Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

[Donger]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...nuclear-fusion

Researchers at a laboratory in California say they've had a breakthrough in producing fusion power with a giant laser. The success comes after years of struggling to get the laser to work and is another step in the decades-long quest for fusion energy.

Omar Hurricane, a researcher at , says that for the first time, they've produced significant amounts of fusion by zapping a target with their laser. "We've gotten more energy out of the fusion fuel than we put into the fusion fuel," he says.

Strictly speaking, while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser's energy ever reached the fuel. Useful levels of fusion are still a long way off. "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser," says , the head of a huge fusion experiment in the U.K. called the , or JET.

The laser is known as the , or NIF. Constructed at a cost of more than $3 billion, it consists of 192 beams that take up the length of three football fields. For a brief moment, the beams can focus 500 trillion watts of power — more power than is being used in that same time across the entire United States — onto a target about the width of a No. 2 pencil.

The goal is fusion: a process where hydrogen atoms are squeezed together to make helium atoms. When that happens, a lot of energy comes out. It could mean the answer to the world's energy problems, but fusion is really, really hard to do. Hurricane says that each time they try, it feels like they're taking a test.

"Of course you want to score real well, you think you've learned the material, but you just have to see how you do," he says.

Over the past few years, For all its power, it just couldn't get the hydrogen to fuse, and researchers didn't know why. The failures have led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars. In 2012, the government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: .

But the fusion experiments continued, and Hurricane says researchers now understand why their original strategy wasn't working. In the journal Nature, that they've finally figured out how to squeeze the fuel with the lasers. By doing a lot of squeezing right at the start, they were able to keep the fuel from churning and squirting out. The lasers squeezed evenly and the hydrogen turned into helium.

The new technique can't reach "ignition," which is the point at which the hydrogen fusion feeds on itself to make more. Even so, JET's Cowley says, this is still a big moment for NIF.

"I think it's still a very important step forward, they reached fusion conditions, they made some fusion happen, and that's not been done before [with a laser]," he says.

Hurricane says no one knows for sure whether NIF can really reach the point of ignition. "It's not up to me; it's up to Mother Nature," he says. "But we're certainly going to try."

[Simply Red]

Originally Posted by Donger

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...nuclear-fusion

Researchers at a laboratory in California say they've had a breakthrough in producing fusion power with a giant laser. The success comes after years of struggling to get the laser to work and is another step in the decades-long quest for fusion energy.

Omar Hurricane, a researcher at , says that for the first time, they've produced significant amounts of fusion by zapping a target with their laser. "We've gotten more energy out of the fusion fuel than we put into the fusion fuel," he says.

Strictly speaking, while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser's energy ever reached the fuel. Useful levels of fusion are still a long way off. "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser," says , the head of a huge fusion experiment in the U.K. called the , or JET.

The laser is known as the , or NIF. Constructed at a cost of more than $3 billion, it consists of 192 beams that take up the length of three football fields. For a brief moment, the beams can focus 500 trillion watts of power — more power than is being used in that same time across the entire United States — onto a target about the width of a No. 2 pencil.

The goal is fusion: a process where hydrogen atoms are squeezed together to make helium atoms. When that happens, a lot of energy comes out. It could mean the answer to the world's energy problems, but fusion is really, really hard to do. Hurricane says that each time they try, it feels like they're taking a test.

"Of course you want to score real well, you think you've learned the material, but you just have to see how you do," he says.

Over the past few years, For all its power, it just couldn't get the hydrogen to fuse, and researchers didn't know why. The failures have led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars. In 2012, the government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: .

But the fusion experiments continued, and Hurricane says researchers now understand why their original strategy wasn't working. In the journal Nature, that they've finally figured out how to squeeze the fuel with the lasers. By doing a lot of squeezing right at the start, they were able to keep the fuel from churning and squirting out. The lasers squeezed evenly and the hydrogen turned into helium.

The new technique can't reach "ignition," which is the point at which the hydrogen fusion feeds on itself to make more. Even so, JET's Cowley says, this is still a big moment for NIF.

"I think it's still a very important step forward, they reached fusion conditions, they made some fusion happen, and that's not been done before [with a laser]," he says.

Hurricane says no one knows for sure whether NIF can really reach the point of ignition. "It's not up to me; it's up to Mother Nature," he says. "But we're certainly going to try."

Georgia has had this technology for years.

[Donger]

Originally Posted by Fish

Donger, when you copied and pasted, you accidentally redacted a bunch of text that was formatted as links. Made it kinda funny to read....

I know, sorry, been meaning to clean it up. A better version, rather than do that:

A milestone has been reached in the 60-year struggle to harness the nuclear reactions that power the Sun in an experiment that could lead to a way of producing an unlimited source of clean and sustainable energy in the form of nuclear fusion.



Scientists in California said on Wednesday night that they have for the first time managed to release more energy from their nuclear fusion experiment than they put into it, which marks a critical threshold in eventually achieving the goal of a self-sustaining nuclear-fusion reaction.

Nuclear fusion uses a fuel source derived from water and produces none of the more dangerous and long-lasting isotopes, such as enriched uranium and plutonium, that result from conventional nuclear power plants, which rely on the fission or splitting of atoms rather than their fusion.

Researchers involved in the Nuclear Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said that they have used 192 laser beams to compress a tiny fuel pellet less than half the diameter of a human hair in such a way that it triggered the net release of energy by nuclear fusion.

The fuel, composed of the two hydrogen isotopes tritium and deuterium derived from water, was compressed together under enormous pressures and temperatures for less than a billionth of a second, but this was enough to see more energy coming out of the experiment than went into it.

“We are fusing deuterium and tritium, which are isotopes of water, in a way that gets them to run together at high enough speed to overcome their natural electrical repulsion to each other,” said Omar Hurricane of the Livermore laboratory.

“We are finally, by harnessing these reactions, getting more energy out of these reactions than we are putting into the deuterium-tritium fuel... We took a step back from what we tried before and in the process took a leap forward,” said Dr Hurricane, who led the NIF study published in the journal Nature.

There are currently two parallel approaches to nuclear fusion. One uses laser energy to compress fuel pellets -- like the NIF experiment -- and aims to keep the fuel in place by a process known as inertial confinement.

The other approach is to build a complex magnetic “bottle” to hold the hot, electrically charged plasma of the fuel in place. This magnetic confinement is the strategy of the Joint European Torus (JET) experiment in Culham, Oxfordshire, and the international ITER nuclear fusion plant under construction at Cadarache in southern France.

Both approaches aim to gain more energy than is put into the system, and ultimately to a critical stage called “ignition” when the reaction becomes self-sustaining, which would mean that fusion could be exploited practically in power plants as an unlimited source of clean energy.

The breakthrough at NIF was made possible by altering the laser pulses focusing on the fuel pellet in such a way that it led to the even compression of the capsule holding the deuterium and tritium, said Debbie Callahan, one of the researchers involved.

“We had to compress the capsule by 35 times. This is like saying that if you started with a basketball it would be like compressing it down to the size of a pea, but keeping the perfect spherical shape, which is very challenging,” Dr Callahan said.

Professor Steve Cowley, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, said that the two approaches to nuclear fusion are beginning to make significant headway after decades of painstakingly slow research.

“We have waited 60 years to get close to controlled fusion, and we are now close in both magnetic and inertial-confinement research. We must keep at it,” Professor Cowley said.

“The engineering milestone is when the whole plant produces more energy than it consumes – ITER, the successor to JET, will be the first experiment to do this. ITER is going slowly but progress is happening,” he said.

[KC_Connection]

[Fish]

Originally Posted by Grim

They're on the verge of losing funding for their project. They'll say anything to keep that funding. Seen it dozens of times.

If I read that they're able to document and reproduce their results, then I'll back off a bit. Until that time, I call BS.

They can't simply say anything and bullshit their way along. That's not how funding works.

[Beef Supreme]

Originally Posted by Fish

They can't simply say anything and bullshit their way along. That's not how funding works.

Jan Hendrik Schon would like word with you about that.

[Radar Chief]

Originally Posted by VAChief

Because...?

"Big Oil" won't let it?

[mr. tegu]

500 trillion watts of power? I wonder if they can plug into a standard wall outlet.

[Donger]

Originally Posted by Radar Chief

"Big Oil" won't let it?

Now, now... don't go there...

[Just Passin' By]

Originally Posted by Fish

They can't simply say anything and bullshit their way along. That's not how funding works.

It's been working for global warming for a hell of a long time.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by BigChiefTablet

Jan Hendrik Schon would like word with you about that.

Yes, that's a good example of what happens if you try and BS results.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by Just Passin' By

It's been working for global warming for a hell of a long time.

No.

[Just Passin' By]

Originally Posted by Fish

No.

Yes, absolutely

[mikey23545]

Originally Posted by Just Passin' By

It's been working for global warming for a hell of a long time.

That's different...that's a religion...