SF Chronicle, BBC, Cosmos, etc: The big boys in fusion speak up. That laser-crazy NIF machine is ready to strut its stuff.
The Tracker has been carping for the last year or two at reporters who insist on telling people that the big National Ignition Facility in Livermore, CA, exists mainly to demonstrate how to make electricity from inexhaustible fusion. No, it was built mainly to tend to nuclear weapons. And I’ve written that such stories overlook other ways to do fusion.
For all that, NIF’s attendants include plenty of very smart physicists who are very excited about fusion. They say their piece in today’s Science – declaring that early tests with dummy fuel pellets inside little X-ray focussing capsules called hohlraums indicate the machine is ready to make dramatic news. In the next year or so, its 192 monster lasers may be smacking the real thing – including fuel of deuterium and tritium – so hard and with such symmetry that pint-sized thermonuclear explosions will ensue and pump out more energy than it took to make them happen.
Stories:
- SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Focusing 192 lasers on one little target ; He deftly put the fusion in context of the weaponry priority, and then excitedly reviews the boggling power of this machine and of its potential as harbinger of “unlimited and clean energy.”
- New Scientist – Jeff Hecht: Giant laser reaches key milestone for fusion: Hecht interviewed Livermore people to get a well-assembled, tight narrative on the experimental steps thus far – and what they expect next.
- Contra Costa Times – Suzanne Bohan: Livermore Lab scientists report promising step toward fusiion ; Nice job, weapons work in context. One quibble – Bohan compares the 3.3 million deg. K temp in tests to the 6000 K of the sun’s surface. Its core, where its fusion occurs, is the more apt comparison (around 15 milliion K).
- MSNBC-CosmicLog – Alan Boyle: Is Fusion Success In Sight? ; He lets the Livermore man declare his machine a possible “game changer,” but Boyle also tells readers that turning a plausibility test into a commercial power plant will require a long slog.
- BBC – Jason Palmer: Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes ;
- Cosmos (Australia) – Kerensa McElroy: Clean power from fusion now one step closer ; She gets right into the action in the upcoming fully fueled tests, describing a burning wave of fuel isnide the little hohlraums and gouts of neutrons flying out – their capture providing the heat that, in principle, could boil water or other fluid to drive turbines and generators.
Grist for the Mill: LLNL Press Release ; MIT News ;
