
Dry-run experiments verify key aspect of Sandia nuclear fusion concept - kposehn
https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/nuclear_fusion/
======
MattGrommes
I worked as a webmonkey intern with these guys back in the late nineties. When
they "shoot" the machine it shook the ground for a hundred yards around, which
they neglected to tell me during my first week. I had just gone through
radiation training and I'm standing in the room next to the giant warehouse
that housed the thing when there's a huge boom and the ground shakes. Nobody
else batted an eye so I played it cool but great googly moogly that was scary.
And that was before they add a great honking laser that comes over from the
next building and zaps the core of the machine. A lot of those guys were
stereotypical crazed geniuses, it's fun to see their work carrying forward.

------
dsr_
Clean fusion power may only be fifty years away.

(Seriously, it's great that there are fundamental research programs still
going on. Even the spin-offs are generally worthwhile by themselves.)

~~~
jostmey
I would not rush to call fusion "clean". But it would be an amazing power
source.

~~~
DennisP
It's pretty close. Has a high neutron flux that makes your equipment
radioactive, but there's no waste from the fuel itself.

If one of the boron fusion projects works out, we won't even have the neutron
flux.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
IIRC, the neutron branching fraction for the proton-boron reaction is around
1%. So it is not clean, but the flux is low enough not to do much damage to
the walls of the fusion chamber.

~~~
DennisP
True. It would need a bit of shielding. Some of the picosecond laser papers
say the total radioactivity per megawatt would be less than what's released by
burning coal, which contains a little thorium and uranium. Here's an abstract
that mentions that:
[http://www.davidpublishing.com/journals_show_abstract.html?7...](http://www.davidpublishing.com/journals_show_abstract.html?7377-0)

(Google will turn up plenty of full papers though.)

------
zrail
If I'm interpreting this correctly, each liner is a one-use consumable and all
of the power it can generate comes out in one big burst. How does long-term
power generation work in that scenario? Is there a big feed tube that drops
liners into a chamber, fuse them, then dump them out the bottom?

~~~
jff
I think the idea is closer to shooting the liners into the chamber, but
essentially yes. I saw a video at one point (don't have it handy) that one of
the labs put together, illustrating a conceptual plant based on current work,
in which fuel pellets were fired into the fusion chamber one after another.

------
adlep
meanwhile Adrea Rossi's ECAT LENR device is getting closer and closer to
reality. <http://www.e-catworld.com/>

<http://rossilivecat.com/>

<http://youtu.be/tjOoGtTFpNk>

<http://youtu.be/JWoaJ5NEj-w>

<http://youtu.be/2cOEHQmnG-I>

[http://www.e-catworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/EFA-
rep...](http://www.e-catworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/EFA-rep-1107.pdf)

~~~
vectorpush
It's been almost a year since this guy promised to deliver a working prototype
of his supposed "low energy nuclear reaction" device, but of course, he's
actually just a scammer.

~~~
mrb
Rossi _did_ deliver a prototype to his first customer at the end of a
demonstration day in October 2011. A few dozen scientists and journalists were
also invited to this event. Are you claiming the customer hauling away the
device in a truck was fake and staged?

The general consensus from the scientists present at the event was that "yes,
something strange appears to be going on, we need to attempt to replicate
this". As a result, Rossi's research has triggered a non-negligible renewal of
interest of Nickel-Hydrogen fusion (which has been going on for 15+ years),
especially in Italy and Greece. A few well-recognized researchers openly and
publicly admit that Rossi's research appears promising and deserves more
research (such as Dennis M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist at NASA Langley Research
Center).

Recently, Celani has been able to reproduce anomalous heat in Ni-H cells that
cannot be explained by current physical theories (other than with Ni-H fusion
being real): [http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/08/celani-demonstrates-
excess...](http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/08/celani-demonstrates-excess-heat-
from-nickel-hydrogen-reactor-at-niweek/)

I am following the latest developments very closely.

The only reason Rossi is not taken _more_ seriously is because current
physical theories predict cold fusion should be impossible, and because he
publishes barely enough information to reproduce anomalous heat in Ni-H cells
without giving away all the experimental tricks he found to make the reaction
more pronounced (he appears to be driven by greed and wants to commercialize
the tech before letting the secret out).

Still, I don't think you personally can call Rossi a scammer, since you
obviously don't follow Ni-H research that has been going on in the last year.

~~~
nisa
There is a lot of public information ([http://psiram.com/en/index.php/Focardi-
Rossi_Energy-Catalyze...](http://psiram.com/en/index.php/Focardi-Rossi_Energy-
Catalyzer)) that screams "scam" but I'm not expert in the field. His approach
to research does not seem to help his case at all.

------
cletus
I remain skeptical that fusion will ever be an economical or even viable
source of energy. The major problems are that:

1\. The Sun, by comparison, produces less energy (per volume) than compost
[1];

2\. Heavier isotopes of hydrogen, used because they provide a faster reaction,
emit more neutrons, which tend to have a devastating effect on the container.
Thus you have two conditions at odd: speed of the reaction vs viability of
containment;

3\. The Sun solves the problem of containing the reaction with gravity.
Magnetism has yet to yet to be shown as viable of effective in energy terms;
and

4\. People focus too much on the fuel cost, which is near-zero and supply is
effectively unlimited. But that's H1. Deuterium is relatively plentiful [2]
but tritium is one of the most expensive substances (by mass) on Earth.
Helium-3 is an alternative but is also incredibly expensive [3] such that
recovering it from the Moon may actually be economically viable relative to
cost (that should tell you something about how rare/expensive it is). D-D
reaction research I think is currently far behind anything involving Tritium
or He-3.

Fuel costs aside, that's only one input into the cost equation. Even if the
fuel is free the power plant will cost $X to produce, will require $Y in
maintenance per year for Z years and produce W MW of power. Plug all those
numbers together and that power still has cost even with "free" fuel.

For automobiles at least, petrochemicals have some incredible advantages. They
are relatively stable, cheap and the machinery for turning them into usable
energy is cheap and mass-produced. Of course it has two major problems:

1\. Emissions; and

2\. It is a limited resource.

I tend to think at some point in the next few centuries genetic engineering
will allow us to solve (2) by sustainably "growing" more fuel with something
like algae or (to borrow an idea from Anathem) "fuel trees". Of course
something must be consumed to produce this energy.

Battery technology will have to improve by an order of magnitude at least to
be a viable alternative to fuels that are easily transported and don't require
the infrastructure that charging stations otherwise would.

For fixed power generation I'm really not sure what the future holds. If we're
not careful we'll simply exhaust a number of readily available fuels and the
population problem will "correct" (as it often does) with war.

[1]:
[http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.ht...](http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.htm)

[2]: <http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/FAQ.aspx#Depletion>

[3]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Fusion_reactions>

~~~
InclinedPlane
1\. The Sun uses gravitational confinement and will run for over 10 billion
years, producing nearly 400 yottawatts of power all throughout that time. The
relationship to the average power density of compost is utterly, utterly
irrelevant.

2\. Oh no, neutrons! If only we'd spent 7+ decades working with neutron
reactions and their interactions with materials. It's a shame there are no
functional power reactors anywhere in the world that are subjected to a high-
neutron flux.

3\. Magnetic confinement of fusion works just fine, we're at a point where it
looks like it's simply a matter of scaling things up to get to greater than
break-even energy-wise. How practical and competitive such reactors might be
remains to be seen, but it's fairly unlikely that they just plain won't work.

4\. The biggest advantages of fusion as an energy source are that it's safe
and clean. It won't be until quite some time in the future when we have the
ability to make use of something like p-B11 fusion reactions (which are far,
far beyond our capability at the moment due to the much higher plasma
temperatures required) when fusion will be, potentially, much cheaper and
easier than competing alternatives (due to the potentially lower capital cost
and conversion efficiency of an aneutronic fusion reactor which wouldn't even
need a steam turbine).

~~~
DennisP
Some recent modeling suggests that by using side ignition of fuel with a
petawatt picosecond laser, boron fusion would only be ten times harder than
D-T. By comparison, for the spherical arrangement NIF uses, boron is 100,000
times harder. Here's one paper, google brings up more:
<http://ocs.ciemat.es/EPS2011PAP/pdf/P5.037.pdf>

The lasers are almost good enough to try this and advancing fast.

Another approach to boron ignition is focus fusion. They published a peer-
reviewed paper recently showing they'd achieved the temperature required for
boron fusion (they're up to 1.8 billion degrees C). They need higher density
though, they're working on that and hope to get to the level they need in a
year.

------
ck2
Isn't this the laboratory that is doing weapons research under the guise of
helping people?

Or am I confusing propaganda? Their logo creeps me out too.

~~~
jff
Sandia does weapons research, but it does more than just that. One of the main
goals is indeed stockpile stewardship, and to that end Sandia produces a lot
of hardware and software. On the other hand, it also does a lot of research
into energy generation, such as fusion, wind, solar, and improvements in
combustion-operated power sources such as coal plants and internal combustion
engines. There's also work in robotics, biology, chemistry, physics (beyond
nuclear explosions!), math, computer science; most of these are not for the
development of weapons. It's a DOE lab, so it does things which fall under the
DOE mandate, which includes maintaining the nation's nuclear stockpile _among
many other things_.

I think fusion energy is a big enough win for everyone that you don't need to
assign some sinister backing to it. The Department of ENERGY damn well should
be interested in a safe, clean method of generating electricity.

The logo is a thunderbird, after the mythological creature of the Native
Americans.

~~~
ck2
Ah okay, I guess the Nazis ruined a lot of symbolism.

Logo reminded me of something out of Wolfenstein 3D

The paranoia in me always suspect they are all trying to make nuclear weapons
without the pesky fallout which would be a horrible "advancement" as it would
remove resistance to use them.

~~~
001sky
The bird is native american, Sandia is in New Mexico. If you are unfamiliar
with the USA, there are vast swathes of the desert southwest that are
milititary and mixed-use government land. White Sands, for example is also in
NM. Not too far away, is Trinity site. To the north, is Los Alamos. Etc. There
are only so many places you can test rockets and fighter planes due to the
extreme speed, etc.

~~~
pyre
You forgot Black Mesa in NM. ;-)

