Giant Laser Experiment Powers Up

From BBC:

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.

Professor Mike Dunne, who leads a European venture that is also pursuing nuclear fusion with lasers, told BBC News that if NIF was successful, it would be a "seismic event".

Read more ....

The World's Biggest Laser Powers Up

Fusion central: 192 lasers will shoot through openings in this spherical chamber, focusing near the tip of the cone projecting from the right. A worker in a service module can be seen at the left. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Department of Energy

From Technology Review:

Now complete, the National Ignition Facility could soon create controlled fusion using lasers.

The most energetic laser system in the world, designed to produce nuclear fusion--the same reaction that powers the sun--is up and running. Within two to three years, scientists expect to be creating fusion reactions that release more energy than it takes to produce them. If they're successful, it will be the first time this has been done in a controlled way--in a lab rather than a nuclear bomb, that is--and could eventually lead to fusion power plants.

Read more ....

New Hope For Controversial 'Cold Fusion' Power Source

An experimental "cold fusion" device produced this pattern of "triple tracks" (shown at right), which scientists say is caused by high-energy nuclear particles resulting from a nuclear reaction. Credit: Pamela Mosier-Boss, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR)

From Live Science:

If cold fusion can be made to work, it could power the world cheaply on a virtually limitless supply of seawater. But scientists don't even know if it's possible.

Now a new study has produced evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the new name for the controversial process labeled "cold fusion" two decades ago.

Fusion is the energy source of the sun and other stars. It occurs when atomic nuclei are combined. Today's nuclear plants employ fission, the splitting of nuclei. Scientists have been striving for decades to tap fusion to produce electricity from an abundant fuel called deuterium that can be extracted from seawater. Fusion would not come with the radioactive byproducts of fission.

Read more ....

General Fusion Research Update

From The Next Big Future:

General Fusion is using the MTF (Magnetized Target Fusion) approach but with a new, patent pending and cost-effective compression system to collapse the plasma. They describe the injectors at the top and bottom of the above image in the new research paper. The goal is to build small fusion reactors that can produce around 100 megawatts of power. The company claims plants would cost around US$50 million, allowing them to generate electricity at about four cents per kilowatt hour.

If there are no funding delays, then in 2010-2011 for completion of the tests and work for an almost full scale version (2 meters instead of 3 meter diameter).

Read more ....

Fusion Energy: Europe's New Holy Grail? (Part 2)

In the fusion process Deuterium and Tritium (isotopes of Hydrogen) are compressed to create Helium and an energetic particle or neutron. This neutron can be captured to produce energy by heating water to drive a steam turbine. But producing more energy than is used in the process remains the key to a real breakthrough.

From TCS Daily:

Not all senior physicists believe an early breakthrough in fusion energy is either possible or, given the prevailing global economic conditions, even viable. And when Professor Dunne, director of the European HIPER project gives us an analogy for "perspective," it is not hard to see why. Dunne puts it this way:

"The laser is 10,000 times the power of the entire UK National Grid. And then you're going to focus that down onto a spot that's 10 to 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The pressure is equivalent to 10 Nimitz class aircraft carriers sitting on your thumb. Some pretty crazy things are going to happen."

Read more ....

Fusion Energy: Europe's New Holy Grail? (Part 1)

From TCS Daily:

A long-standing joke among physicists is that a breakthrough in pursuit of the holy grail of fusion energy is 'always just around the corner'. In October scientists in Europe formally launched the latest fusion energy project the High Power Laser Energy facility (HIPER). Due to be built and operational by 2020, HIPER represents phase 2 of Europe's twin-track approach; a phase that will involve constructing the world's largest laser, a laser the size of a football stadium.

But while HIPER's lead scientist believes a fusion energy breakthrough is just years away, some senior physicists are not only sceptical but question the whole need for fusion energy at all.

Read more ....

Fusion Projects Hang In Limbo

ORNL / ITER
This rendering shows the proposed ITER fusion
reactor. Click on the image for a larger version.

Form Cosmic Log/MSNBC:

The current round of financial uncertainty is coming at just the wrong time for America's largest and smallest fusion research programs.

In its simplest form, nuclear fusion involves combining the nuclei of hydrogen atoms to produce helium atoms, plus a smidgen of energy. It's the energy reaction that powers the sun as well as hydrogen bombs. For decades, scientists have been trying to tame the process to produce what could be an abundant, high-yield power source that is less environmentally problematic than nuclear fission.

Federal funding currently backs three strategies for fusion power:

Read more ....

Fusion Will Be Cracked "Within 30 Years"

(Click To Enlarge)
Temperatures inside the fusion reactor will reach 100 million degrees Celsius (ITER.ORG)

From Swissinfo:

Despite the complexity and high research and development costs, scientists are convinced they can unlock the massive power of nuclear fusion within a generation.

On Monday the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor Organisation (ITER) signed a cooperation agreement at the opening of an IAEA fusion energy conference, held in Geneva.

"ITER is one of the most important scientific projects in the world," said IAEA's director general, Yuri Sokolov.

ITER, or "the way" in Latin, is an experimental reactor being built in Cadarache, southern France, which has a practical goal: to establish whether fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun and the hydrogen bomb, can be tamed to generate useful power on Earth.

Read more ....