{"id":3183,"date":"2012-07-24T18:03:29","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T23:03:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=3183"},"modified":"2012-07-24T18:03:58","modified_gmt":"2012-07-24T23:03:58","slug":"the-nif-lots-of-power-and-energy-but-no-ignition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2012\/07\/24\/nuclear-weapons\/the-nif-lots-of-power-and-energy-but-no-ignition\/","title":{"rendered":"The NIF: Lots of Power and Energy, but No Ignition"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to a recent press release <\/a>from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, the 192-beam National Ignition Facility (NIF) fired\u00a0a 500 terawatt\u00a0shot on July 5.\u00a0 The world record power followed a world record energy shot of 1.89 Megajoules on July 3.\u00a0 As news, this doesn\u2019t rise above the \u201cmeh\u201d category.\u00a0 A shot at the NIF\u2019s design energy of 1.8 Megajoules was already recorded back in March.\u00a0 It\u2019s quite true that, as NIF Director Ed Moses puts it, “NIF is becoming everything scientists planned when it was conceived over two decades ago.\u201d\u00a0 The NIF is a remarkable achievement in its own right, capable of achieving energies 50 times greater than any other laboratory facility, with pulses shaped and timed to pinpoint precision.\u00a0 The NIF team in general and Ed Moses in particular deserve great credit, and the nation\u2019s gratitude, for that achievement after turning things around following a very shaky start.<\/p>\n

The problem is that, while the facility works as well, and even better than planned, the goal it was built to achieve continues to elude us.\u00a0 As its name implies, the news everyone is actually waiting for is the announcement that ignition (defined as fusion energy out greater than laser energy in) has been achieved.\u00a0 As noted in the article, Moses said back in March that \u201cWe have all the capability to make it happen in fiscal year 2012.\u201d\u00a0 At this point, he probably wishes his tone had been a mite less optimistic.\u00a0 To reach their goal in the two months remaining, the NIF team will need to pull a rabbit out of their collective hat.\u00a0 A slim chance remains.\u00a0 Apparently the NIF\u2019s 192 laser beams were aimed at a real ignition target with a depleted uranium capsule and deuterium-tritium fuel on July 5, and not a surrogate.\u00a0 The data from that shot may prove to be a great deal more interesting than the 500 terawatt power announcement.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Russians are apparently forging ahead with plans for their own superlaser<\/a>, to be capable of a whopping 2.8 Megajoules, and the Chinese are planning another about half that size, to be operational at about the same time (around 2020).\u00a0 That, in itself, speaks volumes about the real significance of ignition.\u00a0 It may be huge for the fusion energy community, but not that great as far as the weaponeers who actually fund these projects are concerned.\u00a0 Many weapons designers at LLNL and Los Alamos were notably unenthusiastic about ignition when NIF was still in the planning stages.\u00a0 What attracted them more was the extreme conditions, approaching those in an exploding nuke, that could be achieved by the lasers without ignition.\u00a0 They thought, not without reason, that it would be much easier to collect useful information from such experiments than from chaotic ignition plasmas.\u00a0 Apparently the Russian bomb designers agree.\u00a0 They announced their laser project back in February even though LLNL\u2019s difficulties in achieving ignition were well known at the time.<\/p>\n

The same can be said of some of the academic types in the NIF \u201cuser community.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s noteworthy that two of them, Rick Petrasso of MIT and Ray Jeanloz of UC Berkeley, whose enthusiastic comments about the 500 terawatt shot where quoted in the latest press release, are both key players in the field of high energy density physics.\u00a0 Ignition isn\u2019t a sine qua non<\/em> for them either.\u00a0 They will be able to harvest scores of papers from the NIF whether it achieves ignition or not.<\/p>\n

The greatest liability of not achieving early ignition may be the evaporation of political support for the NIF.\u00a0 The natives are already becoming restless.\u00a0 As noted in the Livermore Independent<\/a>,<\/p>\n

In early May, sounding as if it were discussing an engineering project rather than advanced research, the House Appropriations Committee worried that NIF\u2019s \u201cconsiderable costs will not have been warranted\u201d if it does not achieve ignition by September 30, the end of the federal fiscal year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and,<\/p>\n

Later that month, in a tone that seemed to demand that research breakthroughs take place according to schedule, the House Armed Services Committee recommended that NIF\u2019s ignition research budget for next year be cut by $30 million from the requested $84 million budget unless NIF achieves ignition by September 30.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Funding cuts at this point, after we have come so far, and are so close to the goal, would be short-sighted indeed.\u00a0 One must hope that a Congress capable of squandering billions on white elephants like the International Space Station will not become penny-wise and pound-foolish about funding a project that really matters.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to a recent press release from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, the 192-beam National Ignition Facility (NIF) fired\u00a0a 500 terawatt\u00a0shot on July 5.\u00a0 The world record power followed a world record energy shot of 1.89 Megajoules on July 3.\u00a0 As news, this doesn\u2019t rise above the \u201cmeh\u201d category.\u00a0 A shot at the … Continue reading “The NIF: Lots of Power and Energy, but No Ignition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[37,78,22,10,41],"tags":[121],"class_list":["post-3183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-fusion-energy","category-inertial-confinement-fusion","category-nuclear-weapons","category-science","tag-fusion-energy-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-Pl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3183"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3185,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183\/revisions\/3185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}