Largest Laser Beam in the World to Create Fusion

This video is about the National Ignition Facility, more details in previous post, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, employing the largest bank of laser beams in the world, to be used in an experiment designed to create fusion ignition, a potential clean energy source for the 21st century. The $3.5 billion complex is under construction and expected to start full operations in 2009.

Scientists are creating a system to replicate fusion by using lasers to create the high heat and pressure needed for fusion. At the center of the project is a gold cylinder the size of a dime. This gold cylinder, called the hohlraum, houses a capsule containing the hydrogen isotopes – the fuel for the fusion reaction. NIF scientists will blast the hohlraum with 192 laser beams simultaneously (containing a total of 1.8 million joules of energy, about 500 trillion watts) for a few billionths of a second. The cylinder will produce x-rays that compress and heat the capsule resulting in a nuclear fusion reaction.

This experiment is not a continuous fusion reactor, it is an experimental device designed to determine whether scientists can create a fusion reaction for an instant of time, using this method. It does not produce any continuous output as ITER is designed to, It is one of the first major steps designed to see if lasers can be used to create fusion.

The ITER Tokamak, a $13 billion magnetic containment device, is based on totally different technology and would be the first fusion device to produce thermal energy at levels equivalent to conventional electricity power plants.

Several other containment devices are being tested throughout the world, in an attempt to develop a device that is superior to that used in ITER. The technology used in ITER is the most advanced and thus was selected for use in that ground breaking experiment.

Thanks to Lauren Sommer of KQED for the tip

Comments

[Alex]

Expensive, complex and uncertain but worth waiting for, since it might change the face of Nuclear power, reactors and waste.

[Paul F. Dietz]

No, laser fusion is unlikely to change the face of nuclear power. Simply keeping the final optics working (which have to be in the direct line of sight to tens of gigawatt-years of nuclear explosions) is probably an insurmountable problem. Beyond that, the technology solves relatively minor problems (uranium availability, fission waste disposal) while exacerabating the most serious problems of capital cost and complexity.

I view the inertial fusion program as primarily a means for the government to maintain a cadre of technologists versed in the specific knowledge needed for thermonuclear weapon design.

[G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996]

Some other fusion experiments that have been getting set up for years and years in the background: the Large Helical Device in Japan, the Levitated Dipole that was recently in the news, the Wendelstein 7X Stellarator.

[Peter de Valk]

What does ITER stand for. When using acronyms, please indicate at the initial use what it stands for, so that us dummies can also understand what is being said. Thanks.

[Paul F. Dietz]

From the www.iter.org:

"“The way” in Latin. Formerly interpreted to stand for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, although this usage has been discontinued."

[Kit P]

“while exacerabating the most serious problems of capital cost and complexity”

So true, mundane things like heat transfer area. At some point your system to transfer energy to make electricity become inefficient because it loses too much heat to the environment.

[rml]

This work represents a continuation of past laser fusion ignition by Lawrrence Livermore labs (Nova Laser) and KMS Fusion (Ann Arbor, MI).
I had a chance to tour KMS in the early 90's and viewed thier 2TW laser. It was quite impressive. And even more impressive was the ability of a 2TW laser to hit a sample of 2 thousands of an inch in diameter.
It makes a lot more sense to advance this field of research than investing more in fission when there is a finite amount of recoverable uranium.

[Jules]

"It makes a lot more sense to advance this field of research than investing more in fission when there is a finite amount of recoverable uranium..."

Why not fund research into sub-critical accelerator driven reactors or Thorium reactors? These reactors could use relatively abundant types of fuel like U-238 or Thorium. I'm not an expert, but it seems that the research for these types of reactors is a lot farther along than that of hot fusion reactors.

[Cyril R.]

And thorium also scores better on the commercially viable index.

Fusion gets maybe 1/100.

[Paul Dietz]

It makes a lot more sense to advance this field of research than investing more in fission when there is a finite amount of recoverable uranium.

It would make much more sense to push seawater uranium extraction, since the oceans contain 4 billion tons of the element. This would be enough to power the world even using once-through reactors for many centuries.

With breeding cycles, available of uranium or thorium become nonproblems essentially forever. Granted, breeding has economic issues.

Fusion is only going to make sense if there's a design with substantial inherent economic advantages over fission.

[scott]

As a former laser scientist, and someone who has talked to many of the scientists that used to be involved in the Nova, and Shiva project before it, this is strictly a weapons maintenance program. The theory is that the ability to have small scale nuclear explosions in the lab is important to maintain the current weapons stock given the test ban. The most important non weapons related results and discoveries that have come out of this research are typically only of value to laser scientists, though many of them were really really cool. In my opinion sustainable fusion for energy production is at best a PR device, and not one they have ever clung to in the past under any direct questioning.