Uncle Sam plows $42M into nurturing fusion breakthrough The US Department of Energy has released $42 million in seed funding to help research the nuclear fusion techniques successfully demonstrated at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory last year. The institution claimed a world-first in December 2022 when it produced 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy as output, exceeding the 2. …
Thunderf00t already “busted” the idea that this research has anything to do with power generation. It’s actually nothing but weapons research.
(For example: to “harness” the heat energy you’d have to incorporate a steam generator, or some kind of thermal capture apparatus, and they don’t have the room in between all those super laser beams.)
Sabine Hossenfelder goes further into competing technologies, but even the most likely candidates use severely esoteric, sketchy techniques. Probably all 100% of this research space isn’t being commercialized in the next 50 years…
(It’s a wonder Musk isn’t mixed up in this too, if he were then we’d know for certain it’s just an elaborate scam.)
-- Why go through the bother when one is still trying to get the process to work in the first place? --
Because if you don't design for it to start with then once you have the fusion system working you have to redesign. I seem to recall somewhere (could be in IT) that its ALWAYS more expensive and difficult to modify the design than get it right first.
We’ve had fusion bombs for decades. What do you think an H-bomb is? The problem is the weapons tech isn’t very useful for commercial use. Detonating a fission bomb to start your fusion reactor tends to have the unfortunate side effect of obliterating your power plant, entire staff and anything else within a 20km radius.
It would be nice to have a controlled fusion reaction that energy can be transferred from to generate electricity. This research is a tiny part of that plan. Tiny, but important.
There is such a concept as a hybrid fusion-fission reactor. Fusion reactors can't produce a lot of heat on their own (the reaction happens surrounded by vacuum for a start..) But they are very good neutron sources, and it is trivially easy (unlike fission reactors) to turn them off.
Thus, a fusor can be used as a neutron source to activate sub-critical Uranium. Basically the fusion becomes an on/off switch for the fission reaction, and because it is low-enriched, there isn't so much of a weapons proliferation issue.
Fusion as an energy source on its own though, is likely to be a dead end. May I remind you that the only practical fusion reactor that we have, that big one up there, has approximately the same power density as a compost heap. It's just such a mind bogglingly enormous compost heap that it glows. That's why when we try to do fusion on earth, to get a useful power out if it, we need even higher pressures and temperatures than the sun
How about using "Heavy Oil"?
Using a similar concept, use of "heavy oil" (i.e. oil using deuterium and tritium rather than mono-atomic hydrogen) formed into droplets by an "ink jet" type of mechanism might accomplish the same thing but for steady state operation. Just sayin'. But gummint funding does not seek practical+inexpensive solutions...
[first scientist that acknowledges my brilliance gets to make a working fusion reactor with 'heavy oil' for fuel)
The target is fuel contained within a hohlraum. During ICF, the inner walls of the hohlraum are hit with the laser, which then generates X-rays that crush the fuel itself. Potentially, laminar flow could be used to encapsulate the fuel within the driving material but it doesn't seem like it would be terribly easy to then form it into a hollow tube which doesn't collapse (unless a third liquid could be injected to hold the shape, though this would have to not interact with any of the involved radiation).
Last time I looked, LLNL's NIF hohlraums cost $300,000 each.
To get 1GW of thermal output that way they'd need to zap dozens to hundreds per second. It's not cost-effective for power production: it's barely even a pretext.
What NIF is good for is examining plasma dynamics at very high temperatures and pressures -- exactly the conditions you'd get in the microseconds following an H-bomb detonation.
The USA is forbidden from testing H-bombs by the Comprehensive Text Ban Treaty; NIF gives them a tool to research weapons designs without breaking the ban.
Final nugget of truthiness: LLNL is a nuclear weapons research lab ...
The USA is forbidden from testing H-bombs by the Comprehensive Text Ban Treaty; NIF gives them a tool to research weapons designs without breaking the ban.
That Treaty seems to be falling apart with the rumors that Russia might be about to resume nuclear testing.
Final nugget of truthiness: LLNL is a nuclear weapons research lab ...
Amongst other things. It also does civil nuclear research, although it may also be working on Scorpion Stare. Luckily it's probably going to be a while before that can be concealened in a 'ULEZ' camera. People don't realise that really stands for 'Ultra Lethal Eradicator of Zombies'. But LLNL is also collaborating on Da Big Bomb! Or a cunning plan to wrap a fusion reactor in a blanket of fissile material and use the fast neutrons to generate heat in that fission blanket. Then add steam pipes, turbines and assuming the blanket can't go critical, it won't make a very large and dirty crater.
But the biggest challenge to nuclear research is overcoming garbage like this from the article-
...but it was unlikely to come online in the time frame necessary to help the fight against climate change
If we stop research into reliable, large-scale clean energy, it won't help us stop the next Ice Age. Climate change is inevitable, it's by no means an emergency and anti-nuclear neo-luddites shouldn't be deciding energy policy. Especially given the subsidies and costs the US is currently committed to in the ironically named 'Inflation Reduction Act'.
Slow climate change is inevitable, rapid climate change is an emergency.
There's nothing rapid about it. There is a lot of idiocy however-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67654008
Parts of the UK could become home to mosquitoes capable of spreading dengue fever, chikungunya and zika virus by the 2040s and 2050s, health officials warn.
The UK Health Security Agency's report is based on a worst-case scenario, which would see high emissions and temperatures rising by 4C by 2100
Except 4C is considered unlikely. And Londoners used to be afflicted by the ague, aka malaria until we drained the swamps. Now, in our infinite wisdom, we're restoring wetlands around London and bringing those mosquito breeding grounds back. Our politicians and environmentalists are so smart!
They're not doing research with anything portable or practical so it's not weapons lab. If the results are used for weapons tech, it would come later. I'm not sure it would really be needed, though. A lot of international disputes come down to the US wanting cheaper energy or cheaper ways to process things that require energy.
I'm thinking more in terms of inertial confinement and the idea that oil is dense, contains carbon for carbon cycle, and if hit on all sides by simultaneous lasers, would form a oressure wave to compress itself before vaporizing. THAT, and it would be sustainable, passing the droplets through the "laser guantlet" into a reaction chamber. Probably would not need a shell.
The same the world over. In Britain, our civilian administrators of defence outnumber our army, our weapons procurement is always many years late, costs billions over budget, and delivers an inferior product.
If the major world powers spent a tenth of the money wasted on weapons development on proper energy related R&D, we'd have solved the energy problem decades ago.
"Making the military cheaper........"
I believe that making the military cheaper is a good thing. Less money, smaller military. I can't live with a mindset that says "Can't we all just get along?" because as soon as I think that, a country such as Venezuela thinks it would be a good idea to annex their neighbor to subsume their reserves of fossil fuels.
No we wouldn't, because Oil and Gas has spent hundreds of millions if not billions lobbying against anything that could upset their little cash-cow.
Even now, they're trying to redirect the good will of hydrogen fuel to their fake-hydrogen cracked from oil, which releases all the carbon that burning the fool stuff does in the first place. They're putting up big carbon capture facilities in Alberta to "deal with the problem", but the problem is mother nature always wins, so those capture chambers will leak sooner or later and the effort will have been for naught.
"SLS rocket boosters burn money faster than if they were burning actual cash. "
Adjusted for inflation, the Apollo program was as costly. The point isn't to turn a profit, but to return an increase in knowledge. Space programs tend to pay back in spades just by trying to do something difficult. NASA Tech Briefs used to publish and annual compendium of technology spin-offs and I still have those publications. It's everything from metallurgy to sanitation to medical devices.
I won't disagree that there is a lot of political waste and "good ol' boyism" going on, but anytime a government is involved in something, that happens. This is why the US can't have nice things. Turkey has high speed rail, for pete's sake. The US (well, California) thought to do one without much planning and it tripled in cost while now planning to deliver 1/3 the distance between two points nobody has a keen interest in traveling between at high speed. It's worked out so well for the politicians and their friends that plans are being laid (again) to have a route again between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. HSR, of course, when something as well matured at the Intercity 125 would be cheaper, faster to construct and more likely to get completed.
The investment of $42 million by Uncle Sam in advancing fusion breakthroughs is a significant step in the pursuit of cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. While the experimental milestone is promising, it's essential to acknowledge that further work is needed before it can be deemed a viable candidate for power generation. Continued support for research and development in fusion technology is crucial for addressing future energy challenges and mitigating environmental impacts. The commitment to advancing such breakthroughs aligns with the global goal of transitioning towards cleaner and more efficient energy solutions.
http:/medizin-gesundheit-lexikon.com
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