0 GT....can it play crysis?
I work for one of the companies who actually contributed to the NIF lasers. I think many of you commenting on here don't know a damn thing about how a laser works, let alone quoting some confounded Hollywood movie and relating that to something that has great potential. For those of you worried about the waste issues, I'm guessing that you can't wait to quit your day job to solve those issues. Yeah right.
I imagine the the fusion or plasma created is stored via magnetic containment which is NOT, let me repeat not science fiction. Google search Tokamak.
Oh and for the dumb asses thinking that 1.21 Gigawatts is lot of power, look up the University of Texas at Austin's Peta watt laser system, also something my company made. But there are still greater projects out there try Google searching France's ELI (Extreme Light Initiative) or look up the Laser Energetics Program at University of Rochester.
I've toured NIF, Mercury, Shiva, and the Nova sites, worked with professors and some of the top professionals in the field. If they fail at this, so what. The point aside from achieving fusion is also to study the foundations of atomic and astronomic physics as well as to try and delve into plasmonic meta-materials. Atomic, plasma, and at some level solid state physics can benefit from what is done here.
If this experiment proves to be somewhat of quandary, at least other areas of science can stand to benefit. Look at the LINAC at Stanford, they too have made an X-ray FEL as a by product which is allowing other scientists to study soft and hard x-rays. Oh for those of you who don't know FEL is "Free Electron Laser" and LINAC is Linear Accelerator Center.