Fusion Update: Signs of Life from the National Ignition Facility

The National Ignition Facility, or NIF, is a huge, 192 beam laser system, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.  It was designed, as the name implies, to achieve thermonuclear ignition in the laboratory.  “Ignition” is generally accepted to mean getting a greater energy output from fusion than the laser input energy.  Unlike magnetic confinement fusion, the approach currently being pursued at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, now under construction in France, the goal of the NIF is to achieve ignition via inertial confinement fusion, or ICF, in which the fuel material is compressed and heated to the extreme conditions at which fusion occurs so quickly that it is held in place by its own inertia.

The NIF has been operational for over a year now, and a two year campaign is underway with the goal of achieving ignition by the end of this fiscal year.  Recently, there has been a somewhat ominous silence from the facility, manifesting itself as a lack of publications in the major journals favored by fusion scientists.  That doesn’t usually happen when there is anything interesting to report.  Finally, however, some papers have turned up in the journal Physics of Plasmas, containing reports of significant progress.

To grasp the importance of the papers, it is necessary to understand what is supposed to occur within the NIF  target chamber for fusion to occur.  Of course, just as in magnetic fusion, the goal is to bring a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two heavy isotopes of hydrogen, to the extreme conditions at which fusion takes place.  In the ICF approach, this hydrogen “fuel” is contained in a tiny, BB-sized target.  However, the lasers are not aimed directly at the fuel “capsule.”  Instead, the capsule is suspended in the middle of a tiny cylinder made of a heavy metal like gold or uranium.  The lasers are fired through holes on each end of the cylinder, striking the interior walls, where their energy is converted to x-rays.  It is these x-rays that must actually bring the target to fusion conditions.

It was recognized many years ago that one couldn’t achieve fusion ignition by simply heating up the target.  That would require a laser driver orders of magnitude bigger than the NIF.  Instead, it is first necessary to compress, or implode, the fuel material to extremely high density.  Obviously, it is harder to “squeeze” hot material than cold material to the necessary high densities, so the fuel must be kept as “cold” as possible during the implosion process.  However, cold fuel won’t ignite, begging the question of how to heat it up once the necessary high densities have been achieved.

It turns out that the answer is shocks.  When the laser generated x-rays hit the target surface, they do so with such force that it begins to implode faster than the speed of sound.  Everyone knows that when a plane breaks the sound barrier, it, too, generates a shock, which can be heard as a sonic boom.  The same thing happens in ICF fusion targets.  When such a shock converges at the center of the target, the result is a small “hot spot” in the center of the fuel.  If the temperature in the hot spot were high enough, fusion would occur.  Each fusion reaction would release a high energy helium nucleus, or alpha particle, and a neutron.  The alpha particles would be slammed to a stop in the surrounding cold fuel material, heating it, in turn, to fusion conditions.  This would result in a fusion “burn wave” that would propagate out through the rest of the fuel, completing the fusion process.

The problem is that one shock isn’t enough to create such a “hot spot.”  Four of them are required, all precisely timed by the carefully tailored NIF laser pulse to converge at the center of the target at exactly the same time.  This is where real finesse is needed in laser fusion.  The implosion must be extremely symmetric, or the shocks will not converge properly.  The timing must be exact, and the laser pulse must deliver just the right amount of energy.

One problem in the work to date has been an inability to achieve high enough implosion velocities for the above scenario to work as planned.  One of the Physics of Plasmas papers reports that, by increasing the laser energy and replacing some of the gold originally used in the wall of the cylinder, or “hohlraum,” in which the fuel capsule is mounted with depleted uranium, velocities of 99% of those required for ignition have been achieved.  In view of the recent announcement that a shot on the NIF had exceeded its design energy of 1.8 megajoules, it appears the required velocity is within reach.  Another of the Physics of Plasmas papers dealt with the degree to which implosion asymmetries were causing harmful mixing of the surrounding cold fuel material into the imploded core of the target.  It, too, provided grounds for optimism.

In the end, I suspect the success or failure of the NIF will depend on whether the complex sequence of four shocks can really be made to work as advertised.  That will depend on the accuracy of the physics algorithms in the computer codes that have been used to model the experiments.  Time and again, earlier and less sophisticated codes have been wrong because they didn’t accurately account for all the relevant physics.  There is no guarantee that critical phenomena have not been left out of the current versions as well.  We may soon find out, if the critical series of experiments planned to achieve ignition before the end of the fiscal year are carried out as planned.

One can but hope they will succeed, if only because some of our finest scientists have dedicated their careers to the quest to achieve the elusive goal of controlled fusion.  Even if they do, fusion based on the NIF approach is unlikely to become a viable source of energy, at least in the foreseeable future.  Laser fusion may prove scientifically feasible, but getting useful energy out of it will be an engineering nightmare, dangerous because of the need to rely on highly volatile and radioactive tritium, and much too expensive to compete with potential alternatives.  I know many of the faithful in the scientific community will beg to differ with me, but, trust me, laser fusion energy aint’ gonna happen.

On the other hand, if ignition is achieved, the NIF will be invaluable to the country, not as a source of energy, but for the reason it was funded in the first place – to insure that our nation has an unmatched suite of experimental facilities to study the physics of nuclear weapons in a era free of nuclear testing.  As long as we have unique access to facilities like the NIF, which can approach the extreme physical conditions within exploding nukes, we will have a significant leg up on the competition as long as the test ban remains in place.  For that, if for no other reason, we should keep our fingers crossed that the NIF team can finally clear the last technical hurdles and reach the goal they have been working towards for so long.

Fusion ignition process,courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Space Colonization and Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking is in the news again as an advocate for space colonization.  He raised the issue in a recent interview with the Canadian Press, and will apparently include it as a theme of his new TV series, Brave New World with Stephen Hawking, which debuts on Discovery World HD on Saturday.  There are a number of interesting aspects to the story this time around.  One that most people won’t even notice is Hawking’s reference to human nature.  Here’s what he had to say.

Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.

The fact that Hawking can matter-of-factly assert something like that about innate behavior in humans as if it were a matter of common knowledge speaks volumes about the amazing transformation in public consciousness that’s taken place in just the last 10 or 15 years.  If he’d said something like that about “selfish and aggressive instincts” 50 years ago, the entire community of experts in the behavioral sciences would have dismissed him as an ignoramus at best, and a fascist and right wing nut case at worst.  It’s astounding, really.  I’ve watched this whole story unfold in my lifetime.  It’s just as stunning as the paradigm shift from an earth-centric to a heliocentric solar system, only this time around, Copernicus and Galileo are unpersons, swept under the rug by an academic and professional community too ashamed of their own past collective imbecility to mention their names.  Look in any textbook on Sociology, Anthropology, or Evolutionary Psychology, and you’ll see what the sounds of silence look like in black and white.  Aside from a few obscure references, the whole thing is treated as if it never happened.  Be grateful, dear reader.  At last we can say the obvious without being shouted down by the “experts.”  There is such a thing as human nature.

Now look at the comments after the story in the Winnipeg Free Press I linked above.  Here are some of them.

“Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”  If that is the case, perhaps we don’t deserve to survive. If we bring destruction to our planet, would it not be in the greater interest to destroy the virus, or simply let it expire, instead of spreading its virulence throughout the galaxy?

And who would decide who gets to go? Also, “Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.” What a stupid thing to say: if we can’t survive ‘lurking’ on planet Earth then who’s to say humans wouldn’t ruin things off of planet Earth?

I will not go through any of this as I will be dead by then and gone to a better place as all those who remain and go through whatever happenings in the Future,will also do!

I’ve written a lot about morality on this blog.  These comments speak to the reasons why getting it right about morality, why understanding its real nature, and why it exists, are important.  All of them are morally loaded.  As is the case with virtually all morally loaded comments, their authors couldn’t give you a coherent explanation of why they have those opinions.  They just feel that way.  I don’t doubt that they’re entirely sincere about what they say.  The genetic programming that manifests itself as human moral behavior evolved many millennia ago in creatures who couldn’t conceive of themselves as members of a worldwide species, or imagine travel into space.  What these comments demonstrate is something that’s really been obvious for a long time.  In the environment that now exists, vastly different as it is from the one in which our moral predispositions evolved, they can manifest themselves in ways that are, by any reasonable definition of the word, pathological.  In other words, they can manifest themselves in ways that no longer promote our survival, but rather the opposite.

As can be seen from the first comment, for example, thanks to our expanded consciousness of the world we live in, we can conceive of such an entity as “all mankind.”  Our moral programming predisposes us to categorize our fellow creatures into ingroups and outgroups.  In this case, “all mankind” has become an outgroup or, as the commenter puts it, a “virus.”  The demise, not only of the individual commenter, but of all mankind, has become a positive Good.  More or less the same thing can be said about the second comment.  This commenter apparently believes that it would be better for humans to become extinct than to “mess things up.”  For whom?

As for the third commenter, survival in this world is unimportant to him because he believes in eternal survival in a future imaginary world under the proprietership of an imaginary supernatural being.  It is unlikely that this attitude is more conducive to our real genetic survival than those of the first two commenters.  I submit that if these commenters had an accurate knowledge of the real nature of human morality in the first place, and were free of delusions about supernatural beings in the second, the tone of their comments would be rather different.

And what of my opinion on the matter?  In my opinion, morality is the manifestation of genetically programmed traits that evolved because they happened to promote our survival.  No doubt because I understand morality in this way, I have a subjective emotional tendency to perceive the Good as my own genetic survival, the survival of my species, and the survival of life as it has evolved on earth, not necessarily in that order.  Objectively, my version of the Good is no more legitimate or objectively valid that those of the three commenters.  In some sense, you might say it’s just a whim.  I do, however, think that my subjective feelings on the matter are reasonable.  I want to pursue as a “purpose” that which the evolution of morality happened to promote; survival.  It seems to me that an evolved, conscious biological entity that doesn’t want to survive is dysfunctional – it is sick.  I would find the realization that I am sick and dysfunctional distasteful.  Therefore, I choose to survive.  In fact, I am quite passionate about it.  I believe that, if others finally grasp the truth about what morality really is, they are likely to share my point of view.  If we agree, then we can help each other.  That is why I write about it.

By all means, then, let us colonize space, and not just our solar system, but the stars.  We can start now.  We lack sources of energy capable of carrying humans to even the nearest stars, but we can send life, even if only single-celled life.  Let us begin.

Belgium Joins the Nuclear de-Renaissance

The move away from nuclear power in Europe is becoming a stampede.  According to Reuters, the Belgians are now on the bandwagon, with plans for shutting down the country’s last reactors in 2025.  The news comes as no surprise, as the anti-nukers in Belgium have had the upper hand for some time.  However, the agreement reached by the country’s political parties has been made ”conditional” on whether the energy deficit can be made up by renewable sources.  Since Belgium currently gets about 55 percent of its power from nuclear, the chances of that appear slim.  It’ s more likely that baseload power deficits will be made up with coal and gas plants that emit tons of carbon and, in the case of coal, represent a greater radioactive hazard than nuclear because of the uranium and thorium they spew into the atmosphere.  No matter.  Since Fukushima global warming hysteria is passé and anti-nuclear hysteria is back in fashion again for the professional saviors of the world.

It will be interesting to see how all this turns out in the long run.  In the short term it will certainly be a boon to China and India.  They will continue to expand their nuclear capacity and their lead in advanced nuclear technology, with a windfall of cheaper fuel thanks to Western anti-nuclear activism.  By the time the Europeans come back to the real world and finally realize that renewables aren’t going to cover all their energy needs, they will likely be forced to fall back on increasingly expensive and heavily polluting fossil fuels.  Germany is already building significant new coal-fired capacity.

Of course, we may be dealt a wild card if one of the longshot schemes for taming fusion on the cheap actually works.  The odds look long at the moment, though.  We’re hearing nothing but a stoney silence from the National Ignition Facility, which bodes ill for what seems to be the world’s last best hope to perfect inertial confinement fusion.  Things don’t look much better at ITER, the flagship facility for magnetic fusion, the other mainstream approach.  There are no plans to even fuel the facility before 2028.

DARPA’s “100 Year Starship” and Planetary Colonization

DARPA seems to have its priorities straight when it comes to space exploration.  The agency is funding what it calls the “100 Year Starship” program to study novel propulsion systems with the eventual goal of colonizing space.    Pete Worden, Director of NASA’s Ames Center, suggests that Mars might be colonized by 2030 via one-way missions.  It’s an obvious choice, really.  There’s little point in sending humans to Mars unless they’re going to stay there, and, at least from my point of view, establishing a permanent presence on the red planet is a good idea.  My point of view is based on the conclusion that, if there’s really anything that we “ought” to do, it’s survive.  Everything about us that makes us what we are evolved because it promoted our survival, so it seems that survival is a reasonable goal.  There’s no absolutely legitimate reason why we should survive, but, if we don’t, it would seem to indicate that we are a dysfunctional species, and I find that thought unpleasant.  There, in a nutshell, is my rationale for making human survival my number one priority. 

If we seek to survive then, when it comes to planets, it would be unwise to put all of our eggs in one basket.  Steven Hawking apparently agrees with me on this, as can be seen here and here. In his words,

It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.

Not unexpectedly in this hypermoralistic age, morality is being dragged into the debate.  The usual “ethics experts” are ringing their hands about how and under what circumstances we have a “right” to colonize space, and what we must do to avoid being “immoral” in the process.  Related discussions can be found here and here.  Apparently it never occurs to people who raise such issues that human beings make moral judgments and are able to conceive of such things as “rights” only because of the existence of emotional wiring in our brains that evolved because it promoted our survival and that of our prehuman ancestors.  Since it evolved at times and under circumstances that were apparently uninfluenced by what was happening on other planets, morality and “rights” are relevant to the issue only to the extent that they muddy the waters.

Assuming that others agree with me and Dr. Hawking that survival is a desirable goal, then ultimately we must seek to move beyond our own solar system.  Unfortunately there are severe constraints on our ability to send human beings on such long voyages owing to the vast amounts of energy that would be necessary to make interstellar journey’s within human lifetimes.  For the time being, at least, we must rely on very small vessels that may take a very long time to reach their goals.  Nanotechnology is certainly part of the answer.  Tiny probes might survey the earth-like planets we discover to determine their capacity to support life.  Those found suitable should be seeded with life as soon as possible.  Again, because of energy constraints, it may only be possible to send one-celled or very simple life forms at first.  They can survive indefinitely long voyages in space, and would be the logical choice to begin seeding other planets.  Self-replicating nano-robots might then be sent capable of building a suitable environment for more complex life forms, including incubators and surrogate parents.  At that point, it would become possible to send more complex life forms, including human beings, in the form of frozen fertilized eggs.  These are some of the things we might consider doing if we consider our survival important.

Of course, any number of the pathologically pious among us might find what I’ve written above grossly immoral.  The fact remains that there is no legitimate basis for such a judgment.  Morality exists because it promoted our survival.  There can be nothing more immoral than failing to survive.

The Daedalus Starship

More Thorium Silliness

Thorium is a promising candidate as a future source of energy.  I just wonder what it is about the stuff that inspires so many people to write nonsense about it.  It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in physics to spot the mistakes.  Most of them should be obvious to anyone who’s taken the trouble to read a high school science book.  Another piece of misinformation has just turned up at the website of Popular Mechanics, dubiously titled The Truth about Thorium and Nuclear Power.

The byline claims that, “Thorium has nearly 200 times the energy content of uranium,” a statement I will assume reflects the ignorance of the writer rather than any outright attempt to deceive. She cites physicist Carlo Rubbia as the source, but if he ever said anything of the sort, he was making some very “special” assumptions about the energy conversion process that she didn’t quite understand. I assume it must have had something to do with his insanely dangerous subcritical reactor scheme, in which case the necessary assumptions to get a factor of 200 would have necessarily been very “special” indeed. Thorium cannot sustain the nuclear chain reaction needed to produce energy on its own. It must first be transmuted to an isotope of uranium with the atomic weight of 233 (U233) by absorbing a neutron. Strictly speaking, then, the above statement is nonsense, because the “energy content” of thorium actually comes from a form of uranium, U233, which can sustain a chain reaction on its own. However, let’s be charitable and compare natural thorium and natural uranium as both come out of the ground when mined. 

As I’ve already pointed out, thorium cannot be directly used in a nuclear reactor on its own.  Natural uranium actually can.  It consists mostly of an isotope of uranium with an atomic weight of 238 (U238), but also a bit over 0.7% of a lighter isotope with an atomic weight of 235 (U235).  U238, like thorium, is unable to support a nuclear chain reaction on its own, but U235, like U233, can.  Technically speaking, what that means is that, when the nucleus of an atom of U233 or U235 absorbs a neutron, enough energy is released to cause the nucleus to split, or fission.  When U238 or natural thorium (Th232) absorbs a neutron, energy is also released, but not enough to cause fission.  Instead, they become U239 and Th233, which eventually decay to produce U233 and plutonium 239 (Pu239) respectively. 

Let’s try to compare apples and apples, and assume that enough neutrons are around to convert all the Th232 to U233, and all the U238 to Pu239.  In that case we are left with a lump of pure U233 derived from the natural thorium and a mixture of about 99.3% Pu239 and 0.7% U235 from the natural uranium.  In the first case, the fission of each atom of U233 will release, on average, 200.1 million electron volts (MeV) of energy that can potentially be converted to heat in a nuclear reactor.  In the second, each atom of U235 will release, on average, 202.5 Mev, and each atom of Pu239 211.5 Mev of energy.  In other words, the potential energy release from natural thorium is actually about equal to that of natural uranium. 

Unfortunately, the “factor of 200″ isn’t the only glaring mistake in the paper.  The author repeats the familiar yarn about how uranium was chosen over thorium for power production because it produced plutonium needed for nuclear weapons as a byproduct.  In fact, uranium would have been the obvious choice even if weapons production had not been a factor.  As pointed out earlier, natural uranium can sustain a chain reaction in a reactor on its own, and thorium can’t.  Natural uranium can be enriched in U235 to make more efficient and smaller reactors.  Thorium can’t be ”enriched” in that way at all.  Thorium breeders produce U232, a highly radioactive and dangerous isotope, which can’t be conveniently separated from U233, complicating the thorium fuel cycle.  Finally, the plutonium that comes out of nuclear reactors designed for power production, known as “reactor grade” plutonium, contains significant quantities of heavier isotopes of plutonium in addition to Pu239, making it unsuitable for weapons production.

Apparently the author gleaned some further disinformation for  Seth Grae, CEO of Lightbridge, a Virginia-based company promoting thorium power.  He supposedly told her that U233 produced in thorium breeders “fissions almost instantaneously.”  In fact, the probability that it will fission is entirely comparable to that of U235 or Pu239, and it will not fission any more “instantaneously” than other isotopes.  Why Grae felt compelled to feed her this fable is beyond me, as “instantaneous” fission isn’t necessary to prevent diversion of U233 as a weapons material.  Unlike plutonium, it can be “denatured” by mixing it with U238, from which it cannot be chemically separated.

It’s a mystery to me why so much nonsense is persistently associated with discussions of thorium, a potential source of energy that has a lot going for it.  It has several very significant advantages over the alternative uranium/plutonium breeder technology, such as not producing significant quantities of plutonium and other heavy actinides, less danger that materials produced in the fuel cycle will be diverted for weapons purposes if the technology is done right, and the ability to operate in a more easily controlled “thermal” neutron environment.  I can only suggest that people who write popular science articles about nuclear energy take the time to educate themselves about the subject.  Tried and true old textbooks like Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Introduction to Nuclear Reactor Theory by John Lamarsh have been around for years, don’t require an advanced math background, and should be readable by any intelligent person with a high school education.

“Heatballs”: German Technology Triumphs Again

According to Reuters (hattip Tim Blair), German scientists have discovered a new home heating technology that leverages the tendency of charged particles (in this case electrons) to transfer energy to a metal lattice when under the influence of an electromotive force. Although remarkably similar to old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, which were recently banned in the European Union, the devices can be easily distinguished therefrom by virtue of the fact that they are clearly marked “Heatball.”

According to the website set up to market the new devices, they are the,

Best invention since the lightbulb! …A heatball is an electrical resistance intended for heating. Heatball is action art! Heatball is resistance against regulations that are imposed without recourse to any democratic or parliamentary procedure, disenfranchising citizens.

Noting that a portion of the purchase price of each of the devices will be contributed to a fund to save the rainforests, the blurb continues,

Heatball is also a form of resistance against the senseless nature of measures to protect the environment. How is it possible to seriously believe that we can save the world’s climate by using energy efficient lightbulbs, while at the same time condoning the fact that the rainforests have been waiting in vain for their salvation for decades?

Making light of the absurd notion that the devices could be misused to produce light, the site adds,

In accordance with the instructions, the correct use of heatballs is to produce warmth. Would you use a toaster as a reading lamp? …The emission of light during the heating process is a result of the production technology. It is no reason for alarm, nor does it constitute legitimate grounds for a refund.

In the 20th century we found ways to beat Prohibition in the USA.  May our German friends have similar success with their Heatballs in the 21st.

Energy Update: Nuclear Falters, Coal Advances

Something over a year ago, the US government announced that four companies out of 17 that had applied for over a hundred billion dollars worth of federal loan guarantees for 21 proposed nuclear reactors had made what the Wall Street Journal called its “short list.”  At the time, Carl from Chicago, who occasionally writes for ChicagoBoyz, penned an article expressing his “confusion” at the choices.  Several seemingly logical candidates had been passed over, and, of the four picked, three were underfunded and had an assortment of legal and financial issues that made them dubious choices for coming up with the kind of capital needed to fund new construction.  As it turns out, the feds should have listened to Carl.  NRG, one of the two companies he picked as “least likely to succeed,” effectively dropped out of the game some time ago.  Now, as he puts it, “the other shoe has dropped.”  The other weak sister, Constellation Energy Group, just announced it is pulling out of negotiations to build the build the Calvert Cliffs 3 reactor in Maryland.

Rod Adams at Atomic Insights also commented on Constellation’s decision to walk.  Citing a related article in the Washington Post according to which,

Separately, administration officials said they had approved a $1.06 billion loan guarantee for an Oregon wind farm, the world’s largest, after project developers waged a vigorous lobbying campaign to bring the year-long application process to a conclusion.

Rod notes the gross disparity in the terms and conditions of loans offered to the two industries:

Just in case anyone wonders why the wind farm project accepted its loan guarantee while Constellation refused, the key is in understanding the terms and conditions.

For a project that would have produced 4,000 jobs for 4-5 years in Maryland, the companies involved were being told that they had to PAY the US government a non refundable fee of $880 MILLION dollars in order to BORROW $7.5 billion for a project where they would have to invest at least 20% of the project cost as their own equity, thus giving them at least $2.0 billion in reasons to make sure the project succeeded.

In contrast, the wind farm, which will produce 400 jobs for a relatively short period during construction, was able to obtain a $1.06 billion dollar loan with NO CREDIT SUBSIDY COST at all. The ARRA has provided all of the money required for the credit subsidy cost for politically defined “renewable” energy via a change in section 1705 of the Energy Policy Act. In addition, section 1603 of the ARRA provides a CASH GRANT in lieu of a production tax credit of 30% of the cost of the project via a check within 6 months after the project closes. The wind project thus gets a $1.06 billion loan with no closing cost and the sponsors have no equity in the project at all since they get their 20% down payment back with a 50% kicker less than a year after the project starts.

In a word, hype about a “nuclear renaissance” can be taken with a grain of salt, at least until the government gets its act together.  Meanwhile, the coal industry has reason to cheer.  New coal gasification plants are being built in the US even as we speak.  Among other things, they produce hydrogen, a long shot candidate as a non-polluting vehicle fuel to replace petroleum.  Ideas for getting the stuff out of coal without releasing tons of CO2 in the process remain sketchy.  Even more intriguingly, a firm is seriously looking into the possibility of building a coal liquefaction plant in Indiana.  Whether they decide the new plant is financially feasible or not, the fact that such a project has made it this far along in the planning process demonstrates how close coal has come to becoming a viable replacement for petroleum.  Given that the United States has over a quarter of the proved coal reserves in the entire world, and that those reserves are more than twice the size in terms of energy as the world’s remaining oil, that is a fact of no small significance.

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.

Whither Nuclear Power?

Carl at Chicago Boyz has some interesting insights on the future prospects for nuclear power.  According to his latest,

While there has been talk of a nuclear “renaissance” in the media for years, it is mostly hype. Existing nuclear plants in the US are running at a high capacity factor and making money for their owners, but there has been little tangible investment in new nuclear plants in the US.

One giant barrier to building new nuclear plants in the US is financing. We haven’t built a new nuclear plant in the US in decades so no one really knows what it will cost (and it depends on which design is chosen) but it is safe to assume that they will cost more than $8-10B each. Given that the entire market capitalization of most US electric utilities is smaller than this figure, as I discussed in this post in June of 2009, the idea that new nuclear plants would be built in large numbers was a pipe dream.

Read the whole article and some of the outstanding comments as well.  For example, one of the nuclear engineers working on the new starts in Texas writes,

First, let’s understand the nature of the loan guarantees. I’m a nuclear engineer who has been involved with the South Texas Project’s new reactor plans since near the beginning.

The loan guarantees do not guarantee against technical risk. They only cover subsequent GOVERNMENT actions. In the last batch, investors lost billions due to capricous government actions either to delay or prevent startup. Once the NRC issues a “combined operating license” (COL) per 10CFR52, the guarantee is to kick in so that no county government or state agency (or feds) can block construction and completion. When a number is given on the amount of loan guarantees, that is NOT the money that has to be spent. It is merely the exposure of default. Each applicant for a guarantee has to pay an upfront fee like an insurance premium to the government based on the expected risk of default. Basically, the federal government is acting as an insurance company, collecting premiums and covering specific risks.

THAT’S ALL WE NEED! Get government and politics out of the way and we can build and run new nuclear power plants in the country.

As you will see if you read the article, Carl is extremely pessimistic about the possibility of a nuclear “renaissance.”  Unless we can find a rational way to deal with lawyers, NIMBYs, and multiple layers of redundant government regulation, he’s probably right.  He summarizes the countries energy picture as follows:

- new drilling technologies are making natural gas in the US cheaper, which makes other types of investment (nuclear, coal) less financially feasible
- while many companies were potential investors in new nuclear plants, only one (Southern Company) was really feasible, and they seem to be first out of the gate (woe to their shareholders, however)
- NRG jumped out first with their Texas plant but it is looking like they are going to pull the plug on that under-capitalized effort
- the Federal government is continuing to be completely inept in their activities 1) unable to disburse stimulus funds, as predicted 2) no plan for waste after abandoning Yucca Mountain 3) can’t figure out what to do about “clean coal” projects after spending over $1B in Illinois and 7 years to boot
- not covered here is cap and trade, which needs its own post to do it justice. It looks like the recent change in the senate will stop this in its tracks, but legal efforts to stop the EPA from implementing new draconian rules continues

As Carl says, the key problem when it comes to nuclear startups is the “giant barrier” of cost.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but a suggestion by one of the other commenters seems to make sense:

One way of solving the quick problem is to use smaller units manufactured offsite. E.G. Babcox and Wilcox, proposes self contained reactors producing 100 — 250 MWe. The site would be prepared, the reactor could then manufactured in a factory and brought in by train or barge. Once at the site the reactor could be hooked up to the system and started up quickly.

There’s an excellent article on small nuclear reactors at the World Nuclear Association website.  Carl plans to take a closer look at the cost issue in a later post, but, if new conventional plants really cost “more than $8 to $10 billion each,” small reactors look very competitive.  After all, a complete Virginia class nuclear submarine only costs $1.8B.  Why not just build a whole fleet of dummy nuclear submarines, float them out beyond the territorial limit, and hook them up to the grid with extension cords?  It would knock out the lawyers and the NIMBYs at one blow!

Crunch Time for the National Ignition Facility

The news from California is encouraging.  In an article recently published in Science and summarized on the website of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), scientists working at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) report efficient coupling of energy from all 192 beams of the giant facility into a hohlraum target similar to the one that will be used later this year in the first attempts to achieve fusion ignition and “breakeven,” usually defined as more energy production from fusion than was carried in the laser beams used to hit the target.  The design energy of the NIF is 1.8 megajoules, and, according to the latest reports from Livermore, the threshold of one megajoule has already been achieved. 

In inertial confinement fusion, or ICF, the target, a thin, spherical shell containing a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two heavy isotopes of hydrogen, is first compressed and imploded to very high densities.  A series of converging shocks then create a “hot spot” in the center of the compressed material, setting off fusion reactions which release enough energy to set off a ”burn wave.”  This wave propagates out through the remaining fuel material, heating it to fusion energies as well.  The process is known as inertial confinement fusion because it takes place so fast (on the order of a nanosecond) that the material’s own inertia holds it in place long enough for the fusion reactions to occur.  There are two basic approaches; direct drive, in which the laser beams hit the fusion target directly, and indirect drive, the process that will be used in the upcoming Livermore ignition experiments, in which the beams are shot into a hollow can or “hohlraum,” producing x-rays when they hit the inner walls.  These x-rays then implode and ignite the target.  

A potential problem that must be overcome in ICF is known as laser plasma interactions (LPI).  These are parasitic interactions which can soak up laser energy and quench the fusion process.  According to the Livermore paper, special grids at the hohlraum entrance holes were used in the latest experiments, allowing the use of LPI to “tweak” the incoming beams, steering them to just the right spots.  This recent (and elegant) innovation allows the exploitation of a process that has always been considered a major headache in the past to actually improve the chances of achieving igntion.

The BBC and Spiegel both have articles about the latest experiments today, conflating the energy and military applications of the NIF as usual.  According to the Spiegel article, for example, it will be necessary for the lasers in a fusion reactor to hit the target ten times a second, whereas hours are necessary between shots at the NIF.  The reason, of course, is that the NIF was never designed as an energy project, but is being funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to conduct nuclear weapons experiments.  If ignition is achieved, the prospects for fusion energy will certainly be improved, but the prospects aren’t nearly as bright as the press releases from LLNL would imply.  It will still be necessary to overcome a great number of scientific and engineering hurdles before the process can ever become useful and economical as a source of energy.

I am not optimistic about the success of the upcoming experiments.  I suspect it will be too difficult to achieve the fine beam energy balance and symmetry that will be necessary to ignite the central “hot spot.”  It will take more than one converging shock to do the job.  Several will be necessary, moving inward through the target material at just the right speed to converge at a small spot at the center.  If they really pull it off, I will be surprised, but will be more than happy to eat crow.  A lot of very talented scientists have dedicated their careers to the quest for fusion, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for them. 

Even if these ignition experiments fail, it won’t mean the end for fusion by a long shot.  We know we can achieve the high fuel densities needed for inertial fusion, and there are other ways of creating the “hot spot” needed to achieve ignition, such as “fast ignitor.”  Other approaches to fusion keep showing up in the scientific literature, and I can’t help but think that, eventually, one of them will succeed.