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Dry-run experiments verify key aspect of Sandia nuclear fusion concept
- ck2 14y agoIsn'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 14y agoSandia 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.
- fintler 14y agoAlso, sometimes the nuclear stuff goes beyond weapons. Like destroying asteroids for example. http://insidehpc.com/2012/01/08/video-visualizing-the-los-alamos-asteroid-killer/ http://insidehpc.com/2012/01/08/video-visualizing-the-los-al...
- ck2 14y agoAh 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.
- Daniel_Newby 14y agoHere's an image search for "Navajo eagle": http://www.google.com/search?q=navajo+eagle&hl=en&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X http://www.google.com/search?q=navajo+eagle&hl=en&pr...
- fintler 14y agoThere are two sides to every coin. "The purpose of the Sedan explosion was to determine if nuclear devices could be used as cratering or earth moving mechanisms [for construction purposes]." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1o38Yo5OhY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1o38Yo5OhY
- 001sky 14y agoThe 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 14y agoYou forgot Black Mesa in NM. ;-)
- josephcooney 14y agoI think the nazis stole the bird iconography from the romans.
- dfc 14y agoHow do you find the sandia logo creepy? Do you think all Native American imagery is creepy?
- pyre 14y agoHe's somehow associating it with this: http://www.thegrandoldgame.com/Bob/Bayern/NaziEmblem01.jpg http://www.thegrandoldgame.com/Bob/Bayern/NaziEmblem01.jpg
- javert 14y agodoing weapons research under the guise of helping people You're presuming those are different things, when they aren't necessarily. Good weaponry is a prerequisite for world (or even domestic) peace. Of course, good ideas are also a prerequisite, and in that area, we're far more lacking.
- dsr_ 14y agoClean 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.)
- gus_massa 14y agoIt's really very difficult to predict which technologies will work in 50 years. Try to imagine yourself in 1962 and try to predict what would happen in 2012. I googled http://www.google.com/#q=1960+technology+predictions http://www.google.com/#q=1960+technology+predictions , there are a lot of results, some of them are very interesting. But it is difficult to choose the sites with good reliable information. Or in other words: http://xkcd.com/678/ http://xkcd.com/678/
- InclinedPlane 14y agoWell, 1952 to 2002 would be even more challenging (42 even more so). The transistor was new, lasers hadn't been invented, no orbital satellites had been launched, computers were very primitive, etc. So much of our modern communications infrastructure is based on lasers, satellites, and micro-chips. What invention will render our predictions utterly useless? Consider the potential of memristor technology, for example, which could put vastly increase the power and space efficiency of computers and lead to micro-chip sized supercomputers. Or maybe we invent some form of nanofabrication, or room temperature superconductors, or some invention that wouldn't even make sense to us today.
- jostmey 14y agoI would not rush to call fusion "clean". But it would be an amazing power source.
- DennisP 14y agoIt'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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bluestix 14y agoFor $20M I will show you how to do fusion cheaply and safely. You can do it at home if you want.
- zrail 14y agoIf I'm interpreting this correctly, each liner is a one-use consumable and all of the power it can generate comes out in one big burst. How does long-term power generation work in that scenario? Is there a big feed tube that drops liners into a chamber, fuse them, then dump them out the bottom?
- jff 14y agoI think the idea is closer to shooting the liners into the chamber, but essentially yes. I saw a video at one point (don't have it handy) that one of the labs put together, illustrating a conceptual plant based on current work, in which fuel pellets were fired into the fusion chamber one after another.
- Retric 14y agoThink internal combustion engine. Lot's of detonations fast enough + Flywheel (or in this case large heat sink) = steady power. As to cost 1GW of electricity is worth ~50,000$ an hour so there is room for a fair amount of consumables.
- MattGrommes 14y agoI 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.
- adlep 14y agomeanwhile Adrea Rossi's ECAT LENR device is getting closer and closer to reality. http://www.e-catworld.com/ http://www.e-catworld.com/ http://rossilivecat.com/ http://rossilivecat.com/ http://youtu.be/tjOoGtTFpNk http://youtu.be/tjOoGtTFpNk http://youtu.be/JWoaJ5NEj-w http://youtu.be/JWoaJ5NEj-w http://youtu.be/2cOEHQmnG-I http://youtu.be/2cOEHQmnG-I http://www.e-catworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/EFA-rep-1107.pdf http://www.e-catworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/EFA-rep...
- vectorpush 14y agoIt'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 14y agoRossi 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-heat-from-nickel-hydrogen-reactor-at-niweek/ http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/08/celani-demonstrates-excess... 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.
- cletus 14y agoI 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.htm http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.ht... [2]: http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/FAQ.aspx#Depletion http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/FAQ.aspx#Depletion [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Fusion_reactions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Fusion_reactions
- Daniel_Newby 14y ago