I don’t know if I can decribe how promising this news is:
A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show. The controlled fusion of atoms – creating conditions like those in our Sun – has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source. However, there have been doubts about the use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the “plasma” they create could interrupt the fusion. An article in Science showed the plasma is far less of a problem than expected. The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams. Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser – by a factor of 20.
This is huge. I have been one of those who has been skeptical about the potential for large-scale laser-heated inertial containment fusion systems precisely because of the “plasma problem” that had been expected to happen at these super high energy levels. Basically these experiements showed the fusion fuel absorbing up to 95% of the laser energy even at energy levels approaching what are needed to achieve fusion. Predictions from many experts was that the plasma generated by the lasers would block the energy absorbtion creating a situation where the more energy you poured into the lasers, the more energy the plasma would block, meaning that the power curve would never turn positive in a system that could be controlled on earth. This was considered to be perhaps the single largest technical hurdle to overcome, and this research basically says “not really a problem after all.”
If this holds up, we could be hearing about successful fusion reactions generating more energy than they need to “ignite” within a year or so.
And Polywell fusion is still looking promising too.
Awesome news.
11 users commented in " OMG! level news from fusion "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackSo that leads to interesting speculative directions. Suppose that fusion creates “free” or “extremely cheap” energy. Suppose that within a decade it can be commercialized and made available to western consumers.
What does it mean for fossil-fuel-producing economies like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Venezuela, even Russia?
A new economic collapse for them? Or by then would the world at large be so transformed by fusion energy that it won’t matter?
There are a lot of uses for petroleum other than as an energy source. It is also the raw material for a lot of plastics and other things we use every day.
JSullins, I’ve blogged on this before. Fusion could be a “game changer” which would have unpredictable consequences for geopolitics and human society.
But my humble layman’s opinion is that these laser heated inertial containment systems are not likely to be THAT game-changing because of the immense infrastructure needed to sustain the fusion reaction at those energy levels. That’s one reason I still have so much hope for polywell fusion.
In other words fusion from giant laser power plants will not likely be that much less expensive per watt than electricity from fission, coal or natural gas, so it’s not likely to usher in a golden age of “free energy.”
However, and this is a big “however” it WOULD create a major dent in the domination of coal for power generation. But it would probably not have an immediate impact on oil because oil is mostly turned into portable fuel for the transportation industry while coal is mostly used to generate electricity.
The longer term impact of this sort of breakthrough might well be in space exploitation. Fusion reactors powering ion engines could conceivably allow us to create practical interstellar spacecraft.
For this sort of fusion to have a real impact on the oil market, we’re going to have to convert from a gas and diesel based transportation model to one based on electricity, and that ain’t gonna happen overnight.
Some more thoughts on the likely geopolitical and societal results of large-scale laser based fusion generators.
Desalination of ocean water could become economically feasible. They have to process millions of gallons of water anyway to get the deuterium fuel for the fusion power plants, so adding desalination into the mix using excess fusion reaction power would make sense. That could have real game-changing impacts on societies which are struggling with not enough fresh, clean water (like the southwest USA for example).
China (and other newly developing countries, such as India) would almost certainly invest heavily in fusion power plants and put tremendous international pressure on the USA to replace our huge investment in coal power plants with fusion power plants. That would likely be a net negative economic impact at first since coal power generation provides hundreds of thousands of jobs in this country, and building new power plants won’t be cheap.
Those same newly developing countries would also invest heavily in transforming their still expanding transportation infrastructure to run off electricity while the USA would have to replace existing infrastructure at tremendous cost.
It is possible, not likely but possible that fusion power plants could be used to generate non fossil-fuel based fuels which would replace gas and diesel, which would have a huge impact on the oil trade. But as I said, I don’t consider this likely.
Oil-rich nations with limited infrastructure and highly concentrated power systems would be among the easiest to convert to the new fusion model, and due to things like desalination would be among those with the most to gain from them. So even if the oil business dies down, countries like Saudi Arabia may end ahead of the rest of the world in taking advantage of the new technology.
Interesting to speculate on.
In April 2009, the Polywell was awarded a further $2 million in funding as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009. The citation in the legislation was labelled as Plasma Fusion (Polywell) – Demonstrate fusion plasma confinement system for shore and shipboard applications; Joint OSD/USN project. The citation occurs 166 pages into the document, and suggests development of the device for ‘Domestic Energy Supply / Distribution’.
In May 2009, Richard Nebel was interviewed in a popular science/futurism blog. He stated: “We are hoping to have a net energy production product within six years. It could take longer, but this definitely won’t be a 50 year development project. [...] So if the concept works we could have a commercial plant operating as early as 2020.”
In June 2009, the US Navy confirmed that contracts were now in existence for the funding and construction of WB-8, the next Polywell prototype. This device will have an eightfold increase in magnetic field strength compared to previous WB series devices, with the expectation of higher performance. Of particular importance within the Navy contract announcing these developments is the proposal that …based on the results of WB8 testing, and the availability of government funds the contractor shall develop a WB machine (WB8.1) which incorporates the knowledge and improvements gained in WB8. It is expected that higher ion drive capabilities will be added, and that a “PB11” reaction will be demonstrated.
In September 2009, the US Department of Defense announced further funding of $7,855,504 for Energy Matter Conversion Corp (EMC2) for research, analysis, development, and testing in support of the Plan Plasma Fusion (Polywell) Project. Efforts under this Recovery Act award will validate the basic physics of the Plasma Fusion (Polywell) concept, as well as provide the Navy with data for potential applications of polywell fusion. The project is expected to be completed by April 2011.
Yep, like I said, I have high hopes for Polywell fusion. That’s the real “game changer” with cheap, simple, portable fusion generators. That’s when we’ll see the oil economy start to wither and die.
But there’s no reason not to have both laser based inertial containment and Polywell fusion side by side. Until we get them both working, we really can’t say which scales better. I suspect it may turn out that laser driven fusion is what will run cities, while polywell runs towns, ships, and perhaps even trains…
Well, as far as portable energy goes, I would imagine it would not be so hard to achieve. Assuming fusion power techniques are applied to create electricity, we can see electric cars that are truly commercial successes. Maybe the car would cost more to manufacture, but the savings on fuel costs could be huge. And rechargeable battery technology has come a long way, and will continue to progress with or without electric cars needing them (we have laptops and iPhones to thank for that). I think electrically-powered transportation could be practical very quickly in a world where cheap fusion-derived electricity existed. And the infrastructure would already be largely in place, even in the US.
You are an optimist J. I think conversion to electricity based transportation in the USA is going to be much more difficult than most people realize. If fusion were to suddenly become available tomorrow China and India (and even Brazil) would be in a signifantly better position to benefit than the USA. Many people don’t realize that Brazil adopted cell phone technology faster than the USA. The reason is because Brazil never installed a nationwide landline infrastructure. They were in the midst of that effort when cell phones were introduced and they simply switched gears to install cell phone towers instead. The same basic dynamic will exist with electricity distribution. Our grid simply cannot handle the demand of every house in the nation charging their cars overnight. Huge portions of our installed grid infrastructure require several hours of limited demand for overheated transformers to cool down. The overnight downtime has been designed into our grid infrastructure. Replacing even ONE of those transformers can take months, and the USA no longer even manufactures transformers capable of handling a 24 hr load. It’s gonna be a lot harder than people think to get our infrastructure upgraded to allow an electric transportation conversion.
It is a rare day indeed when I bear the optimist tag. I’ll take it.
That’s another reason I like polywell fusion. Local power generators for communities might then be feasible, and that would make the need for huge transcontinental electricity transport through massive transformers unnecessary. This would also have positive impact on the robustness and resilience of our electrical grid as well.
It is conceivable that by 2020 a community like Highlands Ranch could have their own power generator using polywell fusion technology and feeding excess power back into the grid.
dondad, yes it is true that petroleum has more uses than just as fuel. But so long as fuel is the overwhelming product generated, we’ll still be calling it the “oil economy.” Once we’ve gotten away from gas and diesel as fuel, then a lot of products will get suddenly cheaper as the amount of oil we have for raw materials for plastics and other items suddenly outstrips the demand for oil.
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