Has Physicits Crack The Fusion Mystery

Plasma chamber: This experimental fusion reactor at MIT could test the new theory.
Mike Garrett, MIT

Physicists Crack Fusion Mystery -- Technology Review

A new theory might help researchers double the power of fusion reactors.

One reason it's taking decades to develop fusion reactors that can generate electricity is that physicists don't completely understand what's going on in the high-temperature plasma inside a reactor. Under certain conditions, the plasma—which is where fusion reactions take place—disappears in under a millisecond.

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My Comment: Faster please.

Is Nuclear Fusion Possible?

A prototype of the nuclear fusion system that relies on coils and compressing magnetic fields to produce energy. CREDIT: Derek Lamppa

Nuclear Fusion Is A Real Possibility, New Models Suggest -- Live Science

If new computer simulations pan out in the real world, nuclear fusion, the power source that makes stars shine, may be a practical possibility here on Earth, scientists say.

Simulations at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico revealed a fusion reactor that surpasses the "break-even" point of energy input versus energy output, indicating a self-sustaining fusion reaction. (This doesn't break any laws of physics for the same reason that starting a fire with a match doesn't).

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My Comment: Faster please.

Is This The Year of Cold Fusion?

2012: The Year of Cold Fusion? -- Forbes

Well, there goes 2011, a year that was, to say the least, a mixed bag.

In the tech world it has been an interesting year. The Large Hadron Collider has, so far, failed to find evidence of the Higgs Boson (boo!) but at least it didn’t, as some people had feared, create a black hole that swallowed the earth (hooray!). Biological research produced promising results regarding antiviral drugs that may cure the common cold (hooray!) but a cure for cancer and HIV stills seems a long way away (boo!).

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My Comment: Unfortunately .... we are still a long way off.

World's Most Powerful Laser To Trigger Fusion Reaction This Year

From The Telegraph:

A pivotal step in the march towards fusion power, the ''holy grail'' of sustainable clean energy, could be taken this year.

Scientists in the US are preparing for the dramatic moment when the world's most powerful laser unleashes the nuclear force that lights up the sun and achieves ''ignition''.

At that moment, 192 laser beams housed in a building the size of three football pitches will focus on a target the size of a peppercorn to trigger a self-sustaining fusion reaction.

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Scientists Set For Nuclear Fusion Fuel Switch-On

From The Independent:

A pivotal step in the march towards fusion power, the "Holy Grail" of sustainable clean energy, could be taken this year.

Scientists in the US are preparing for the dramatic moment when the world's most powerful laser unleashes the nuclear force that lights up the Sun and achieves "ignition".

At that moment, 192 laser beams housed in a building the size of three football pitches will focus on a target the size of a peppercorn to trigger a self-sustaining fusion reaction.

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Levitating Magnet May Yield New Approach To Clean Energy

The Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX) reactor is housed inside a 16-foot-diameter steel structure in a building on the MIT campus that also houses MIT’s other fusion reactor, a tokamak called Alcator C-mod. (Credit: Photo courtesy of the LDX team, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 30, 2010) — A new experiment that reproduces the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets has yielded its first significant results. The findings confirm that its unique approach has some potential to be developed as a new way of creating a power-producing plant based on nuclear fusion -- the process that generates the sun's prodigious output of energy.

Fusion has been a cherished goal of physicists and energy researchers for more than 50 years. That's because it offers the possibility of nearly endless supplies of energy with no carbon emissions and far less radioactive waste than that produced by today's nuclear plants, which are based on fission, the splitting of atoms (the opposite of fusion, which involves fusing two atoms together). But developing a fusion reactor that produces a net output of energy has proved to be more challenging than initially thought.

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Experiments Meet Requirements For Fusion Ignition; New Physics Effect Achieves Symmetrical Target Compression

This artist's rendering shows a NIF target pellet (the white ball) inside a hohlraum capsule with laser beams entering through openings on either end. The beams compress and heat the target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 29, 2010) — The first experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF) have demonstrated a unique physics effect that bodes well for NIF's success in generating a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction.

In inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments on NIF, the energy of 192 powerful laser beams is fired into a pencil-eraser-sized cylinder called a hohlraum, which contains a tiny spherical target filled with deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen. Rocket-like compression of the fuel capsule forces the hydrogen nuclei to combine, or fuse, releasing many times more energy than the laser energy that was required to spark the reaction. Fusion energy is what powers the sun and stars.

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Fusion Power A Step Closer After Giant Laser Blast

A pointed "target positioner" (right) in the National Ignition Facility's target chamber held the pencil-eraser-size cylinder used in the fusion experiment. Photograph courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy

From The National Geographic:

Nuclear fusion plant possible within a decade, physicist says.

Using the most powerful laser system ever built, scientists have brought us one step closer to nuclear fusion power, a new study says.

The same process that powers our sun and other stars, nuclear fusion has the potential to be an efficient, carbon-free energy source—with none of the radioactive waste associated with the nuclear fission method used in current nuclear plants.

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Levitating Magnet Brings Nuclear Fusion Closer To Reality

The Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX) reactor is housed inside a 16-foot-diameter steel structure in a building on the MIT campus that also houses MIT’s other fusion reactor, a tokamak called Alcator C-mod. Credit: LDX team

From Live Science:

Physicists may be one step closer to achieving a form of clean energy known as nuclear fusion, which is what happens deep inside the cores of stars.

A recent experiment with a giant levitating magnet was able to coax matter in the lab to extremely high densities — a necessary step for nuclear fusion.

When the density is high enough, atomic nuclei — the protons and neutrons of atoms — literally fuse together, creating a heavier element. And if the conditions are right that fusion can release loads of energy.

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Nuclear Fusion Is The Future

James Hansen Photo: PA

From The Telegraph:

The Copenhagen Summit: Could a new nuclear fusion process allow us to escape the whole carbon trap?

'It's time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here." With that warning to the US Congress in June 1988, the Nasa climatologist James Hansen focused the minds of politicians on a danger that, until then, many of them had treated with scepticism.

A few days later came the first international conference to discuss man's impact on the Earth's climate, in Toronto, to which I had been packed off by The Daily Telegraph's then editor. I watched as scientists tried to persuade government representatives, legal experts, economists and industrialists that the time had come to take the threat seriously.

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Will Fusion Fade ... Or Finally Flare Up?

May 31: A video from the National Ignition Facility explains what the super-laser experiment is designed to do. NIF / LLNL

From MSNBC:

The hot, medium and cool prospects for harnessing ultimate star power.

Is nuclear fusion the ultimate energy source, or the ultimate pipe dream? Millions upon millions of dollars are being spent to find out which answer is the right one. For some technologies, the answer could come sooner than later. For others, it may be later rather than sooner.

The easiest way to access fusion power is to go outside on a sunny day: Nuclear fusion is the reaction that powers the sun, by crushing hydrogen atoms into helium atoms and converting the small blips of extra mass into energy. Hydrogen bombs, tested by the world's armies but never used on the battlefield, do the same thing.

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High-performance Plasmas May Make Reliable, Efficient Fusion Power A Reality

Artist's rendering of a tokamak plasma. The plasma is confined by the combination of strong magnetic field in the toroidal direction (around the hole in the "donut" as shown by the black arrow) generated by external coils (not shown) and the magnetic field from a large current flowing in the same toroidal direction. The plasma is held inside a sealed metal structure that is evacuated and lined with special material to keep the plasma pure and handle the heat exhaust. (Credit: Image courtesy of American Physical Society)

From The Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 12, 2009) — In the quest to produce nuclear fusion energy, researchers from the DIII-D National Fusion Facility have recently confirmed long-standing theoretical predictions that performance, efficiency and reliability are simultaneously obtained in tokamaks, the leading magnetic confinement fusion device, operating at their performance limits. Experiments designed to test these predictions have successfully demonstrated the interaction of these conditions.

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The Fusion Illusion -- A Commentary

From The New Atlantis:

To hear President Barack Obama tell it, we need to fundamentally overhaul the way we produce, deliver, and consume energy. After the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in June, the president said it would “spark a clean energy transformation in our economy. It will spur the development of low carbon sources of energy—everything from wind, solar, and geothermal power to safer nuclear energy and cleaner coal. It will spur new energy savings, like the efficient windows and other materials that reduce heating costs in the winter and cooling costs in the summer. And most importantly, it will make possible the creation of millions of new jobs.” He repeated those sentiments before the G-8 in Italy several weeks later when he stated, “One of my highest priorities as president is to drive a clean energy transformation of our economy.”

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Building A Second Sun: Take $10 Billion, Add Coconuts

From New Scientist:

THE balmy south of France has always been a magnet for sun worshippers. So it is perhaps fitting that here, not far from the Côte d'Azur, an international team of researchers is building a machine to recreate the sun. It will take tens of thousands of tonnes of steel and concrete, plus a whole host of more unusual materials: beryllium, niobium, titanium and tungsten; frigid liquid nitrogen and helium. Oh, and a supply of burnt coconuts.

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Igniting Fusion

Ground zero: A circular access port affords a glimpse into a 10-meter-diameter target chamber where, in the coming months, powerful lasers will be fired with the goal of setting off small thermonuclear explosions. Credit: Jason Madara

From Technology Review:

Researchers at a California National Lab will soon attempt to start self-sustaining fusion reactions using the world's largest lasers. If it works, it could be a first step on the road to abundant fusion power.

It's late April and workers are assembling the last parts of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a sprawling building covering the area of three football fields at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA. Dressed in hard hats, hair nets, lab coats, and latex gloves, they have gathered at the target chamber, a sphere 10 meters in diameter and bristling with 48 burnished-aluminum ducts that together house 192 separate laser beams. Each beam on its own is one of the world's most powerful, says Bruno Van Wonterghem, operations manager at NIF. Together they deliver 50 to 60 times the energy of any other laser.

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Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun

This is the view inside the doughnut-shaped JET reactor, the largest fusion device on Earth. During a reaction, nuclear fuels are held away from the walls by electromagnets, and reach temperatures more than ten times hotter than the core of the sun

From The Daily Mail:

The JET fusion reactor looks more like the lair of a Bond villain than an extraordinary British experiment that might save the world.

The highly compacted core of the sun is a very hot place indeed.

In the star's burning heart, hydrogen atoms collide at immense speeds. This welds them together and turns them into helium atoms, which each release a burst of energy that escapes into the solar system as light. It is a nuclear furnace, responsible for fuelling all life on Earth, that consumes a lot of hydrogen (600 million tons every second) at very high temperatures (over 15 million degrees C). As such, it's the second-hottest place in the solar system.

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An Update On What’s Happening With Fusion Research.

From Classical Values:

Nature News is reporting that the ITER fusion experiment is in big trouble. Very big trouble. It is way over budget, way behind time, and the experimental efforts are being scaled back.

ITER -- a multi-billion-euro international experiment boldly aiming to prove atomic fusion as a power source -- will initially be far less ambitious than physicists had hoped, Nature has learned.

Faced with ballooning costs and growing delays, ITER's seven partners are likely to build only a skeletal version of the device at first. The project's governing council said last June that the machine should turn on in 2018; the stripped-down version could allow that to happen (see Nature 453, 829; 2008). But the first experiments capable of validating fusion for power would not come until the end of 2025, five years later than the date set when the ITER agreement was signed in 2006.

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California Fires Up Laser Fusion Machine

From The Guardian:

Success at National Ignition Facility could pave the way for commercial laser fusion power stations and provide a solution to world energy crisis

A tentative first step towards an era of clean, almost limitless energy will take place today with the opening of a giant facility designed to recreate the power of the stars in an oversized warehouse in California.

The $3.5bn National Ignition Facility (NIF) sits in a 10-storey building covering three football fields and will harness the power of lasers to turn tiny pellets of hydrogen into thermonuclear energy.

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Powerful Ideas: Fusing Atoms Just Might Work

Artist's rendering of a NIF target pellet being struck by multiple laser beams, which inside compress and heat the target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Department of Energy

From Live Science:

This occasional series looks at powerful ideas — some existing, some futuristic — for fueling and electrifying modern life.

Solar power captures sunlight to create renewable energy, but recreating the sun on Earth holds even greater energy potential. Nuclear fusion — the power source inside the sun — will be attempted in new and soon-to-be-built facilities around the world.

"Fusion is a carbon-free and a virtually limitless supply of energy," said Ed Moses, project manager for the Department of Energy's recently commissioned National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, Calif.

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World's Highest-Energy Laser To Create Mini-Stars (Pictures)

To produce the temperatures and pressures needed for fusion, the facility will aim all of its 192 laser beams simultaneously on a hydrogen target. This all happens inside this 10-metre-diameter chamber, which weighs 130 tonnes. The sphere is made up of 18 aluminium sections that are each 10 centimetres thick.The square openings are for the lasers, and the round openings are used to accommodate nearly 100 pieces of diagnostic equipment. (Image: Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Department of Energy)

From New Scientist:

In early April, the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, was given the green light to begin a series of experiments. Researchers hope they will culminate in the first ever self-sustained, stable fusion reaction that will release many times more energy than the energy used to trigger the reaction. The stadium-sized facility will train 192 laser beams on tiny targets, producing pressures and temperatures that could illuminate the interiors of giant planets and pave the way to the first fusion reactors.

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