The NIF: No News is Bad News

For those who don’t follow fusion technology, the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, is a giant, 192 beam laser facility located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  As its name would imply, it is designed to achieve fusion ignition, which has been variously defined, but basically means that you get more energy out from the fusion process than it was necessary to pump into the system to set off the fusion reactions.  There are two “classic” approaches to achieving controlled fusion in the laboratory.  One is magnetic fusion, in which light atoms stripped of their electrons, or ions, typically heavy isotopes of hydrogen, are confined in powerful magnetic fields as they are heated to the temperatures necessary for fusion to occur.  The other is inertial confinement fusion, or ICF, in which massive amounts of energy are dumped into a small target, causing it to reach fusion conditions so rapidly that significant fusion can occur in the very short time that the target material is held in place by its own inertia.  The NIF is a facility of the latter type.

There are, in turn, two basic approaches to ICF.  In one, referred to as direct drive, the target material is directly illuminated by the laser beams.  In the other, indirect drive, the target is placed inside a small container, or “hohlraum,” with entrance holes for the laser beams.  These are aimed at the inside walls of the hohlraum, where they are absorbed, producing x-rays which then compress and ignite the target.  The NIF currently uses the latter approach.

The NIF was completed and became operational in 2009.  Since that time, the amount of news coming out of the facility about the progress of experiments has been disturbingly slight.  That is not a good thing.  If everything were working as planned, a full schedule of ignition experiments would be underway as I write this.  Instead, the facility is idle.  The results of the first experimental campaign, announced in January, sounded positive.  The NIF had operated at a large fraction of its design energy output of 1.8 Megajoules.  Surrogate targets had been successfully compressed to very high densities in symmetric implosions, as required for fusion.  However, on reading the tea leaves, things did not seem quite so rosy.  Very high levels of laser plasma interaction (LPI) had been observed.  In such complex scattering interactions, laser light can be scattered out of the hohlraum, or in other undesired directions, and hot electrons can be generated, wreaking havoc with the implosion process by preheating the target.  We were assured that ways had been found to control the excess LPI, and even turn it to advantage in controlling the symmetry of the implosion.  However, such “tuning” with LPI had not been foreseen at the time the facility was designed, and little detail was provided on how the necessary delicate, time-dependent shaping of the laser pulses would be achieved under such conditions.

After a long pause, another series of “integrated” experiments was announced in October.  Even less information was released on this occasion.  We were informed that symmetric implosions had been achieved, and that, “From both a system integration and from a physics point of view, this experiment was outstanding,”  Since then, nothing.  

It’s hard to imagine that the outlook is really as rosy as the above statement would imply.  The NIF was designed for a much higher shot rate.  If it sat idle through much of 2010, there must be a reason.  It could be that damage to the laser optics has been unexpectedly high.  This would not be surprising.  Delicate crystals are used at the end of the chain of laser optics to triple the frequency of the laser light, and, given that the output energy of the facility is more than an order of magnitude larger than that of its next largest competitor, damage may have occurred in unexpected ways, as it did on Nova, the NIF’s predecessor at Livermore.  LPI may, in fact, be more serious, more difficult to control, and more damaging than the optimistic accounts in January implied.  Unexpected physics may be occurring in the absorption of laser light at the hohlraum walls.  Whatever the problem, Livermore would be well advised to be forthcoming about it in its press releases.  After all, the NIF will achieve ignition or not, regardless of how well the PR is managed.

All this seems very discouraging for the scientists who have devoted their careers to the quest for fusion energy, not to mention the stewards of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, whose needs the NIF was actually built to address.  In the end, these apparent startup problems may be overcome, and ignition achieved after all.  However, I rather doubt it, unless perhaps Livermore comes up with an alternative to its indirect drive approach.

Iran: Dazzled by Fusion

According to Media Line, Iran is pressing ahead with plans to build a fusion reactor:

Rather than bowing to international pressure to curb its nuclear development program, Iran has announced a new project: a nuclear fusion reactor. On Saturday, Iran’s nuclear chief announced that, “The scientific phase of the fusion energy research project is being launched with no budgetary limitation.” The head of Iran’s Nuclear Fusion Research Center told an Iranian news agency that, “We need two years to complete the studies on constructing and then another 10 years to design and build the reactor.”

You go, Ahmedinejad! I can think of no more “useful” way for Iran to spend its oil wealth than on a fusion reactor. If it works, Islam will have a clear edge over Christianity in miracles.  The Crusader’s competing ITER reactor isn’t even supposed to be loaded with fuel until 2028.  Besides, as seen in the image below, we know large scale fusion reactors are scientifically feasible.

ITER on the Move, or White Elephants have Long Lives

ITER

The Baseline describes ITER all the way from the beginning of construction, through commissioning, and on to Deuterium-Tritium operation. The main milestones will be the achievement of First Plasma in November 2019 and the start of Deuterium-Tritium operation by March 2027 ultimately taking ITER to 500 MW of fusion power.

He adds that “The world is watching us closely.” If so, it appears we’re going to be watching closely for a very long time. Evidently the plasma physics guys are nursing this thing like an all day sucker. It sounds like the scheduled building time is already running neck and neck with the Great Pyramid, and will soon be giving some of the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages a run for their money.

With any luck, some bright physicist(s) will finesse Mother Nature out of her fusion secrets using some known (see, for example, here and here) or yet to be discovered alternative to the “traditional” brute force magnetic and inertial confinement fusion approaches well before they ever get around to feeding tritium to this white elephant. Failing that, maybe the upcoming experiments on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) will be a lot more successful than I expect. Either way, some excuse to pull the plug on ITER is sorely needed. If nothing else, it will encourage some very bright scientists to do something useful with their talents for a change. All complex cost analyses done using the most up to date methods to the contrary, ITER will never be able to compete with the available alternative energy sources in terms of cost any time in the next few centuries.

“On Deception Watch” – The “Conspiracy” to Kill Fusion

In wandering here and there on the Internet I ran across mention of a new novel by David H. Spielberg entitled “On Deception Watch.” According to the Amazon blurb about it,

This is an epic drama about unlimited energy, the realignment of international power in a truly new world order unlike anything envisioned before, and deadly conflict between political and military centers of power. Controlled fusion energy ignites a firestorm of competing interests from within the top levels of government to the “oil patch” to the United Nations and ultimately to the world. How is it that a visionary physicist/entrepreneur was able to achieve the technological breakthrough of the century?

The author himself adds some detail to the picture;

I wrote a novel, “On Deception Watch,” that was triggered by my visit to KMS Fusion,” a real company that in 1975 really accomplished laser fusion ignition of a deuterium/tritium target and was then harassed to death by the federal government and its assets essentially looted by the feds. My novel is about the premise of a company that does what KMS Fusion did and then what. Check out KMS Fusion, Keeve Siegel, the president of the company, and my novel. One exploration in it is about what replaces the United Nations. The story takes place about 25 years in the future.

W-e-e-e-l-l-l. It wasn’t quite like that, and I doubt the author believes it himself.  According to Xlibris, he has a Ph.D. in physics and, if so, I’m sure he doesn’t really believe KMS accomplished ignition back in 1975.  Still, the above account isn’t going to mislead anyone whose tastes don’t already run to yarns about the Da Vinci Code, the Celestine Prophecy, and the Maya calendar, because the original papers about what happened then are still available, and many of the people who did the experiments are still around.  We’ll cut Spielberg some slack and call it “poetic license,” forgivable from an author who’s just published his first novel.  Regardless, the story of KMS is certainly fascinating even without such embellishments.

In fact, there was a guy named Keeve (or “Kip” as he was better known) Siegel, his initials were KMS, and he was a brilliant entrepreneur who, back in the 60′s, became convinced that inertial confinement fusion (ICF) was within reach using the laser technology then available.  Gathering a crew of talented scientists, he founded KMS Fusion and built the “Chroma” laser in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and, without government funding, actually succeeded (in 1974, not 1975) in demonstrating fusion from a laser-driven implosion in the laboratory for the first time, beating embarrassed teams at Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories to the punch.  It was a remarkable achievement, but was still orders of magnitude away from “ignition,” usually defined as equivalent to “scientific breakeven,” which occurs when the energy released from fusion equals the energy carried by the laser beams driving the reaction.  Siegel, a very heavy man, died dramatically less than a year later, suffering a stroke while appealing for government funding before the Joint Congressional Committee on nuclear power.  According to the Wikipedia article about him linked above,

At this time, KMS Fusion was indisputably the most advanced laser-fusion laboratory in the world. Unfortunately, outright harassment from the AEC only increased after the announcement of these results. According to one source in the faculty of the University of Michigan, the campaign against KMS Fusion culminated with a massive incursion into the KMS Fusion facilities by federal agents, who effectively put an end to its operations by confiscating essential materials on the grounds that, inter alia, all information concerning the production of nuclear energy is classified information which belongs exclusively to the federal government.

As usual, caution is due in taking Wiki at face value, and this account is pure mythology.  The AEC was abolished in 1974, so was in no position to “harass” KMS.  If the government continued to “harass” KMS after that, it chose an odd way of doing it, because KMS actually succeeded in securing a multi-million dollar government contract to continue its research after Siegel’s death.  This was renewed several times, and KMS became a major player in the government ICF program, eventually becoming the lead laboratory for target development and production.  The company eventually ran afoul of its sponsors at the Department of Energy in the early 90′s for reasons that had nothing to do with suppressing its research results, and lost its government contract to General Atomics, which continues as the “lead lab” for inertial fusion targets to this day.  KMS continued a shadow existence for many years, but that effectively ended its role as a player in ICF.

That said, it’s quite true that there was friction between KMS and the inertial fusion guys at the national laboratories, just as there has always been friction between the national laboratories themselves.  The teams at Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia all coveted the research dollars that were going to KMS, whose management didn’t endear itself by a bad habit of lobbying for earmarks over and above the funding DOE wanted it to have with the aid of Michigan representatives in Congress.  The lab guys all seemed to believe that this money came out of their hide.  They argued that the Chroma laser in Ann Arbor was obsolete, and that KMS should end experiments there and concentrate on target fabrication.  Well, after KMS’ collapse, Chroma was cannibalized, the lion’s share of its optical innards going to Los Alamos.  There, after being rechristened “Trident,” this “obsolete” laser continues in operation to this day!

As for ignition, it turned out that the slogan of “online by ’79″ was a tad optimistic.  Mother Nature had other ideas.  The computer power available when KMS was founded was very limited, and the computer programs that had predicted the possibility of ignition with relatively small lasers like Chroma were limited to looking at the problem in one dimension.  It turns out that multi-dimensional effects, such as the Rayleigh-Taylor instability, make ignition much harder to achieve than the first generation of computer codes predicted.  It’s probably a good thing, too, because otherwise we may have succeeded in blowing ourselves up by now with pure fusion weapons.  In any case, we kept building bigger laser facilities, eventually culminating in the recent completion of the National Ignition Facility at Livermore, a massive, 192 beam system capable of delivering a nominal 1.8 megajoules of blue (frequency-tripled) light.  As its name implies, its goal is to achieve ignition, and the critical experiments designed to achieve that goal will take place in the next couple of years.  I am not optimistic that they will succeed, but am keeping my fingers crossed that they do.

Meanwhile, I wish Dr. Spielberg every success with his novel.  It sounds like a great yarn, and should bring a smile to the faces of ICF old timers.

Action at ITER

It looks like they’re really serious about building this white elephant. Magnetic fusion facilities like ITER are scientifically feasible, but they are engineering nightmares, and will never be cost-competitive with the alternatives, except in the daydreams of the people who write reactor design studies for scientific journals. I’ve always been a fan of fusion energy, but there’s got to be a better way. Oh, well, I suppose this is one of the more creative ways for governments to waste money.

Cold Fusion and ARPA-E

According to it’s mission statement, the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) is supposed to have more or less the same role within the Department of Energy as DARPA has for the Department of Defense. Quoting from the statement:

ARPA-E focuses exclusively on high risk, high payoff concepts – technologies promising genuine transformation in the ways we generate, store and utilize energy.

A statement of objectives on the ARPA-E website elaborates on this theme:

To focus on creative “out-of-the-box” transformational energy research that industry by itself cannot or will not support due to its high risk but where success would provide dramatic benefits for the nation.

Apparently the source selection guys who picked the first round of 37 projects to be funded by the new office never got the word. Read over the list, and you’ll find they have a distinctly incremental, chewed over flavor.   There are projects to train bacteria to produce biofuels, projects to make better batteries, projects to do a better job of removing CO2 from flue gas, etc.  All very interesting, but the chances that any of this stuff will be “transformational” are vanishingly small.  One project area that really is “high risk, high payoff” and potentially transformational is remarkable by its absence – cold fusion.

They’re taking a very dim view of the situation at the website of Cold Fusion Times. Their take:

Corrupt individuals within the US Patent Office and elsewhere continue to cover up cold fusion applications and other alternative energy inventions. ARPA-E and the DOE tricked scores of cold fusioneers to waste their time on proposals that went into the waste basket. For what reason? It is unethical that this has continued from the crash of the Exxon Valdez through the present disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. People around the world now believe that those involved in this coverup festering since 1989 should finally be held accountable.

I can understand the frustration, but that sort of hyperbole is both counterproductive and wrong.  I have seen no evidence that any of the individuals involved in the selection process are corrupt, or that there has been a “cover up.”  Orthodox energy scientists and bureaucrats would have nothing to “cover up,” because they simply don’t believe in cold fusion.  There was no attempt to “trick” anyone.

What we are really seeing at ARPA-E is hidebound conservatism, ignorance of what has been going on in the cold fusion community, and the time-honored reticence of bureaucrats in all ages to stick their necks out and risk ridicule by supporting anything unconventional.  I wouldn’t describe ARPA-E’s failure to fund a single one of the many cold fusion proposals it received, and its singularly bland choice of awards, as “corrupt” or ”trickery.”  A more appropriate adjective that comes to mind might be “pathetic.”  These people have utterly and completely failed to grasp exactly what it is their organization is supposed to be doing. 

“High risk, high payoff?”  Get real!  Let’s hope they do better next time.

2009 Colloquium on Lattice-Assisted Nuclear Reactions (LANR) at MIT

“Stealth” Fusion Progress

It didn’t take us long to master the destructive force of fusion, but taming it for more constructive applications, such as electricity production, has been harder than anyone imagined back in the day when a popular slogan was “online by ’79.” Right, maybe in 2079 with any luck. We know of two scientifically feasible ways to get more energy out of fusion than it’s necessary to put in to ignite the fuel materials; magnetic fusion, as in ITER, or inertial confinement fusion (ICF) as at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The problem with both approaches is not the science, but the engineering challenge of building reactors capable of generating electricity anywhere near as cheaply as the alternatives. At the moment, the chances that we will be able to do so any time in the foreseeable future seem remote.

If anyone around today lives to see the dawn of the era of fusion energy, it will probably be because some exceptionally clever researcher has hoodwinked Mother Nature and discovered how to finesse his way past the Coulomb barrier that usually keeps atomic nuclei too far apart to come within the range of the fusion-enabling strong force. Several promising candidates are already in the field, and one of them, Tri-Alpha Energy, has apparently managed to attract $50 million in private research funding. The company hasn’t revealed the nature of its approach, but it is apparently inspired by the work of Prof. Norman Rostoker of UC Irvine. One can get a broad hint from this paper co-authored by Rostoker and Tri-Alpha entitled, “Colliding Beam Fusion Reactors.” Rostoker is an emeritus professor who has been publishing papers since the 50′s, some co-authored with fusion superstars such as Nicholas Krall and Marshall Rosenbluth. Octogenarian physicists don’t often pull off such miracles, but you never know.

If he or someone else ever does manage to pull the fusion rabbit out of the hat, it would potentially put an end to our worries about energy for a very long time. It could also enable pure fusion weapons. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it doesn’t.

Fusion Reaction

ITER: Throwing Good Money after Bad

According to the journal Nature, European nations hope to redirect more than €1 billion (US$1.25 billion) earmarked for research grants to make up a budget shortfall at the experimental ITER fusion reactor.  In an article that appeared in the July 7 issue, the editors note,

The proposal has alarmed scientists, who say that it will rob researchers of vital funds at a time when governments are planning to scale back domestic research budgets in response to the global economic downturn.

This is surely an understatement.  If I were a European scientist, I would be screaming bloody murder.  Like the International Space Station, ITER is a white elephant whose potential benefits will never come close to justifying the cost of building it.  It’s projected cost has tripled since it was estimated in 2001.  The fond hopes of the aging scientists who have devoted their careers to the pursuit of magnetic fusion energy will not be realized.  Like the International Space Station, ITER’s real effect will be to serve as a huge financial vacuum cleaner, soaking up billions in research money that could be much better spent elsewhere, including in the field of fusion energy research itself.

The problem with magnetic fusion, at least in the form represented by ITER, is that, while it is scientifically feasible, it will never be able to compete with alternative methods of producing electric power in terms of cost.  There are certainly hundreds of reactor design studies out there that claim the opposite, but, as the future will demonstrate if ITER is ever built, they are all wrong.  Among other things, the cost of a tritium economy has been grossly underestimated.  Tritium is a heavy form of hydrogen whose nucleus contains two neutrons in addition to the usual single proton.  Mixed with deuterium, another heavy isotope of hydrogen with a single extra neutron, it will be an essential fuel material in reactors such as ITER.  Deuterium occurs naturally, and is relatively common.  In other than trace amounts, tritium does not.  It must be produced artificially.  In order to produce the quantities necessary to keep a reactor like ITER running indefinitely, it will be necessary to surround the burning plasma with a thick layer of lithium.  Fast neutrons produced by fusion in the burning plasma can then produce the necessary tritium in nuclear reactions with this material. 

However, there is a slight problem.  Tritium is highly radioactive, with a half-life, the time it takes for half of any given quantity to undergo nuclear decay, of something over 12 years.  In spite of the fact that hydrogen is a notoriously slippery substance, passing with ease right through some types of metal, it will be necessary to control and contain kilograms of this material in a working magnetic fusion reactor.  In addition to its intrinsic radioactive hazard, tritium must also be carefully guarded to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.  For example, if terrorists were able to secure enough special nuclear material to build a nuclear bomb, they could potentially greatly increase its explosive yield by using tritium in the process known as boosting.  All this, not to mention the legal challenges that NIMBY’s are sure to mount to avoid living next to such an objectionable material, is unlikely to be cheap.

This and other potential show stoppers will insure that magnetic fusion reactors like ITER will never be able to compete economically.  Don’t believe me?  Wait and see.  It would be much better to use the increasingly scarce research dollars now being used to fund this particular white elephant on smaller projects, including fusion research projects, where it could do some real good.  Who knows.  They might even result in the discovery of a way to finesse Mother Nature after all and build fusion reactors that don’t need tritium and are economically competitive.

ITER

Mineral Wealth in Afghanistan: The Saudi Arabia of Lithium?

The Grey Lady seemed positively ecstatic about recent discoveries of mineral wealth in Afghanistan in an article that appeared yesterday. The finds include iron, copper, gold, and a host of other valuable materials valued at a cool $1 trillion. The most significant of them all may turn out to be lithium. Initial analysis indicates deposits at only one location as large as those of Bolivia, the country that now has the world’s largest known reserves.

Lithium has become increasingly important lately as a component of small but powerful batteries. It will become a lot more important if fusion energy ever becomes a reality. I don’t expect this to happen anytime soon. Even if the remaining scientific hurdles can be overcome, the engineering difficulties of maintaining the extreme conditions necessary for fusion reliably over the long periods necessary to extract useful electric power would be daunting. Fusion power would likely be too expensive to compete with alternative energy sources under the best of circumstances. However, that’s my opinion, and a good number of very intelligent scientists disagree with me. If they’re right, and the upcoming proof of principle experiments at the National Ignition Facility prove far more successful than I expect, or some scientific breakthrough enables us to tame fusion on much smaller and less costly machines, fusion power may yet become a reality.

In that case, lithium may play a far more substantial role in energy production than it ever could as a component of batteries. It could literally become the metallic “oil” of the future. The reason for that is the fact that the easiest fusion reaction to tame is that between two heavy isotopes of hydrogen; namely, deuterium and tritium.  The “cross section” for the fusion reaction between these two isotopes, meaning the probability that it will occur under given conditions, becomes significant at substantially lower temperatures and pressures than competing candidates.  The fly in the ointment is the availability of fuel material.  Deuterium is abundant in nature.  Tritium, however, is not.  It must be produced artificially.  The raw material is lithium.

It happens that the fusion reaction between deuterium and tritium results in the production of a helium nucleus and a very energetic neutron.  This neutron can cause reactions in either of the two most common naturally occurring isotopes of lithium, Li-6 and Li-7, that produce tritium.  Thus, the fusion reactions that may one day produce energy for electric power could also be leveraged to breed tritium if the reaction were made to take place in the vicinity of lithium, either in a surrounding blanket or one of several other more fanciful proposed arrangements.   

As noted above, I don’t think that day is coming anytime soon.  If it when it does, Afghanistan may well become the Saudi Arabia of a new technological era of energy production.