Nuclear physicists have been promising sustained fusion power in, say, 15 years for the last 60 years.
I'll believe it when I see it, otherwise this article is just another puff piece to stay in the headlines and garner more research funds.
Using star power for a clean-energy future (photos)
by ZDNet Author | June 4, 2010 4:10am PDT | Image 1 of 21
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Deep inside the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., sits the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The giant system sends 192 laser beams 1,500 meters from a master oscillator to a target chamber where the 192 beams are focused on a tiny fuel pellet. The idea? To demonstrate that laser fusion is possible--and a potential future source of clean energy.
In just 20 billionths of a second, the NIF's lasers deliver a payload of 500 trillion watts of power, more than 500 times the total amount of power created on the global power grid in the same amount of time.
This is a model of the target chamber that holds the actual fuel pellet target. The giant NIF system funnels the 192 laser beams into the chamber using a complex infrastructure of power amplifiers, mirrors, and more.
Read more in our related article: "Harnessing a star's power for clean energy"
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The promise of sustained fusion power is a much better future for us than the same windmills and solar panels that have been promised to us for 30 years.
I guess fusion's not green enough for the Earth Worshipers.
I really hope this goes somewhere.
I guess fusion's not green enough for the Earth Worshipers.
I really hope this goes somewhere.
Fusion's promise continues to lack really serious backing, otherwise it would've brought results by now. Note that we've had fusion based weapons around for decades, but have not yet learned to economically harness the reaction for energy production, but fission technology reached that point after only a couple of decades. In other words, we're able to harness decay more easily than construction. About the same could be said for biological energy. Anybody could make a compost heap in their back yard and draw the heat off of it by merely running ducts and a ventilator fan, to get heat in a matter of days. But, getting heat from growing things means plowing, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting and burning, in a cycle that generally takes months or even years. The problem with both biological and fission reactions is managing the waste products. Fusion's promise is really a cleaner output? Few people mention the slag from the mining for uranium or coal when it comes to environmental damage, but it is a part of the puzzle. Likewise, with fusion, we're looking at depleting the earth's supply of deuterium, tritium and other limited supply elements, but in order to obtain them, mining the ocean's waters could result in depleting other elements. Likewise, the reaction results in lithium production, among other things, so expect this to eventually become an issue, never mind all the mining and industrial processes that go into producing the equipment and dealing with the waste...
Solar panels and windmills, on the other hand are available today, and have been for many years. These technologies have passed through generations of improvements and new development, and are now beginning to show their real potential, as reliability is going up and cost of production and installation are dropping rapidly. It's not a matter only of what is greener, but rather, which technology is affordable now and will allow us to clean up our act now and still provide us with the needed energy for the continued improvement of mankind's standard of living and further technological advancement.
Yes, keep on plugging away at cheap and sustainable fusion, but not at the cost of going green by other means. We need both.
Solar panels and windmills, on the other hand are available today, and have been for many years. These technologies have passed through generations of improvements and new development, and are now beginning to show their real potential, as reliability is going up and cost of production and installation are dropping rapidly. It's not a matter only of what is greener, but rather, which technology is affordable now and will allow us to clean up our act now and still provide us with the needed energy for the continued improvement of mankind's standard of living and further technological advancement.
Yes, keep on plugging away at cheap and sustainable fusion, but not at the cost of going green by other means. We need both.
@Ken Whitmore
...but are incapable of supplying the energy that we need to power our cities and industry. We certainly should use them where practical, but we will continue to need the reliable power that we get from fossil fuels and fission for the foreseeable future. Fusion power has been a very tough nut to crack, but the rewards will be worth the effort should the technology become feasible.
...but are incapable of supplying the energy that we need to power our cities and industry. We certainly should use them where practical, but we will continue to need the reliable power that we get from fossil fuels and fission for the foreseeable future. Fusion power has been a very tough nut to crack, but the rewards will be worth the effort should the technology become feasible.
Remember the movie TRON (1982)? The Lab scenes were shot at LLL in the building that housed the Nova Project. It was a laser fusion power experiment, the predecessor of NIF. LLL has been trying to make fusion power happen for 30 years, and they still haven't made it work. I'm not saying they can't, I'm just saying that NIF is not news.
How feasible would it be to use laser amplification like this. On a much smaller scale, to boil water for a steam turbine, and get rid of the fossil fuel component?
@colin.franks@... I wouldn't think it would be very economical, as the energy required to boil water with lasers would exceed the energy returned from the steam turbine.
The Star Wars Program, while a dry well at the time, put a LOT of money into laser research. Now the military is knocking down drones with lasers, and maybe fusion will also come along on the same coat tails...
True, economically feasible controlled fusion has been eluding mankind for a while, but those that doubt its possibility lack perspective. Why the optimism? Those from the industry all over the world that are the greatest tax contributors (and political campaign donors) - namely the fossil fuel lobby - are the ones with the least interest in seeing controlled fusion coming soon; that is the main reason why financing fusion research has been insufficient for a tangible result. The obstacles are complicated but look back for a second: at the beginning of World War II the collective knowledge about controlled and uncontrolled fission was even in relative terms lesser than the knowledge about fusion today and the technology was practically nonexistent; some scientists and engineers were doubting a controlling a chain reaction would be possible, some spoke that detonating an A-bomb would start an uncontrolled chain reaction that would fission the whole Earth, maybe the entire Universe. Than came the Manhattan project - unlimited manpower and financial resources (a political decision dictated by war, of course) and in just three years we had a functioning nuclear reactor (Fermi in Chicago) and a functioning A-bomb (Oppenheimer in Alamagordo). If mankind would repeat a similar feat and pool that kind of brain and money in one place, we might not have a functioning fusion reactor in three years, but in 10-15 maybe. Unfortunately, politics dictates otherwise and with this level of resources that might happen in 50 years instead.
Because can "go back" only around 10000 years, and isn't that reliable after 5,730 years.
Isn't this the same set up that would be used to create a black hole?
@Dr BobM You may be thinking of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. When the NIF target capsule implodes, the tiny "star" that will be created will explode in a burst of energy lasting just a few trillionths of second, fusing hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei and releasing neutrons and kinetic energy in a reaction similar to what happens continuously in the sun and healthy stars. This process is different from the gravitational collapse of a burned-out star into a black hole, or the theoretical creation of miniature black holes due to the collision of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays striking the Earth's atmosphere. Fusion experiments on NIF will not involve either enough mass or enough energy to create black holes.
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