We Have Ignition!

So the big news of the week, which was preceded by the rumors a few days before the official announcement, is the breakeven achievement in a fusion process at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility (NIF).

This is certainly a major breakthrough, and it is something that has achieved for the very first time ever in a controlled experiment (it happens all the time in our Sun and other stars). However, to me, this is more of a proof-of-principle experiment, meaning that it is a demonstration that it is possible, rather than to show that it is viable. It is certainly very, VERY far away from producing anything useful because harnessing this energy is an entirely different matter.

While you can read many sites reporting this, I kinda like the one that I read on CNET because there's a certainly level of sensibility aimed towards the general public. In particular, there is this definition of what is meant by "breakeven":

More specifically, scientists at NIF kickstarted a fusion reaction using about 2 megajoules of energy to power the lasers and were able to get about 3 megajoules out. Based on the definition of ignition used by NIF, the benchmark has been passed during this one short pulse. 

But that doesn't convey the whole thing, because this is what should also be mentioned:

"The calculation of energy gain only considers the energy that hit the target, and not the [very large] energy consumption that goes into supporting the infrastructure," said Patrick Burr, a nuclear engineer at the University of New South Wales.

What it means is that they only considered the energy of the laser hitting the target, and then finding the energy output from the ignition that subsequently resulted in fusion. Sure, that energy output is greater than the input energy of the laser, but this is not the total energy of the entire facility that created the laser. That facility would still not be self-sufficient to run just by using the output energy of the fusion it created, even assuming 100% efficiency.

This does not diminish the amazing achievement, considering that other facilities and techniques have not even reach this level. It is just that it needs to be tampered with a bit more realistic expectations so that we don't oversell ourselves to the public.

Zz.

Fusion Power Is 15 Years Away?

This news article is reporting that "MIT scientists" is predicting that we will have nuclear fusion power in 15 years time.

The project, a collaboration between scientists at MIT and a private company, will take a radically different approach to other efforts to transform fusion from an expensive science experiment into a viable commercial energy source. The team intend to use a new class of high-temperature superconductors they predict will allow them to create the world’s first fusion reactor that produces more energy than needs to be put in to get the fusion reaction going.

Bob Mumgaard, CEO of the private company Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which has attracted $50 million in support of this effort from the Italian energy company Eni, said: “The aspiration is to have a working power plant in time to combat climate change. We think we have the science, speed and scale to put carbon-free fusion power on the grid in 15 years.”

Interestingly, there was no direct quote from any MIT scientists here who is working on the project. The article quoted MIT's vice-president for research, but she's not working on this project.

So essentially, it appears that no one from MIT is making this claim, but everyone else on the peripheral is.

Let's mark this and check back in 15 years. Still, I will not be holding my breath.

Zz.

Atomic Age Began 75 Years Ago Today

December 2, 1942, to be exact.

This is an article on the history of the first controlled nuclear fission that was conducted at the University of Chicago 75 years ago that marked the beginning of the atomic/nuclear age.

They called this 20x6x25-foot setup Chicago Pile Number One, or CP-1 for short – and it was here they obtained world’s the first controlled nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942. A single random neutron was enough to start the chain reaction process once the physicists assembled CP-1. The first neutron would induce fission on a uranium nucleus, emitting a set of new neutrons. These secondary neutrons hit carbon nuclei in the graphite and slowed down. Then they’d run into other uranium nuclei and induce a second round of fission reactions, emit even more neutrons, and on and on. The cadmium control rods made sure the process wouldn’t continue indefinitely, because Fermi and his team could choose exactly how and where to insert them to control the chain reaction.

Sadly, other than a commemorative statue/plaque, there's not much left of this historic site. One of the outcome of this work is the creation of Argonne National Lab just outside of Chicago, where, I believe, the research on nuclear chain reaction continued at that time. Argonne now no longer carries any nuclear research work.

Zz.

Muons, The Little Particles That Could

These muons are becoming the fashionable particles of the moment.

I mentioned at the beginning of this year (2017) of the use of muon tomography to image the damaged core at Fukushima. Now, muons are making headlines in two separate applications.

The first is the use of cosmic muons imaging that discovered hidden chambers inside Khufu's Pyramid at Giza. The second is more use of muons to probe the status of nuclear waste safely.

The comment I wrote in the first link still stands. We needed to know the fundamental properties of muons FIRST before we could actually use then to all these applications. And that fundamental knowledge came from high-energy/elementary particle physics.

So chalk this up to another application of such an esoteric field of study.

Zz.

Gamma-Ray Imaging At Fukushima Plant

I mentioned earlier of the muon tomography imaging that was done at the damaged reactor at Fukushima, and tried to highlight this as an example of an application that came out of high energy physics. This time a gamma-ray imaging spectroscopy was performed at the same location to pin-point contamination sites.

But as with the muon tomography case, I want to highlight an important fact that many people might miss.

To address these issues of existing methods and visualize the Cs contamination, we have developed and employed an Electron-Tracking Compton Camera (ETCC). ETCCs were originally developed to observe nuclear gammas from celestial objects in MeV astronomy, but have been applied in wider  fields, including medical imaging and environmental monitoring.

So now we have an example of a device that was first developed for astronomical observation, but has found applications elsewhere.

This is extremely important to keep in mind. Experimental physics often pushes the boundaries of technology. We need better detectors, more sensitive devices, better handling of huge amount of data very quickly, etc...etc. Hardware have to be developed to do all this, and the technology from these scientific experiments often trickle down other applications. Look at all of medical technology, which practically owes everything to physics.

This impact from physics must be repeated over and over again to the public, because a significant majority of them are ignorant of it. It is why I will continue to pick out application like this and highlight it in case it is missed.

Zz.

Spherical Tokamaks

Spherical tokamaks - can they beat out ITER to be the first to be a viable fusion generator?

This article describe the two separate efforts at using this technique in building such a facility, and it appears to not cost more than $10 billion and years of delay (yes, I'm looking at you, ITER!).

That's where the spherical tokamaks come in. The delightfully exotic term refers to a kind of device that can contain superheated plasma in powerful magnetic fields. These devices represent our species' best shot at generating those stellar temperatures we need to achieve nuclear fusion.

Right now, the two most advanced spherical tokamaks in the world are the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U) at PPPL, and the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST) at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in the U.K.

At this stage, we need as many alternatives as we can afford. I'm glad we're not putting all our eggs in ITER, because I'm getting tired of it already.

Zz.

ITER Is Getting More Expensive And More Delayed

This news report details the cost overruns and the more-and-a-decade delay of ITER.

ITER chief Bernard Bigot said the experimental fusion reactor under construction in Cadarache, France, would not see the first test of its super-heated plasma before 2025 and its first full-power fusion not before 2035.

The biggest lesson from this is how NOT to run a major international collaboration. Any more large science projects like this, and the politicians and the public will understandably be reluctant to support science projects of that scale. The rest of us will suffer for it.

Zz.

Wendelstein 7-X' Comes Online

ITER should look over its shoulder, because Germany's nuclear fusion reactor research facility is coming online. It is considerably smaller, significantly cheaper, but more importantly, it is built and ready to run!

Construction has already begun in southern France on ITER, a huge international research reactor that uses a strong electric current to trap plasma inside a doughnut-shaped device long enough for fusion to take place. The device, known as a tokamak, was conceived by Soviet physicists in the 1950s and is considered fairly easy to build, but extremely difficult to operate.

The team in Greifswald, a port city on Germany's Baltic coast, is focused on a rival technology invented by the American physicist Lyman Spitzer in 1950. Called a stellarator, the device has the same doughnut shape as a tokamak but uses a complicated system of magnetic coils instead of a current to achieve the same result.

Let the games begin!

Zz.

Lockheed Fusion "Breakthrough" - The Skeptics Are Out

Barely a day after Lockheed Martin announced their "fusion breakthrough" in designing a workable and compact fusion reactor, the skeptics are already weighing in their opinions even when details of Lockheed design has not been clearly described.

"The nuclear engineering clearly fails to be cost effective," Tom Jarboe told Business Insider in an email. Jarboe is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, an adjunct professor in physics, and a researcher with the University of Washington's nuclear fusion experiment.
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"This design has two doughnuts and a shell so it will be more than four times as bad as a tokamak," Jarboe said, adding that, "Our concept [at the University of Washington] has no coils surrounded by plasma and solves the problem."

Like I said earlier, from the sketchy detail that I've read, they are using a familiar technique for confinement, etc., something that has been used and studied extensively before. So unless they are claiming to find something that almost everyone has overlooked, this claim of their will need to be very convincing for others to accept. As stated in the article, Lockheed hasn't published anything yet, and they probably won't until they get patent approval of their design. That is what a commercial entity will typically do when they want to protect their design and investment.

There's a lot more work left to do for this to be demonstrated.

Zz.

Lockheed Martin Claims Fusion Breakthrough

As always, we should reserve our judgement until we get this independently verified. Still, Lockheed Martin, out of the company's Skunk Works program (which was responsible for the Stealth technology), has made the astounding claim of potentially producing a working fusion reactor by 2017.

Tom McGuire, who heads the project, told Reuters that his team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed’s Skunk Works program for the past four years, but decided to go public with the news now to recruit additional partners in industry and government to support their work.

Last year, while speaking at Google’s Solve for X program, Charles Chase , a research scientist at Skunk Works, described Lockheed’s effort to build a trailer-sized fusion power plant that turns cheap and plentiful hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) into helium plus enough energy to power a small city.

“It’s safe, it’s clean, and Lockheed is promising an operational unit by 2017 with assembly line production to follow, enabling everything from unlimited fresh water to engines that take spacecraft to Mars in one month instead of six,” Evan Ackerman wrote in a post about Chase’s Google talk on Dvice.

The thing that I don't have very clear is on the nature of the breakthrough that would allow them to do this, because what was written in the piece about using a magnetic bottle isn't new at all. This technique has been around for decades. I even saw one in the basement of the Engineering Research building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison back in the early 80's when they were doing extensive research work in this area. So what exactly did they do that they think will be successful that others over many years couldn't?

I guess that is a trade secret for them right now and we will just have to wait for the details to trickle out later.

Zz.

No Ignition For National Ignition Facility

The soft whispers about issues and skepticism with the National Ignition Facility (NIF) got louder with the review reports on its failure to meet its milestone last year.

The US$3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF), at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, is designed to crush tiny pellets of hydrogen isotopes until they fuse into helium. The goal is to release more energy than goes into the pellet and in doing so roughly mimic conditions inside a modern nuclear warhead.

That was the goal, but a six-year “ignition campaign” came up short in September, sparking introspection amongst scientists, federal officials and congressional funders. Introspection in Washington inevitably leads to reports, and in November and December, a series of reviews of the project were released—including plans to shift the giant laser facility away from ignition work and towards weapons.

The gist of the conclusion given in the committee report is in this paragraph:

The important conclusion from the NIC is that the pressent understanding of the physics of the hahlraum and capsule implosion as embodied in modeling and computer simulation is insufficient to predict the results of the implosion experiments aimed at achieving ignition. Reviewers indicated that, while progress towards ignition had been made, a program of scientific experiments and modeling focused on understanding the various physical effects, in isolation, that impact the integrated implosion experiments provides the best approach to eventually either achieve ignition, or to understand definitively why it may not be achievable with indirect drive using the NIF laser. Executing such a program will also require enhancing the number of diagnostic measurements of both the future focused experiments and integrated implosion experiments.

The ignition program certainly has a major task ahead of it, and this failure to initiate ignition certainly generates even strong skepticism of its program.

Zz.

Using Muons From Cosmic Rays To Peek Into Fukushima?

What a clever idea!

A PRL paper published last week[1] had an interesting proposal. Use muons generated in the upper atmosphere due to cosmic ray collisions to peek into the Fukushima reactors.

To radiograph inaccessible parts of Fukushima reactors, Borozdin et al. propose a similar approach based on muon detectors placed right outside the reactor building. The authors compared two imaging methods: attenuation radiography, which measures how muons are absorbed inside the reactor, and scattering radiography, which monitors how their path is deviated. They show that scattering radiography would deliver more reliable images of the nuclear core after only a few weeks of measurement, allowing the visualization of melted fuel as well as debris.

That report has a link to the PRL paper that you can get under the Creative Commons license.

Zz.

[1]K. Borozdin et al.,Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 152501 (2012).

Chicago Pile 1

For those who are interested in this significant event in the history of mankind (and certainly in science), this might be an interesting video to watch.



We do not have that many living persons left to give first-hand account of this event.

Zz.

Fusion Energy Research Funding Might Be Restored

Due to the effort of the lone physicist in the US Congress, the US House of Representatives passed a bill to restore funding for fusion energy research, which includes funding for the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.

The funding, which supports the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab and other energy research laboratories, was not included in the President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget request. Without the funding, the lab would face major cutbacks on research projects and staff reductions of up to 100 people, including scientists, engineers, and lab technicians.

While I know that Holt has a tie with PPPL, I wonder if he can muster the same support for high energy physics funding, which looks extremely bleak.

Zz.

Cold Fusion? Not So Fast!

I mentioned earlier of an upcoming colloquium to be held at CERN to decipher and sort through all the claims of the so-called Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR), which is basically cold fusion in sheep's clothing. Today, a skeptical review of the Rossi's e-CAT claims is presented, along with issues surrounding that cold fusion claim.

They claimed their device produced 12,400 Watts of heat power with an input of just 400 W. In a move that raised eyebrows among research physicists, Rossi and Focardi initially declined to publish their results in a peer-reviewed science journal and instead took their discovery directly to the public. They also claimed that they would be starting mass production of their cold fusion devices by the end of last year; that failed to happen, and the chorus of skeptics has grown louder.

Among the most prominent skeptics is Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith, who has offered $200,000 for proof that the Rossi "energy catalyzer" (e-CAT) actually works.

 Is this similar to the long-standing award from James Randi to give away $1 million for a clear demonstration of psychic/supernatural phenomenon?

It's a bit tiresome that many of these people who claim such cold fusion discovery appear to be a bunch of characters who simply refuses to reveal what they have, what they did, and more importantly, to have an independent test done to verify their claim. And these people all wonder why we keep finding their claim to be highly dubious!

Zz.

Severe Blows To US Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics Funding

The current President Obama's 2013 budget proposal for the Department of Energy appears to be devastating for Nuclear/Fusion physics and High Energy Physics funding.

Overall, the budget numbers for the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, the single largest funder of physical sciences research in the United States, look reasonably good. The office would see its budget climb by 2.4% to $4.992 billion. Three of the office's six major research programs, however, are slated for potentially devastating cuts. While programs with connections to clean energy technologies come out ahead, the fusion energy science, nuclear physics, and high-energy physics programs suffer.

While this is severe, it isn't surprising. The US appears to have "shut down" and freely relinquish any kind of initiative to reclaim its powers in high energy physics. And let's be clear about this, the economic impact will be felt soon enough, not just in terms of the direct scientific benefits, but also the technological side effects that typically accompany a major accelerator facility. Somehow, people still do not see how advances in experimental high energy physics have trickled down into devices that are now being used in material science, medicine, etc. Advances that we make for particle detectors will be the high resolution detectors in medical physics of tomorrow. That type of benefits have somehow been lost completely.

And again, as in the past, it appears that the burden of trying to "cut spending" falls onto the small guys, the ones with the small budgets, rather than on the big boys.

Zz.

Lessons from Fukushima

There will be a panel discussion on the Fukushima nuclear disaster today at 4:00 pm US CDT. The live webcast can be followed at that web link.

Japan's Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan have caused the world to reconsider nuclear energy and its place in global energy policy. The University of Chicago Alumni Association, in conjunction with Argonne National Laboratory and the Harris Energy Policy Institute, invite you to join us for a live discussion and simultaneous webcast that will explore the impact of nuclear energy, now and in the future. The discussion will explore the topic from a variety of perspectives, including climate and ecology, economics, history, policy, safety, and science and technology. The panel includes:

* Mark Peters, Deputy Director of Argonne National Laboratory (Moderator)
* Kennette Benedict, Executive Director of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
* Hussein Khalil, Director of the Nuclear Energy Division at Argonne National Laboratory
* Robert Topel, Isidore Brown and Gladys J. Brown Distinguished Service Professor in Urban and Labor Economics, Chicago Booth School of Business, and Director, University of Chicago Energy Initiative.

Zz.

Fukushima: Fact Versus Fiction

A video of a panel dialog on the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.



Zz.

Japan's Nuclear Crisis - Steven Chu Interview

Newsweek interviewed US Dept. of Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, on the aftermath of Japan's nuclear crisis. It didn't just cover his job, but also him being a physicist and still producing his own research work.

Last summer you wrote a paper called “Subnanometre Single-Molecule Localization Registration and Distance Measurements.” When asked about it, you said, “I consider it my equivalent of vegging out in front of the TV.”

The first 80 hours a week of my time go to my full-time job at the Department of Energy. But in the wee hours of the morning, on airplane trips, I can go back and forth. It doesn’t take much time, and it’s a good release.

Zz.

Rush Holt On Japan's Nuclear Crisis

His win over Watson made him a household name among the public. So hopefully, the voting public in the US knows enough about him (and the fact that he is a physicist) to at least pay attention to what he has to say.

And being a nuclear physicist and someone who knows about nuclear reactions intimately (certainly more than the talking head Michio Kaku on TV), he has an expert and unique perspective on the nuclear crisis going on in Japan, and the whole idea of energy source and consumption. This is what we get in this news article. So read it while you have a chance.

Zz.