Fusion central: 192 lasers will shoot through openings in this spherical chamber, focusing near the tip of the cone projecting from the right. A worker in a service module can be seen at the left.
Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Department of Energy
Now complete, the National Ignition Facility could soon create controlled fusion using lasers.
The most energetic laser system in the world, designed to produce nuclear fusion--the same reaction that powers the sun--is up and running. Within two to three years, scientists expect to be creating fusion reactions that release more energy than it takes to produce them. If they're successful, it will be the first time this has been done in a controlled way--in a lab rather than a nuclear bomb, that is--and could eventually lead to fusion power plants.
The National Ignition Facility (NIF), at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), comprises 192 lasers that fire simultaneously at precisely the same point in space: a sphere of fuel two millimeters in diameter. They are designed to deliver 1.8 megajoules of energy in a few billionths of a second. That's enough to compress the fuel to a speck 50 micrometers across and heat it up to three million degrees Celsius. The lasers, which were fired together for the first time last month, have so far produced pulses of 1.1 megajoules.
"Depending on how you count it, it's between 60 and 100 times more energetic than any laser system that's ever been built," says Edward Moses, the principle associate director for NIF and Photon Science at LLNL. Eventually, the fusion reactions produced by each pulse are expected to generate at least 10 times the energy delivered by the lasers, a significant net gain that could be useful for generating power.
The $3.5 billion facility, which has been in development for 15 years, was funded primarily as a way to better understand nuclear weapons, after a ban on testing in the 1990s. NIF will produce tiny thermonuclear explosions that give scientists insight into what happens when a nuclear bomb goes off. That data can, in turn, be used to verify computer simulations that help determine whether the United States' nuclear stockpile will continue to work as the weapons age. The data could also provide insight into the processes that power the sun and other stars, and answer other scientific questions. Finally, NIF could serve as a proof-of-concept design for a fusion power plant.
To generate fusion, 192 laser beams are generated, amplified, converted from infrared to ultraviolet light, and then aimed at a small gold canister the size of a pencil eraser. Inside that canister is a sphere containing the fuel: two isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium. The lasers are positioned all around the sphere to create the temperatures and pressures needed to ignite a fusion reaction. If all goes as planned, some of the hydrogen atoms should fuse, producing helium and releasing energy. This should, in turn, cause more fusion reactions until the fuel runs out. The whole process will take just a few billionths of a second.
New lasers will be key to making fusion energy and proton therapy practical.
Researchers at a California National Lab will soon attempt to start self-sustaining fusion reactions using the world's largest lasers. If it works, it could be a first step on the road to abundant fusion power.
No practical fusion power plant will ever be built using Laser or ITER technology. However, there is a technology that may result in a safe, cheap fusion power plant before Obama leaves office.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell for details.
First off, I'll admit that I am a spokesman for NIF. But even if I wasn't, I'd still be an enthusiast for fusion energy. At this point, all 192 beams have simultaneously been successfully fired into the center of the target chamber, at the expected energy levels. NIF is on target as a proof-of-concept for fusion ignition. It's a safer, cleaner, and proliferation-free technology that is still in its early stages. Yes, it will take two years or so to achieve energy gain, and years afterwards to build a fusion power plant. But in the end, it will be worth it.
Inertial Fusion is not just NIF
I am heartened by the recent publicity of inertial fusion energy as NIF approaches full operation. But just like Tom Friedman's Op-Ed in the NY Times recently, this article doesn't mention that there are other significant efforts in the US to develop inertial confinement fusion - in particular ones that are primarily focused on developing power plants, as opposed to having that as a collateral benefit to weapons research.
For example, the High Average Power Laser (HAPL) program is developing all the methodologies discussed in this article, including target fabrication & injection, more efficient KrF lasers and rapid repetition rates, etc. It's also a direct-drive system, which is less messy and more efficient for power generation, but isn't as effective for simulating weapons.
Yes, I am involved in HAPL... Or rather I was ... until Congress zeroed its funding a month or so ago. Now instead of engineering I'm trying to make folks aware of this research and its potential so we don't lose years of hard work.
(HAPL PDF: http://fire.pppl.gov/fpa07_sethian_hapl.pdf)
From a pure research perspective I don't have a problem with this, but not when funding this costs funding for Geothermal, BioFuel, Solar, and Wind research. This one project probably cost more than entire research budget for Geothermal for the past 50 years. We have a nearly 7900 KM wide nuclear powered furnace under our feet that doesn't cause waste disposal problems and will never run out of fuel in ten thousand generations. This is what we should be spending money on. Until they can fit a fusion power plant in car or airplane, it is essentially a billion dollar boondoggle.
Good point, Geo-thermo should be explored. Amazingly, the oil companies with their depth of expertise in drilling are actually in the best position to spec out a geo-thermo well.
Aside, you must make bets on many different technologies, Nuclear, Fusion, Solar, Wind, Geothermal, and can not bet on just one.
For instance, what if Fusion is possible and can be made small enough to fuel watercraft, spacecraft, or remote cities?
What possibilities would that open up?
Brian Glassman
Innovation Management
Commercialization of technology
and i thought the science in spiderman was fallible, turns out it really can be done! who would have thought
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
lasertekk
146 Comments
2-3 years?
Time to sit back, and keep the fingers crossed. Good luck guys.
Reply
erbium
338 Comments
Yeah, time to sit back and wait..
another 15 years...
in 2-3 years they'll find out they need 5 years to design a successor even bigger machine. Plus 15 years to build it, perhaps waiting 5 years to lobby to get it approved and added to some senator's pork barrel pet projects.
We'll need another 15 billion adjusted for gov't pumped inflation to 30 billion to build the thing, which when repaid to bondholders costs 45 billion.
Add in the operating billions. People smart enuf to dink around with this are not cheap. For this facility and the next one.
10 years after that is finished, that they'll decide that Deuterium fusion wasn't such a great idea and they'd really rather be using Helium-3 to create 2nd generation fusion plants.
Then they'll have to get another 15 billion, (which will be 150 billion in THEN dollars, since the feds have no appetite to tax and chinese are getting wary of lending us more money. So they'll hyperinflate between now and THEN but that's another story)
They'll have to strip mine the moon to get all the helium-3 needed for commercial use so that will cause a land grab on the moon and billions in expensive robotic & rocketry schemes to strip mine and get the h-3 here.
All making the supposedly too-cheap-to-meter fusion reactors incredibly expensive.
I've got it! Let's stack all the money the fed prints out of nothing by pulling out of its nether-regions to lend to greedy banks who don't need it. The massive weight will compress the earth till it spontaneously fuses, for FREE! </sarcasm> At least we could get this done before the scientists get their plants made.
I'd say lets pop some self contained satellite dish sized solar panels in the desert, feed our nearby cities. And use some to combine hydrogen from split water with CO2 from coal plants to fuel our cars with methanol.
Reply