Giant laser experiment powers up

[Albatross]

Text

The US has finished constructing a huge physics experiment aimed at recreating conditions at the heart of our Sun.
The US National Ignition Facility is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion, a process that could offer abundant clean energy.

The lab will kick-start the reaction by focusing 192 giant laser beams on a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel.

To work, it must show that more energy can be extracted from the process than is required to initiate it.

between this and ITER hopefully we`ll have fusion power in the next 20 years;many,many problems could be solved....

 

[Genx87]

I have a few dreams I wish are realized before my time on earth is done. Fusion power is one of them.

 

[frostedflakes]

Interesting, I thought most of the research on fusion was in Tokamak reactors, didn't realize we were this close to actually testing an another design on a large scale. ITER still has a long way to go, won't be complete for another decade, and even then it's estimated that it will be many decades more before commercial plants are online. And don't forget that fusion has been talked about for a long time, seems like it's always just a few decades away.

 

[jackschmittusa]

I hope it works, but I won't hold my breath. For 40 years I've been hearing that we are 10 years from a working fusion reactor.

 

[wwswimming]

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
I hope it works, but I won't hold my breath. For 40 years I've been hearing that we are 10 years from a working fusion reactor.

some years ago i had 2 summer jobs at Spectra Physics. they were doing some sub-contracting for Lawrence Livermore, and a friend of mine who was a physicist in that department gave me a huge bag of ball bearings.

they were using the steel spheres to grind down the rouge so they could deliver, for example, a 1 microinch surface finish instead of a 3 microinch.

but the problem with that batch of ball bearings is that they left impurities in the rouge which became embedded in the optics, which when you had terawatts of power going through them made them explode.

that was for the Shiva experiment, or one of those experiments.

so yeah, they've been working on that for a while.

hey, it creates jobs for engineers & physicists & programmers & IT People.

 

[gevorg]

Maybe after we conquer nanotechnology, fusion will be feasible.

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

Fusion is basically the holy grail of "green" tech

 

[Kadarin]

"Therefore, we shall call it the Alan Parsons Project..."

 

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: wwswimming

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
I hope it works, but I won't hold my breath. For 40 years I've been hearing that we are 10 years from a working fusion reactor.

some years ago i had 2 summer jobs at Spectra Physics. they were doing some sub-contracting for Lawrence Livermore, and a friend of mine who was a physicist in that department gave me a huge bag of ball bearings.

they were using the steel spheres to grind down the rouge so they could deliver, for example, a 1 microinch surface finish instead of a 3 microinch.

but the problem with that batch of ball bearings is that they left impurities in the rouge which became embedded in the optics, which when you had terawatts of power going through them made them explode.

that was for the Shiva experiment, or one of those experiments.

so yeah, they've been working on that for a while.

hey, it creates jobs for engineers & physicists & programmers & IT People.

Did anybody figure out the balls need to be made of the same stuff as the mirror? Or maybe gassify it and filter the dust of condensation.

 

[Moonbeam]

By the way, did anybody notice some progress has been reported recently in cold fusion, i read somewhere and then fell asleep and just now remembered? Now where did I see that?

Edit: Here we go.

 

[conehead433]

A Real Genius or two at work. Reaches for popcorn.

 

[CycloWizard]

Originally posted by: gevorg
Maybe after we conquer nanotechnology, fusion will be feasible.

 

[manowar821]

To those of you complaining about how they've been telling us we're just around the corner from viable fusion power: The only reason we haven't had fusion reactors powering our cities for YEARS already is because of FUNDING.

 

[MovingTarget]

:thumbsup:

Hopefully this will be successful.

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

Originally posted by: manowar821
To those of you complaining about how they've been telling us we're just around the corner from viable fusion power: The only reason we haven't had fusion reactors powering our cities for YEARS already is because of FUNDING.

Not really. It's more of a technology issue. Despite the billions we are putting towards ITER there is still a lot of theory involved. Plasma containment has been and still remains the problem; a problem that won't necessarily be solved by throwing money at it.

 

[Cogman]

The problem with fusion, as I recall, is that to have a fusion reactor you basically have to have a structure that can contain a fission explosion. (or at least the heat created from a fission explosion). Fusion doesn't exactly happen easily, it needs some extreme temperatures.

 

[Modelworks]

The problem with fusion is that they cannot leave the reactor running long enough to make it output more energy than they put into the reactor. The process emits particles that start to destroy the walls of the reactor so they can only run it for very short periods of time.

 

[soccerballtux]

apparently there's a lot of problems with fusion that we won't solve any time soon; I used to think it was the be all end all but fission is much more promising and affordable and will remain so for quite some time. The waste isn't a problem if we just reprocess. France does it.

 

[Atreus21]

Wasn't there also recently a breakthrough in cold fusion?

 

[Atreus21]

repeat.

 

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: Atreus21
Wasn't there also recently a breakthrough in cold fusion?

Geez, read the thread much?