Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
npr.org
npr.org
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
They would like to charge you $32 to look at it, nature-ally.
The fusion yield is (?) 14 kilojoules (inferring this from physicist Mark Herrman's "5 million billion fusions" [WaPo], at 18 MeV per fusion), which is a moderate improvement over the 8 kilojoule achivement from last fall:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459289
[WaPo] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fusion...
The "1%" energy efficiency figure [a] is misleading: 14 kJ is about 1% of 1.5 MJ of ultraviolet light hitting the fuel capsule. But creating that UV pulse consumed 3 MJ of infrared light, which in turn took 400 MJ from the flash bulbs driving the IR laser. So the system efficiency is more like 0.003% (and throwing in hypothetical turbines to generate electricity, 0.001%).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#NIF...
[a] I'm referring to this: "while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser's energy ever reached the fuel."
(update: from yosyp's link, the fusion figures were 14.4 kJ, and 17.3 kJ, on two different runs:
422 MJ capacitors ←────────────┐
↓ │
(?) xenon flash lamps │
↓ │
3 MJ IR laser pulse │
↓ │
1.5 MJ UV pulse │
↓ │
150 kJ X-ray pulse │
↓ │
* 14-17 kJ Fusion yield (this story) │
↓ │
7-9 kJ Potential electricity →────────┘
system
breakeven
As it was already mentioned in the threads like this before, the NIF was built using the technology that was available in those years of the past when NIF was planned and started. Flash lamp pumped lasers are bigger, more expensive and much less efficient, i.e. mere few percents efficiency at best vs. tens of percent efficiency of modern laser diode pumped IR lasers. (Even with such improvement though, i still think laser driven fusion is inferior to many other forms of inertial confinement and much less probable to result in system-level break-even. My personal favorite, Sandia Z-machine is on the scale of 15% efficiency of generating X-ray pulse, and schemes like deep plasma focus or polywell by-pass the energy to radiation conversion stage all together and thus avoid related losses.)
EDIT: Okay here, but I have limited bandwidth so get it while you can: https://mega.co.nz/#!CNgVhZra!JcsLGB5y0FGUffI4rdyNr-BBl82YJD...
Also, if you do "pull an Aaron Schwartz" please change the ending - we need a very public Supreme court administered kick-in-the-teeth for all the out of control copyright regime and its criminal sentencing farce.
"Come now, editorial board of Nature. Do you expect me to pay for a subscription?"
"No, Mr. Finster -- we expect you to fuse!"
The terrorists won.
It could then be called the Terraists and possibly solve the whole issue through discordant namespace collision.
Right now they are 3 orders of magnitude off (10^15 they get, 10^18 or better 10^19 they want).
Mirroring: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/216352/bigscarylaser.pdf.
My tax dollars paid for this research I should be able to read it.
As far as YC is concerned AirBNB and Uber encourage people to break the law all the time, some rules are just stupid and outdated and don't make sense and should be broken. This is "Hacker" News after all.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_Lab...
I mean, I agree with you, but this is a silly statement. Just because the government pays for something does not allow you access to it.
That's not this work, but arguably the original motives and intent of the law is subverted if what's happening here is the government outsourcing the creation of the work to a third party.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the...
I see no parallels to firearm possession.
In what world does personal expected value versus expected cost of breaking the law ever become a good way to make moral decisions?
There are at least two counterarguments to this.
1) The law is written for precisely this reason. Most people do live by a cost vs benefit mindset, and the penalties of laws are generally tuned until people stop committing the crime. I wouldn't want to live in a world where the penalty for murder was only a week in prison.
2) Anyone who uses the law as a way to guide their own moral compass probably isn't very moral, because throughout history every society has had laws which are later agreed to be evil.
I suppose my question is, do you care more about expressing yourself than convincing others? If so, then that's detrimental to a message board.
In this one, where my taxes paid for the goddamned research.
IMO, IP is a loaded term that distorts the wide range of issues. IM for Intellectual Monopoly is much closer to the truth. To be clear I have no problem with the idea of copyright or a well run power company being run as a local monopoly, but there outside of the normal business. And the goals should be finding rules that best serve society not the owners of said monopoly.
If the public is paying for the research should they not have access to the published papers resulting from it without paying $32 to a private company for a PDF download?
D-T fusions are about 17.6 MeV, but 80% of that is in neutrons, which escape unless captured in a special blanket. The 8 kJ reported was all alphas. So 8 kJ / 3.5 MeV = 1.4e16 fusions, vs. 5e15 in the quote. He was probably talking about a previous shot.
For comparison, a typical AA battery stores 16 kJ.
E_{fusion} is the calculated neutron yield Y_{total}=6.1e15 times 17.6 MeV: 17.2 kJ + rounding. Check out page 3, right column.
Anyone have a figure that represents how far off they are?
That's fine by me, it was not very long ago that we were unable to get more out of the fuel than we put into the fuel. That's step one to fusion ignition, and was done for the very first time last fall, so as far as I'm concerned they are still fleshing out step one.
> government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons
I think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the world's military spending on these big, as Google likes to put it, moonshot projects we could probably solve some really fundamental world problems (i.e. energy, climate change) in the near future vs. waiting many, many decades (if not centuries).
The NIF was clearly built to maintain America's nuclear arms capabilities, both in providing employment to nuclear physicists, as well as maintaining the viability of the current stockpile. It was practically transparent from the beginning.
Source: Search for the Ultimate Energy Source: A History of the U.S. Fusion Energy Program, by Stephen O. Dean, who was a major figure in the U.S. fusion program.
unfortunately the latter is used almost exclusively. even in public organisations who should be able to take the broader of public good.
B-2 bomber program cost 44.75 billion[1] LHC cost ~7.5 Billion Euro ~9billion USD.[2]
[1] http://www.fas.org/man/gao/nsiad97181.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost
1: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-lockheed-fighte...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...
Or just start building the next version already!
That's because you're seeing it through the lens of our time. Remember, the B-2, and many other programs including the F-22, were devised during the trailing end of the Cold War (edit: that's actually a lie; the call for contracts and other such nonsense that would lead to the B-2 started in the 70s, and the F-22 program had existed in some form since the very early 80s). Whatever your conviction about whether or not such things should exist, government (and their militaries) in particular has a great deal of inertia, both in terms of expenditures and policies. So while both programs were in full swing during the collapse of the USSR, that era is primarily what laid the groundwork for such expenses.
Personally, I'm a fan of both. I love the hardware used in high energy physics. And I love military hardware.
If I were about 15 years younger and lived in a wetter climate, I'd go outside and splash in the mud right now. ;)
From the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsXjI6BhMV8
This is the kind of thing that makes me really wanna ragequit on human nature.
http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/article/ace-ate-marine-co...
Just so you know, the purpose of the NIF was for military testing right from the beginning. The reason it initially got funded (shortly after the end of the cold war) was to help with stockpile stewardship (making sure our aging weapons still work via simulation, without having to do actual weapon tests).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#NIF_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_Stewardship_and_Manag...
A lot of great innovations have originated from military research. War necessitates innovation.
Not to say that we should just funnel everything into the military, but one should not underestimate its importance in the technological landscape.
Perhaps military first adopters are a net positive; like, the first buyers of a technology who will pay top dollar for working prototypes. But what on the original innovation side can you actually attribute?
Short wave radar, as used on planes ever since, was developed as part of the war effort by the MIT Radiation Lab.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Laboratory
Rocket engines were known before WWII (a thousand years ago in China, and efforts like Goddard in the early 20th C), but you can't disregard the Nazi Germany invention of the V2 just because of that; it was a big deal, not just a fleshing out of prototypes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#World_War_II
"Development of stealth technology likely began in Germany during World War II"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_aircraft
Later stealth, and nuclear carriers, and ICBMs, were a result of the cold war. I don't see how it matters whether the war is hot or cold.
I'll grant you Turing (aside from crypto), not that anyone is claiming differently.
The Internet directly arose from the Arpanet, which was purely a DARPA (Department of Defense) project, and there are lots of other well known examples.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet
> stuff that was nearly useless.
Citation needed.
> But what on the original innovation side can you actually attribute?
Short wavelength radar is inarguable, regardless of whether cold wars count.
By way of contrast, when it comes to military technology you're not competing with nature, only with other humans, and so a "solution" (if you'll excuse the irony) is almost certain to be found by one side or the other.
the H-bomb is better-than-breakeven and much smaller than star scale. What you say may be true for Tokamak like confinement schemes whereis H-bomb is inertial confinement, and it works. And it is pretty clear that inertial confinement in several orders of magnitude smaller scale than H-bomb would work too. Look at Sandia Z-machine - an order of magnitude up, and it would get breakeven. Not that anybody really needs it :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus
ITER is aiming for a Q of 5 for 480 seconds:
I have a feeling that if we had fusion plants providing limitless cheap power, we'd get back on an 8% yearly growth track for energy consumption, like with oil consumption before 1970.
Then within a century or so, we'd be producing an amount of power equivalent to 20% of what the earth receives from the sun. It would give a whole new meaning to "global warming".
To sum it up "Free energy" buys us about 300-400 years of growth before thermodynamics kicks our ass.
That growth will stop sometime and a considerable amount of present pain seems to be that global growth is slowing markedly (and has been since the 1970s).
Globally, economic activity and energy consumption are still tightly correlated: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1vlksg/economic...
It would be "strange" to argue that, as a teenager, you were doomed to a life of misery because in order to keep up with this so-far exponential growth rate you'd have to eat entire planets by the time you were 1000 years old. It is similarly bizarre to argue that human society is in some sort of trouble because we can only double our energy consumption a few dozen more times.
This isn't even bringing up economic concepts like diminishing returns to utility: a person who makes 100k per year does not spend twice as much energy as someone who makes 50k per year. There are plenty of other things to buy that make us happy, and that can only get even more true when we're living in some hypothetical future with hundreds of times the economic productivity of today.
On the other side, Robert Gordon's "End of Growth" paper: http://www.voxeu.org/article/us-economic-growth-over
Your assertion that a person earning 100k doesn't have twice the energy (or environmental) footprint of someone earning 50k really needs some sort of factual support.
And your hypothetical future with 100s of times today's economic productivity flies in the face of the law of diminishing returns which you've invoked yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plan...
Fusion reactions can only be self-sustaining at incredibly high temperatures and pressures. If the containment mechanism loses power, the reaction stops. Unlike fission reactions, at least as used in current reactors, which have the potential to keep on going unless we do something active to stop them. Yeah, the modern, well-designed ones have lots of designed-in safeguards against this, void coefficients and all, but it's still safer still to be running fusion.
Hydrogen and it's isotopes in, with other isotopes or helium out is better than assorted radioactive heavy metal isotopes with relatively long half-lives. The only possibility for dangerous waste from a fusion reactor is any transmutation that takes place in reactor components from the neutron flux. Seems likely to be better, but I don't think anybody has really investigated what this part will look like in a running fusion reactor with reaction rates high enough for commercial power production.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Waste_management
A lot safer too!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
What I don't know is how much of the cost of nuclear power is the much higher level of safety precautions they need.
I haven't seen any projected costs for DEMO which might well be the first fusion power plant (DEMO is the proposed successor to ITER):
It has to be, otherwise nobody would be using nuclear power plants...
Assuming we don't use the new energy in significant part to colonize other planets, with the colonies representing a significant part of the growth in human energy consumption.
Water shortages could be addressed with large scale desalination. Shipping/transportation would become real cheap without significant fuel costs. Food issues could be addressed by commercial hydroponics.
I'm not an anarchist, so I do believe there should be a government that provides military defense. I'm not a progressive, so I don't believe the government should try to loot people to try to solve other people's pet problems.
Their purpose never been anything but "Stockpile Stewardship". Anyone who has been paying attention has known this for decades.
Actually, I think framing it as a grade is beyond silly; it is irresponsible. Giving a letter grade to long-term scientific project makes little sense. It is not a one-shot thing with a predefined notion of correctness. What can we compare such a grade to?
Instead, we should be asking what we've learned and how the project has advanced science.
Given that, the way to evaluate the project is not on grants received, articles published or citations in premier journals, but rather 'Did you make a controlled explosion? If not when will you be able to?' And I think, so far an 'F' is fair.
Disclaimer: I worked in a fusion lab in undergrad.
Science requires experiments, no?
"What was happening, of course, was that all the boys had decided to work on this and to stop their research in science. All science stopped during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos. And that was not much science; it was mostly engineering."
The same is true of fusion research. That's why it's "research", not merely "development".
In particular, the physics of plasma instabilities has always been quite imperfectly understood, and that has been one of the key problems with controlled fusion since the 1950s.
Science is about understanding, engineering is about building something.
If the Manhattan project had resulted in no new understanding, but had created a nuclear bomb it would have been a success. The science was incidental to the success of the project.
Engineering is built on science so there will often be scientists involved in Engineering projects, however the assumption with an Engineering project is that the science is already understood (or at least significantly understood) and so the main effort is in the design and construction.
The problem with Science projects is that they are hard to sell to the public. Thats because its hard for someone who isn't a domain expert to put a value on its significance. This is why a lot of Science projects are dressed up as Engineering projects[1] to sell them to the public.
Its pretty clear that the above fusion research is a Science project, i.e about understanding.
If this facility is being used to produce new bombs then that is an engineering project but if it is just being used to gain understanding about existing bombs then its science.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Love_of_music
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
See for instance Gleick's Feynman biography, "Genius".
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98685.Genius
Another good read about the project is this bio: "The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor"
...which is obviously mostly about Taylor (on the Manhattan Project), but has some Feynman anecdotes.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54968.The_Curve_of_Bindin...
The Manhattan Project can be judged by the simple question, is there a working bomb? Evaluating basic research is much harder.
I ask you, how do you know what are they doing at NIF is different, from the for theory important work at LHC?
How long is "long enough" to deem that a line of experimentation "didn't work out?" There is no period long enough. Sometimes a negative result is quite useful down the road. Some research just comes together when the right things are learned and tried. So any notion of a "dead end" is really just a tentative assessment, frozen in time.
It sounds like you're saying "don't bother exploring dead ends, either do it right the first time or give up," which is a lot like saying "I just want a penthouse apartment, stop wasting time building a foundation."
Not really. The point of big scientific research is that at the moment a project is being conceived, no one has any idea where it will go and whether it will bring anything useful. Yet in time, it always brings breakthroughs.
I'll put it bluntly: we need more trust. The right way to do science is to keep throwing money at it, no questions asked[0]. IMO the reason we've seen so much progress during last two wars was not because war per se stimulates research, but because during a conflict the military has infinite budget and it starts throwing more money at research that can be used, so scientists can do whatever they want without justifying it for general public[1]. Free of money&management issues, creative minds could focus on doing fundamental research in whatever they felt like doing[2].
Come to think of it, science is best done in the same conditions the programming (or any creative endeavour) is - when you're free to think, don't feel the pressure of looming deadlines, don't have to deal with managerial bullshit, and when you have enough money to not have to think about it (both in life and in cost of work materials).
So yes, I advocate some kind of almost blind trust. Just throw some part of taxpayer money at R&D, no questions asked. It's a long-time investment.
[0] - Of course there's a need to build in a system to limit the amount of parasites who will feed on free money; but they ultimately cannot be avoided, we can only try to limit their numbers.
[1] - I think it was Feynman who pointed out that the problem with science in the 90's was that scientists suddenly found themselves accountable to general public and struggled with explaining why their research was useful.
[2] - If that last paragraph rings bad to you, please note that I'm skipping over a lot of points related to creativity needing to be free of trivial bullshit, intrinsic motivation beating monetary rewards/prestige in performance, etc.
Look at the Large Hadron Collider. Do you suppose they scrub from their data stores all tests that fail to produce a "working" result? Are you suggesting that trying and failing produces irrelevant knowledge?
Why?
I mean, why don't they admit that this is four-month-old news? Why is this getting sudden publication? Is their agenda as transparent as informing the public, or is there a strategic element to it?
After decades of work they are orders of magnitude away from break-even. Makes me wonder if the goal is actually break-even and/or power generation. Not really; but it's a revealing question.
I'm no great fan of the budgets these huge projects pull down; I think the bang-for-the-buck is greater elsewhere. But modelling nuclear weapons is an even greater waste of time. It's all kind of a sad epigraph about national science and technology initiatives.
Assuming the modest proposition that fusion energy is possible, why not make fusion energy a 'man on the moon' kind of national goal? It's hardly in doubt that we need a large source of clean energy. Is it a failure of imagination? Is it a failure of the political system - Can't get Bubba to vote for no fusion thing. Is the status quo energy system resistant to change? Whatever, the NIF thing just makes me depressed.
From one of my nuke profs, depending on how fusion is achieved its not all together clear that it would be any cleaner than fission. Something like 16MEV neutrons are going to cause neutron activation in tons of shielding. So all we do is swap tons of spent fuel from fission plants for tons of activated material from fusion plants, assuming we can even get there.
It's not newsworthy, but most reporters are not educated enough to tell the difference between a real breakthrough and a bogus press release.
The rest was lost to energy conversion losses. Yeah, not the best breakthrough I've heard today. Their best breakthrough was this CAD-flythrough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sp1sDpn_M0
which says (10/7/2013) "The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel - the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world."
meanwhile NPR on 2/12/2014 says: "Omar Hurricane, a researcher at, says that for the first time, they've produced significant amounts of fusion by zapping a target with their laser. "We've gotten more energy out of the fusion fuel than we put into the fusion fuel," he says."
We've always been at war with Eastasia.
> The lab's leaders predict that "ignition"-—the point where the 192 lasers actually deliver more energy than they consume—could occur as early as next year.
[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/national-...
That is one awesome name.
Every. Fucking. Time.
He didn't spend all that time in Evil Physicist School to be called Mister, thank you very much.
did you get more energy out than you put in?
Fusion is hard.
We should have finished this instead, what a waste:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
Take a guess why congress only funded the one useful for weapons.
A notable exception to this was the Soviet Tsar Bomba which used non-fissioning tampers in its multiple tertiary (and probably its single secondary) stages - resulting in an explosion of over 50Mt where 97% came from fusion: