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.

Confirmation Of Wendelstein 7-X Magnetic Field

I mentioned a while back that Germany's Wendelstein 7-X Stellerator was about to go on with their tests. One of the most novel aspect of this fusion machine is the complex topology of its magnetic field.

We now have a report that confirms the topology of this magnetic field, with an agreement of better than 1:100,000. The field lines that they saw as shown in Fig. 2 of the paper is astounding and science-fictiony!

Well done, people!

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.

NIF Achieves Milestone

Finally, some good news out of the National Ignition Facility.

In a paper published in Nature, Hurricane and colleagues report results from experiments carried out last September and November – the former producing 14 kJ of fusion energy from a single laser shot and the latter 17 kJ. The researchers point out that since the energy delivered to the fuel is about 10 kJ, both shots generated a fuel gain. They also calculated that as much as half of the energy output from these shots originated in alpha-particle heating. This is significant because such heating is a prerequisite for ignition.

They haven't achieve ignition yet, but this is certainly a necessary step towards understanding this whole process. Now, they have the difficult and unenviable task of delivering on the promise.

Zz.

A Tour Of MIT's Plasma Physics And Fusion Center

If you haven't seen the inside of it, here is a quick tour of MIT's Plasma Physics and Fusion Center.

Zz.

The Case Against Cold Fusion

If there ever is a blog article that has compiled an amazing history of Cold Fusion, this one could be it. Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Physics has updated an article on this topic due to a new film called "The Believers". This article is full of other links and references that you might also want to read, and it also includes description and comments on the effort to separate "cold fusion" from low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR).

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.

Cold Fusion Colloquium At CERN

At CERN, you asked? Yes, CERN, the same place that houses this little facility known at the LHC.

Not sure what to make of this, but a colloquium is being organized at CERN to look into the theoretical and "experimental" progress in Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR), or what we used to call cold fusion.

An overview will be given on the main progress made –since March 1989- through experimental/theoretical studies on thermal/nuclear anomalies observed in forced interactions of Hydrogen isotopes (H, D), in non-equilibrium conditions, with pure or alloyed materials (mainly Palladium, Nickel).

Most of the experiments used electrolytic environments at moderate temperatures (20-50°C). More recently, gas environments have been used at higher temperatures (between 200-400°C and even temperatures between 500-900°C have been employed).

Specific nanostructures have begun to play a crucial role both in basic studies as well as in, recently claimed, technological/industrial applications.

A plethora of theoretical models have been proposed to explain several experimental anomalies in LENR. A brief description of a weak interaction model shall be presented that claims to explain almost ALL of the anomalous effects found so far.

There's even going to be a live webcast of the event!

This will be interesting, especially the cast of characters that will attend or invited to attend this colloquium. I am also curious at what the outcome of it will be. Presumably, this phenomenon will be looked at carefully where the emphasis is purely on the physics.

Zz.

Fusion Power

This is an Op-Ed in the NY Times by Stewart C. Prager, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, on why investment in fusion power research is critical.

But an abundant, safe and clean energy source once thought to be the stuff of science fiction is closer than many realize: nuclear fusion. Making it a reality, however, will take significant investment from the government at a time when spending on scientific research is under threat.

Harnessing nuclear fusion, the energy that powers the sun and the stars, has been a goal of physicists worldwide since the 1950s. It is essentially inexhaustible and it can be created using hydrogen isotopes — chemical cousins of hydrogen, like deuterium — that can readily be extracted from seawater.

 Of course, in the current political climate in the US, funding and commitment to fusion technology in the US is lagging behind several nations.

However, even though the United States is a contributor to this experiment, known as ITER, it has yet to commit to the full program needed to develop a domestic fusion reactor to produce electricity for the American power grid. Meanwhile other nations are moving forward to implement fusion as a key ingredient of their energy security.

Indeed, fusion research facilities more modern than anything in the United States are either under construction or operating in China, Germany, Japan and South Korea. The will and enthusiasm of governments in Asia to fill their energy needs with fusion, as soon as possible, is nearly palpable.

Again, not surprising, and it's the same old story. The US is slowly but surely falling behind in an increasing number of scientific areas. I wouldn't be surprised at all that, 50 to 100 years from now, this period for the last 10-20 years will mark the beginning of the decline of the American civilization, just like the decline of other great civilizations of the past.

Zz.

The Quest For Laser Fusion At NIH

We have reports of more dramatic progress at the National Ignition Facility. The latest report indicated that they have achieved the necessary temperature and compression conditions inside the "hohlraum".

NIF first began testing the laser beams last year and now two groups at Lawrence Livermore have shown that they can obtain the desired conditions inside the hohlraum. They did this by using plastic spheres containing helium, rather than actual fuel pellets, since these were easier to analyse, and by combining their experimental measurements with computer simulations, the researchers found that the hohlraum converted nearly 90% of the laser energy into X-rays and that it heated up to some 3.6 million degrees Celsius. They also found that the sphere was compressed very uniformly, its diameter shrinking from around two millimetres to about a tenth of a millimetre.

It's quite a progress for something that has been up for only a year, and for a facility that is this complex.

Zz.

Fusion - From Here To Reality

An informational video from Physics World on Fusion and ITER. It is more of an interview and Q&A. A bit dry, but it's informative.



Zz.

Penthouse Magazine Founder and Fusion Research

Who knew? I certainly didn't.

With the passing this week of Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse Magazine, we now have various information about him that I didn't know before. For example, he founded the science magazine Omni (not one of my favorite magazines). Still, what was surprising to me was that he was fascinated with fusion and invested quite heavily in a company to develop a workable fusion reactor.

Bussard, who had previously worked on fusion at Los Alamos National Laboratory, had set up a company, International Nuclear Energy Systems Company (Inesco) to develop a compact tokamak design he had devised. His innovation was to equip the device with extremely powerful electromagnets to allow it to heat a small volume of plasma to high enough temperatures so that nuclei would fuse and generate heat. Mainstream tokamaks were getting larger and larger in an effort to reduce heat loss.

According to Robin Herman in her book Fusion: The Search for Endless Energy, Guccione invited Bussard over to dinner and heard about his trouble getting government funding or private investors. In 1980, Guccione decided to back the project with an initial $400,000.

Bussard set up the business in San Diego, California, and soon had a staff of 85. Other investors failed to materialize, and Guccione eventually sank up to $17 million in the project. When a public share issue for Inesco in 1984 flopped, the pair were forced to wind up the project.

Interestingly enough, as pointed out in that Science news article, one of Bussard's said is Bruno Coppi of MIT, who made a news splash recently with his Ignitor project that I mentioned recently as a small-scale alternative to ITER. So Bussard's and Guccione's legacy sort of continues in some form and shape.

Soft porn and fusion? Who knew?

Zz.

Ignitor to Challenge ITER

Italy and Russia are poised to build a new fusion facility called Ignitor.

Russia and Italy announced on Monday that they will collaborate to build a new tokamak fusion reactor called Ignitor. Following talks between Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, other ministers signed a memorandum of understanding to work together on building the Italian-designed device on Russian territory.

The reactor is the brainchild of Bruno Coppi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked on MIT's Alcator tokamaks from the 1970s until the present day.

This is certainly a legitimate alternative to the budget-busting ITER that has been beset by delays and cost over-runs. Whether they can actually achieve the goal is another matter and the whole reason why this is being built in the first place.

Zz.

Fusion Dreams Delayed

This has been reported by Nature's daily news. The international consortium that runs ITER has decided to scale back the machine and will delay running it at its full-blown power for at least 5 years {link available for free only for a limited time}.

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.

The new scheme, known as 'Scenario 1' to ITER insiders, will be discussed on 17–18 June in Mito, Japan, at a council meeting that will include representatives from all seven members: the European Union (EU), Japan, South Korea, Russia, the United States, China and India. It is expected to be approved at a council meeting in November.

This is certainly not unexpected after the US pulled out all of its contribution for that one year (with parts of it being restored later). The machine is also an extremely ambitious one with a very difficult set of goals, not unlike the LHC. So I certainly don't find this unexpected. But still, there's tremendous expectation for something that costs this much.

Zz.

APS Did Not Endorse Scientist In CBS's "60 Minutes"

If you were skeptical of the cold fusion claim that was shown on "60 Minutes", this incident will remove any shred of credibility left in the story.

It appears that the claim made in 60 Minutes that the American Physical Society (APS) provided an "independent" scientist to verify the cold fusion claim is wrong. The APS promptly issued a press statement denying such a thing.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On April 19, CBS aired a “60 Minutes” segment on “cold fusion,” a process that proponents claim could solve the world’s energy problems. The script stated that “... [‘60 Minutes’] asked the American Physical Society, the top physics organization in America, to recommend an independent scientist. They gave us Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri and an expert in measuring energy.” That statement is false.

None of the American Physical Society’s (APS) authorized spokespersons, including the president, president-elect, executive officer, director of public affairs, head of media relations and press secretary, provided CBS with the names of any experts. APS has learned that “60 Minutes” did receive a long list of names - that included Rob Duncan’s - from University of Minnesota Professor Allen Goldman, who states unequivocally that he never claimed to be acting in the name of APS.

APS does not, as an organization, endorse particular experiments or their results. That can only be done through publication in peer-reviewed journals, and by independent replication by other researchers. The APS does not endorse the cold fusion experiments featured in the April 19 “60 Minutes” news program. Any suggestion by the CBS journalists to the contrary is misleading and false.

The American Physical Society is the leading professional organization of physicists, representing over 46,000 physicists in academia and industry in the United States and internationally. APS has offices in College Park, MD (Headquarters), Ridge, NY, and Washington, D.C.

Not only that, probably after this press release by the APS, CBS not only removed the video of that segment of 60 Minutes, but also purportedly altered the transcript of the show, as reported in the April 24, 2009 column of Bob Park's "What's New".

There's something that smell in CBS's medialand, and it isn't the smell of cold fusion evaporating. You would think that these media people would have learned already from the previous cold fusion debacle and WAIT until such claims have been verified to be valid. But noooooooooo....... For ratings' sake, they'd do a junk piece like this AND also make false claims as well.

.. and people wonder why I don't watch network TV anymore...

Zz.

Completion of the National Ignition Facility

I mentioned earlier of the pending completion of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore Lab. The US Dept. of Energy (DOE) is expected to officially certify its completion today, clearing the way for the NIF to start operation some time this June.

The facility, the size of a football field, consists of 192 separate laser beams, each traveling 1,000 feet in a one-thousandth of a second to converge simultaneously on a target the size of a pencil eraser.

While the NIF laser is expected to be used for a wide range of high-energy and high-density physics experiments, its primary purpose is to help government physicists ensure the reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons as they become older.

Hum... is this true or did the Associated Press got this one wrong? Isn't "sustainable fusion" its primary purpose rather than weapons test?

Zz.