LAWRENCE LIVERMORE IGNITION OMISSION.

Ignition Omission: Understanding the National Ignition Facility Milestone also accompanying video presentation.

1. The actual device input energy that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory omitted in its December 2022 announcement.
2. The real-world significance of fusion ignition/scientific breakeven.
3. The gap between the ignition result and the energy needed for device breakeven.
4. The extremely brief duration of the fusion reaction.
5. Why the claims that fusion is an “unlimited, abundant” source of energy are not true.
6. That one of the two required fuels for most nuclear fusion concepts does not exist.
7. That there currently are no good ways to make tritium.
8. Visually, how far away this fusion device is from becoming a practical source of energy.

Frankly, just the first objection looks as most significant one for me. Why? From the NIF history graph follows that latest achievment was done by assisting laser fusion by discharge of coil surrounding the fusion cell. This would create magnetic field impulse which would compress plasma by mechanism similar to pinch fusion. And then there is the problem, that we don't know, which amount of input energy/electricity has been actually used in this impulse.

Which is because the output laser array energy (which is an impressive piece of technology by itself) can not be increased too much anymore. So that everyone could assume, that the whole increase of fusion yield was done without contribution of lasers. But the energy which one can put into magnetic pulse and pinch can be increased nearly arbitrarily and it can easily exceed the amount of energy delivered by lasers by order of magnitude. This is because the laser array has rather low net energy efficiency, whereas the powering of solenoid required just a capacitor bank, the size of which can be increased arbitrarily. And one megajoule shot from capacitor bank is nothing spectacular here, for instance the Z-machine delivers 20 MJ into shots regularly.

One should expect that there is strong political pressure to keep the investments into USD 5 billion NIF facility running and this facility consumes one billion every year in addition. So it may be easily possible, that NIF facility was silently redesigned from laser fusion to Z-pinch machine and most if not all the ceremonially announced increase of output power actually comes from energy introduced into pinch, not from fusion reaction itself. The laser array is there just for illumination of Z-pinch discharge, literally speaking.

Researchers at Berkeley Lab have announced a new material they claim can be used to achieve ultra-high, energy-dense capacitors. The material leverages relaxor ferroelectrics, which, according to Berkeley, are ceramic materials that undergo a rapid mechanical or electronic response to an external electric field and are commonly used as a capacitor in applications such as ultrasonics, pressure sensors, and voltage generators. The results from the paper are impressive, showing that materials exposed to the ion beam had more than twice the energy storage density and 50% higher efficiencies than those unexposed. In some cases, they were able to achieve energy storage densities as high as ~133 joules per cubic centimeter with efficiencies exceeding 75%.

133 joules / ccm translates to 133 MJ / cubic meter. The capacitor bank powering 20 MJ Z-machine or railgun thus can have size of rabbit hutch...

But Z-pinch fusion has to remain concealed, lest people realize that this is how stars really form and function.

Quote from Alan Smith

From our friends ar NEW ENERGY TIMES:--

NEW VIDEO: Ignition Omission: Understanding the National Ignition Facility Milestone

This video explains:

• The actual device input energy that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory omitted in its December 2022 announcement.
• The real-world significance of fusion ignition/scientific breakeven.
• The gap between the ignition result and the energy needed for device breakeven.
• The extremely brief duration of the fusion reaction.
• Why the claims that fusion is an "unlimited, abundant" source of energy are not true.
• That one of the two required fuels for most nuclear fusion concepts does not exist.
• That there currently are no good ways to make tritium.
• Visually, how far away this fusion device is from becoming a practical source of energy.

Watch on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZb-P5C_08g

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Alan is well done, you think right, these bastards want to get billions, but it's not much use. You said a good idea, they don't pay attention to nshi, when I have to make a ball lightning in the reactor, there is very little left to discover my energy, and not physicists with millions of degrees of plasma-morons!!!!

Алан молодец, правильно думаешь, эти гады хотят миллиарды получать, а толку мало. Хорошую мысль ты сказал, на наши они не обращают внимание, когда мне осталось сделать шаровую молнию в реакторе, осталось совсем мало для открытия моей энергии, а не физиков с миллионами градусов плазмы-дебилы!!!!

It is unfortunate that this site - so strongly motivated to examine new nuclear power sources free of preconceptions and bias - should exhibit this bias just because we are talking about inertial confinement fusion (laser-driven) which has major mainstream science backing at NIF.

No tritium? Tritium breeding from Li blankets that absorb fusion neutrons is a well understood part of proposed fusion technology. https://www.iter.org/sci/FusionFuels#:~:text=Tritium%20is%20a%20fast%2Ddecaying,blanket%20wall%20of%20the%20tokamak.

Brief duration? Not relevant. It IS a pulse-fusion system, with all of the attendant problems - but everyone knows that and all the mainstream media discussion of the NIF results made that clear

Unlimited, abundant? Yes, given that Li is essentially unlimited, and tritium and deuterium can be bred from Li. Li is used in exponentially increasing amounts by Li ion batteries, so a supply crunch is expected (as tends to happen when demand changes rapidly). But this will be met by more li production plants. Li from brine can be done anywhere and is essentially an unlimited resource.

There are a lot of problems in commercialising laser fusion - many shared with tokomak fusion - and some extra ones - how do you get the production and high repetition rate placing of pellets to work at low cost? How do you make high power lasers which are also highly efficient? How do you get higher Q from the pellet burning (only 1% burns at the moment)

No need to invent extra problems...

Anyway - the motivation for laser fusion is that laser and pellet technology has advanced so rapidly - enabling it - and can reasonably be expected to continue that advance.

Currently "real Q" = 0.01 (300MJ in -> 3MJ out)

Lasers are 1% efficient. Modern lasers would be 20% efficient - a quick factor of 20 increase

Pellet technology does not have obvious fundamental limits and getting a factor of 10X out of that seem very plausible - that would be burning 10% instead of 1% of fuel.

Together that gives us "real world" Q=2

Within range of what is needed - for a cheap power station you probably need Q=6 or more (because of the extra cost from turbines/generators/cooling if a large amount of the generated electricity has to be recirculated into the lasers).

It is an artificial but very important milestone - and progress has been fast enough in the last 5 years that asking people to take this seriously as a very high reward high risk path to fusion energy is reasonable.

LENR-lite - if it is real (see other threads) will have similar demands for high reward high risk investment. And, if it can show it is real, it will similarly get money.

THH

Quote from Zephir_AWT

Frankly, just the first objection looks as most significant one for me. Why? From the NIF history graph follows that latest achievment was done by assisting laser fusion by discharge of coil surrounding the fusion cell. This would create magnetic field impulse which would compress plasma by mechanism similar to pinch fusion. And then there is the problem, that we don't know, which amount of input energy/electricity has been actually used in this impulse.

Zephir, you do this site no service spreading conspiracy theories which can only fly if 1000s of scientists, most of whom are non-tenured and many post-docs all collude in falsifying scientific reports.

I recommend to you David Brin's excellent analysis of how climate skeptics can be distinguished from deniers

Distinguishing Climate "Deniers" From "Skeptics"

A blog about science, technology, science fiction, books, and the future.

davidbrin.blogspot.com

The same arguments about vanishingly small likelihood of major scientific conspiracies apply to your suggestion.

It is true that there are many other (less clearly workable but more desirable if they could be made to work) fusion confinement strategies - and also that potentially hybrid strategies could end up winning.

Anyway - the "breakthrough" is not really that, since laser energy in/fusion energy out Q is pretty irrelevant in this case, but it makes a media splash and laser fusion deserves this given that it has progressed so quickly from being not even a possibility to now being a serious contender.

And BTW this figure (equiv COP=2.5) is much more certain and replicable than LENR results - albeit it costs a lot!

THHuxleynew , your objections sound really out of place given the absolutely factual criticisms that have been put forward by not only BG;/dj8~ but many other scientists. The latest announcements were pure hype. The 2.5 is only a figment of imagination. As Zephir_AWT points out, there's no way to know how much the MHD Z pinch effect really contributed to the observed result. In 2006, the Z machine, which is not even an ICF device, using stainless steel ions, reached "unexpected" 4x thermal output vs kinetic energy input, reaching temperatures in excess of 3,6 billion Kelvin. They were not even trying to do fusion and got much closer than NIF to it!!! The Z machine works not even in vaccum, just plain air, at those temperatures, you can put a lithium stick in the center of the unintended "hohlraum" made of a cylindrical array of stainless steel wires, and you could expect to see, at those temperatures, self sustaining aneutronic fusion.

Thank you Zephir_AWT we learn so much according to your deep explantions i like.

Anyway this main of research is typically how things are often done in USA according my understand.

A country gifted to make money but not especially to spend it well.

We have had the Appollo programm a kind of half success , the good side was the walk the worst the cost which interrupted quickly the adventure.

Next the Space Shuttle which never reached the expected rentabilty however we learnt so much from its bad engineering point ( good for the future space plane)

However in my mind the best space pictures we have seen by it.

Now about this fusion "hammer investment", sure, we will have also ( as for Apollo and the Shutlle) a day a great pay back even if not yet well undefined.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

Ignition Omission: Understanding the National Ignition Facility Milestone also accompanying video presentation.

1. The actual device input energy that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory omitted in its December 2022 announcement.
2. The real-world significance of fusion ignition/scientific breakeven.
3. The gap between the ignition result and the energy needed for device breakeven.
4. The extremely brief duration of the fusion reaction.
5. Why the claims that fusion is an “unlimited, abundant” source of energy are not true.
6. That one of the two required fuels for most nuclear fusion concepts does not exist.
7. That there currently are no good ways to make tritium.
8. Visually, how far away this fusion device is from becoming a practical source of energy.

Frankly, just the first objection looks as most significant one for me. Why? From the NIF history graph follows that latest achievment was done by assisting laser fusion by discharge of coil surrounding the fusion cell. This would create magnetic field impulse which would compress plasma by mechanism similar to pinch fusion. And then there is the problem, that we don't know, which amount of input energy/electricity has been actually used in this impulse.

Which is because the output laser array energy (which is an impressive piece of technology by itself) can not be increased too much anymore. So that everyone could assume, that the whole increase of fusion yield was done without contribution of lasers. But the energy which one can put into magnetic pulse and pinch can be increased nearly arbitrarily and it can easily exceed the amount of energy delivered by lasers by order of magnitude. This is because the laser array has rather low net energy efficiency, whereas the powering of solenoid required just a capacitor bank, the size of which can be increased arbitrarily. And one megajoule shot from capacitor bank is nothing spectacular here, for instance the Z-machine delivers 20 MJ into shots regularly.

One should expect that there is strong political pressure to keep the investments into USD 5 billion NIF facility running and this facility consumes one billion every year in addition. So it may be easily possible, that NIF facility was silently redesigned from laser fusion to Z-pinch machine and most if not all the ceremonially announced increase of output power actually comes from energy introduced into pinch, not from fusion reaction itself. The laser array is there just for illumination of Z-pinch discharge, literally speaking.

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Quote from Curbina

THHuxleynew , your objections sound really out of place given the absolutely factual criticisms that have been put forward by not only BG;/dj8~ but many other scientists. The latest announcements were pure hype. The 2.5 is only a figment of imagination. As Zephir_AWT points out, there's no way to know how much the MHD Z pinch effect really contributed to the observed result. In 2006, the Z machine, which is not even an ICF device, using stainless steel ions, reached "unexpected" 4x thermal output vs kinetic energy input, reaching temperatures in excess of 3,6 billion Kelvin. They were not even trying to do fusion and got much closer than NIF to it!!! The Z machine works not even in vaccum, just plain air, at those temperatures, you can put a lithium stick in the center of the unintended "hohlraum" made of a cylindrical array of stainless steel wires, and you could expect to see, at those temperatures, self sustaining aneutronic fusion.

Hi Curbina,

Could you say which of my points is incorrect? Unless the NIF "laser energy in" figure is calculated as X-ray energy from hohlraum rather than laser energy hitting hohlraum, They cannot have an extra energy source from magnetic fields without knowing that they have this. It does not matter how much of the actual confinement is due to Z-pinch - given that all the initial energy comes from the lasers. In the Z machine the varying external electrical input used to make the pinch introduces energy - you cannot have that with NIF.

Of course this "breakthrough" is hype. Just as ICCF24 is hype. The question is whether the factors that increase Q from current 0.01 to ~6 are achievable, and if so on what timescale. There are then a whole load of other issues - hohlraum manufacture and cost etc - but those are technology not physics and if tehre is one thing we know - it is that technology can lead to vast increases in efficiency and reductions in cost as long as the physics fundamentals stack up.

I'd still view this as one of the riskier paths to fusion - and given than PV/wind/batteries are likely to be doing so well over the next 20 years I am not sure fusion will ever be cost-effective.

Of the "alt-fusion" approaches I'd rate them as:

1. Small stellerator/tokomak using HTS magnets

2. ICF

3. all the others (FRCs, MTF, etc)

It is interesting that the two best candidates are the two extremes of longest containment or shortest containment.

One of the reasons for continuing with the very short containment ICF stuff is that this is the least well understood regime - and it is entirely possible that some relatively simple breakthrough could dramatically increase ignition efficiency.

The actual goal of these giant expensive international fusion projects is to teach different countries to work together on a project that exceeds the length of one election cycle. Something that is at least 20 and maybe 50 years away, always, is the perfect platform for this teaching.

I also want to point out that most on this thread seem to be agreeing (without evidence) on a conspiracy theory that would require 1000s of scientists all to be complicit in falsifying scientific results. Not something that should be casually stated without extremely good proof.

Just to make it easier for all the deniers and nay-sayers here who seem extraordinarily convinced by Krivit (Krivit's record is somewhat patchy - he is a journalist).

I'd recommend Nature's explainer for a more balanced discussion

Nuclear-fusion lab achieves ‘ignition’: what does it mean?

Researchers at the US National Ignition Facility created a reaction that made more energy than they put in.

www.nature.com

The facility used its set of 192 lasers to deliver 2.05 megajoules of energy onto a pea-sized gold cylinder containing a frozen pellet of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The laser’s pulse of energy caused the capsule to collapse, reaching temperatures only seen in stars and thermonuclear weapons, and the hydrogen isotopes fused into helium, releasing additional energy and creating a cascade of fusion reactions. The laboratory’s analysis suggests that the reaction released some 3.15 MJ of energy — roughly 54% more than went into the reaction, and more than double the previous record of 1.3 MJ.

“Fusion research has been going on since the early 1950s, and this is the first time in the laboratory that fusion has ever produced more energy than it consumed,” says Campbell.

However, although the fusion reactions produced more than 3 MJ of energy — more than was delivered to the target — NIF’s lasers consumed 322 MJ of energy in the process. Still, the experiment qualifies as ignition, a benchmark criterion for fusion reactions.

“It’s a big milestone, but NIF is not a fusion-energy device,” says David Hammer, a nuclear-energy engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many steps on the path to laser fusion energy. “NIF was not designed to be efficient,” he says. “It was designed to be the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research programme.”

NIF scientists made multiple changes before the latest laser shot, based in part on analysis and computer modelling of previous experiments. In addition to boosting the laser’s power by around 8%, scientists reduced the number of imperfections in the target and adjusted how they delivered the laser energy to create a more spherical implosion. Operating at the cusp of fusion ignition, the scientists knew that “little changes can make a big difference”, Herrmann says.

Krivit says:

New Energy Times | LENR News and Scientific References

1. The announcement of a breakthrough is spin. There I agree - but all serious news outlets pointed that out. And the increase in Q over 3 years from this system merits hype.
2. "real" Q = 0.01 => nowhere near commercially acceptable Q. Here Krivit ignores the fact that this is a very old system using old laser technology with 1% efficiency. Replacing those by known new lasers would up system to 20% efficiency, and therefore Q = 0.2. Krivit also ignores the 1% combustion. It is quite plausible to think that relatively simple changes in pellet design etc could up the combustion by a large factor - and therefore so increase Q.
3. The reaction lasts for only 90ps. This is Krivit not understanding physics. What matters is the energy output per pulse - not the reaction rate. There is real difficult technology needed to get pulses every 10s or so - which would provide 30MW of power. But it is not more difficult just because the files is burning for 90ps per pulse

Zephir adds into this some suggestion that non-laser energy is going into the system (as happens in Z-pinch). I think this is 100% rubbish, and also that it would imply 1000s of scientists all conspiring to falsify data, but perhaps I am just not understanding Zephir - he would need to explain what is happening.

Can anyone seriously say that Krivit's negative write-up is more balanced than the positive but not "its a done thing" summary from Nature?

Quote from Alan Smith

They don't even have to bother falsifying them, they just do censorship by omission. As for the NIF it was set up to work on laser-triggering of nuclear weapons. It can do one shot per week. It has as much relationship to commercial fusion energy as I do to the Fon of Bafut.

Those facts are all known and stated in all the "serious" write-ups and tv reports. They do not stop this from being an exciting development, because it is pretty straightforward to extrapolate from these results to ones using more energy-efficient lasers and the technology required for high pulse-repetition rates again can be extrapolated - the problems known. NIF scientific papers do not "censor" anything.

I was positive about ICF fusion 5 years ago on grounds that the enabling technology (lasers) was theoretically highly efficient and advancing rapidly. I am still positive, though overall this is still very high risk.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I'd recommend Nature's explainer for a more balanced discussion

"I'd recommend Nature's explainer for a discussion that is in line with the official narrative."

FIFY.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Just to make it easier for all the deniers and nay-sayers here who seem extraordinarily convinced by Krivit (Krivit's record is somewhat patchy - he is a journalist).

A totally factual and well supported message has nothing to do with anyone's love or hate for the messenger.

Quote from Curbina

"I'd recommend Nature's explainer for a discussion that is in line with the official narrative."

FIFY.

Curbina - would you like to substantiate your subtext here. I have no idea what is "the official narrative" other than (tautologically) what is in Nature. But that tautology makes your statement meaningless.

And if you say this you presumably agree the "official narrative" is pretty cautious:

“Fusion research has been going on since the early 1950s, and this is the first time in the laboratory that fusion has ever produced more energy than it consumed,” says Campbell.

However, although the fusion reactions produced more than 3 MJ of energy — more than was delivered to the target — NIF’s lasers consumed 322 MJ of energy in the process. Still, the experiment qualifies as ignition, a benchmark criterion for fusion reactions.

“It’s a big milestone, but NIF is not a fusion-energy device,” says David Hammer, a nuclear-energy engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many steps on the path to laser fusion energy. “NIF was not designed to be efficient,” he says. “It was designed to be the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research programme.”

“There were a lot of people who didn’t think it was possible, but I and others who kept the faith feel somewhat vindicated,” says Michael Campbell, former director of the laser energetics laboratory at the University of Rochester in New York and an early proponent of NIF while at Lawrence Livermore lab. “I’m having a cosmo to celebrate.”

It took more than a decade, “but they can be commended for reaching their goal”, says Stephen Bodner, a physicist who formerly headed the laser plasma branch of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. Bodner says the big question now is what the Department of Energy will do next: double down on weapons research at the NIF or pivot to a laser programme geared towards fusion-energy research.