But can they attach the laser beams to the heads of sharks?
Posted on 06/09/2003 11:29:17 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently produced 10,400 Joules or 10.4 kiloJoules (kJ) of ultraviolet laser light in a single laser beamline, setting a world record for laser performance.
In recent weeks NIF laser scientists also have used the first four NIF beamlines to set records for infrared and green single beam laser energies with 21 kJ and 11 kJ of energy delivered, respectively. NIF researchers focused this light into a special diagnostic system designed to provide precise measurements of laser beam quality and performance at these different frequencies.
The NIF laser system has now demonstrated ultraviolet laser energy equivalent to 2 million Joules (MJ) in 192 beams. This “full NIF equivalent” performance exceeds the design requirement of 1.8 MJ specified for NIF.
“The NIF project has demonstrated excellent management and technical performance under very demanding circumstances. NIF continues surpassing expectations and is now breaking world records. It is well on its way to becoming one of the jewels of NNSA and the nuclear weapons complex,” said Linton Brooks, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said.
NIF Associate Director George Miller agreed, saying, “We have met or exceeded all current required milestones in the baseline established three years ago. We have now demonstrated on a per-beam basis the critical performance criteria of NIF. These accomplishments show that NIF is ready to fulfill the promise of its vital role in maintaining the viability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent through the Stockpile Stewardship Program.”
NIF’s football stadium-sized building will house 192 laser beams delivering ultraviolet laser light to millimeter-sized targets. The tremendous energy available in NIF can be used to produce conditions of extreme temperature and pressure, similar to those that occur in stars and in exploding nuclear weapons.
NIF also will be used to achieve inertial confinement fusion ignition with energy gain, which will provide researchers with a better understanding of the processes that occur in nuclear weapons and will provide valuable data for future fusion energy power production.
When fully activated, NIF will provide 50 times more energy than any other laser system and will be a cornerstone of the NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program.
In the process of achieving this milestone, the NIF research team has met or exceeded a number of critical performance criteria including:
The achievement of this milestone and demonstration of NIF performance criteria continue a string of successes that have taken place in the past six months. The successful completion of this activity required the efforts of hundreds of workers in disciplines ranging from construction to precision optics. In the process, all of the major systems required to demonstrate the operation of NIF were installed, activated and commissioned to NIF specifications.
In the coming year NIF personnel will use these first laser beams to characterize NIF’s performance and begin basic and applied science experiments. Experiments are planned to begin on NIF starting this year and will continue while the project is completed. Experimental capabilities will grow as additional laser beams are activated, culminating in the completion of all 192 laser beams in 2008.
Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a national security laboratory, with a mission to ensure national security and apply science and technology to the important issues of our time. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
Laboratory news releases and photos are also available electronically on the World Wide Web of the Internet at URL http://www.llnl.gov/PAO and on UC Newswire.
________________________________________________________
Introduction to Inertial Confinement Fusion
Section 1
Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) has been defined as "an approach to fusion that relies on the inertia of the fuel mass to provide confinement."[1] In practice, ICF is based on the concept of igniting a thermonuclear reaction by irradiating and imploding a small capsule (on the order of one millimeter in diameter) containing hydrogen isotopes -- typically equal mixtures of deuterium and tritium. ICF originated in the thermonuclear weapons program of the United States in the late 1950s as part of a classified research effort to understand if nuclear weapons could be designed without using fissile material. The invention of the laser in 1960 spurred ICF work, which then evolved over the next 40 years at the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories through a series of ever-larger laser facilities in an effort to generate significant amounts of energy through ICF. U.S. declassification of basic concepts of ICF occurred in 1972, but wholesale release of information did not occur until the 1990s.
To date, no laser facility has ever produced significant amounts of energy through ICF. Specifically, there has been no laser experiment in which the thermonuclear fuel ignited and burned in a self-sustained way over the short time before the capsule blew apart. It is reported that ICF thermonuclear ignition and self-sustained burn was observed for some types of capsules irradiated by the x-rays produced by nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site in a project code-named Halite/Centurion. These experiments were conducted in the 1980s and their details remain secret.
Since the U.S. nuclear testing moratorium began in 1992, ICF and nuclear weapons research have become -- as a matter of government policy -- even more strongly coupled. The resulting program, known as the Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship, has provided the rationale for the latest and most massive laser ICF research facility, called the National Ignition Facility, or NIF. Physical construction of NIF at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory began in June 1997. In August of 1999, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson confirmed that the NIF project had suffered significant cost overruns and schedule delays. The total cost of NIF currently consists of $1.2 billion in "project" costs and another $1.1 to $1.3 billion in ICF "program" costs. Including annual operating costs of between $100 and $200 million over 30 years, NRDC estimates the total cost of the NIF to be between $5.3 and $8.5 billion before any cost overruns are added. As of January 2000, about $800 million of the NIF project funds has been spent.
The Natural Resources Defense Council has opposed, including through litigation, the NIF project since its inception. Our objections may be summarized as follows:
In addition to these specific objections, which indicate that achievement of ignition at the NIF is now only a remote possibility, NRDC also opposes numerous elements of the Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship Program because they represent a sizable re-investment in nuclear weapons research capabilities. This reinvestment runs counter to the goal of deep reductions in nuclear arms by the United States and Russia and counter to the goal of strengthening the non-proliferation regime, including the achievement of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The NIF has been represented by the Department of Energy as the flagship of the Stockpile Stewardship Program.
In November of 1999, Energy Secretary Richardson requested that the Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board, or SEAB, duly constituted under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, offer him advice on the best course of action in light of the current difficulties with construction of the NIF. Earlier, Congress had directed the secretary to certify by June 1, 2000, a new cost and schedule baseline for the NIF, or, "If the secretary is unable to provide such a certification, the Department [of Energy] should prepare an estimate of the costs necessary to terminate the project."
Thus through the first half of this year the NIF project hangs in the balance. More broadly, the rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by the U.S. Senate on October 13, 1999, and the upcoming presidential elections call into question the future of the current Stockpile Stewardship Program. NRDC will continue to study and report on the evolving situation with the NIF. On this web page we will make available, in addition to our material and relevant links, a collection of documentation on the NIF and on the Stockpile Stewardship Program. Our goal is to assemble primary source materials on the U.S. nuclear weapons program and make these documents widely accessible during a time of review and change.
That's still a severe constraint on practical or commercial fusion power production.
But can they attach the laser beams to the heads of sharks?
Fusion at the National Ignition Facility
__________________________________________________
 |
 |
An artist's 3-D rendition of laser beams depositing energy to heat up a fusion capsule at the proposed National Ignition Facility. (Courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) Slated to be located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a proposed US research center where scientists would study nuclear fusion and other processes involving extremely dense plasmas (collections of electrically charged particles). Expected to be funded and completed by the early part of next decade, NIF will use high-powered lasers to achieve, among other things, inertial confinement fusion, in which a deuterium-tritium fuel pellet is compressed to extremely high densities. In experiments aiming to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion reactions, the densities are expected to reach up to 1000 grams per cubic centimeter, over 6 times the density of the center of the Sun.
| Below: Cutaway view of the NIF target area. The laser beams focus energy onto a target located at the center of the target chamber. (Courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) |
 |
When built, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) will house the world's most powerful neodymium glass laser system. NIF will be 50 times more powerful than the Laboratory's Nova laser, currently the world's most powerful. The NIF will contain 192 independent laser beams, or "beamlets," each with a square aperture of a little less than 40 cm on a side. For economy and efficiency, beamlets will be stacked four high and twelve wide into four large arrays. The beamlines will require more than 9000 large-format optics (greater than 40 x 40 cm) and several thousand smaller optics. Compared to the size of the current Nova facility at LLNL, which uses a single-pass amplifier laser architecture, the compact multipass design of the proposed NIF system allows us to put a laser with a typical output that is 40 times greater than Nova's into a building only about twice the size. This article follows the path of a photon from the master oscillator and preamplifier, through the NIF main laser components, to the target. It also highlights some of the development efforts, begun many years ago, for components, such as the multipass glass amplifiers and plasma electrode Pockels cell, that allow us to design a large, multipass glass laser economically and at very low risk. Results from our recently completed Beamlet Demonstration Project, involving a prototype NIF beamline, along with the models and design codes we are testing ensure that we can have great confidence in the performance projected for NIF.
Since the end of the Cold War with the demise of the Soviet Union, the U.S. nuclear weapons program has changed dramatically. A major change has been the moratorium on underground nuclear testing, which is likely to be extended indefinitely by a Comprehensive Test- Ban Treaty. Although there are now far fewer weapons and weapon types than only a few years ago, the nuclear stockpile nevertheless remains, and U.S. policy will continue to rely on nuclear deterrence for the foreseeable future. Because the U.S. must be confident that the nuclear arsenal would perform reliably if needed, reliance on testing to assess weapon performance must be replaced by reliance on thorough scientific understanding and better predictive models of performance -- that is, science-based stockpile stewardship. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will enable us to produce energy densities (energies per particle) that overlap with the energy densities produced in nuclear weapons, yet the total energy available on NIF will be a minuscule fraction of the total energy from a weapon. This combination of low total energy with weapons- regime energy density will allow us to pursue, besides ignition experiments, many nonignition experiments. These will allow us to improve our understanding of materials and processes in extreme conditions by isolating various fundamental physics processes and phenomena for separate investigation. Such studies will include opacity to radiation, equations of state, and hydrodynamic instability. In addition to these, we will study processes in which two or more such phenomena come into play, such as in radiation transport and in ignition. Weapons physics research on NIF offers a considerable benefit to stockpile stewardship, not only in enabling us to keep abreast of issues associated with an aging stockpile, but also in offering a major resource for training the next generation of scientists who will monitor the stockpile.
The proposed National Ignition Facility (NIF) will provide LLNL researchers as well as others in the scientific community committed to developing Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) with the means of developing and testing data and materials that are key to the long- term goal of building and operating IFE power plants as clean, viable, environmentally safe sources of inexhaustible energy. When the NIF demonstrates fusion ignition, which is central to proving the feasibility of IFE, it will tell us much about IFE target optimization and fabrication, provide important data on fusion-chamber phenomena and technologies, and demonstrate the safe and environmentally benign operation of an IFE power plant. In accomplishing these tasks, the NIF will also provide the basis for future decisions about IFE development programs and facilities, such as the planned Engineering Test Facility (ETF). Furthermore, it will allow the U.S. to expand its expertise in inertial fusion and supporting industrial technology as well as promote U.S. leadership in energy technologies, provide clean, viable alternatives to oil and other polluting fossil fuels, and reduce energy-related emissions of greenhouse gases.
Last March, a group of scientists convened at the University of California, Berkeley, to discuss the potential scientific applications of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) -- a 192-beam, neodymium glass laser that will be used to obtain the high-energy physics data needed to maintain the nation's nuclear stockpile. The objective of the gathering was to identify areas of research in which the NIF could be used to advance knowledge in the physical sciences and to define a tentative program of high-energy laser experiments. The scientists determined that the most effective scientific applications of the NIF would be in astrophysics, hydrodynamics, high-pressure physics, and plasma physics. In astrophysics, the NIF would give scientists the ability to synthesize and analyze the plasmas that occur at all stages of stellar evolution. In hydrodynamics, it would enable them to investigate flow problems under conditions that cannot be obtained by the conventional wind tunnel or shock tube. In high-pressure physics, it would allow scientists to investigate material behavior at pressures from 1 to 100 terapascals and temperatures up to a few hundred electron volts so that they could validate their theoretical models of material behavior. Scientists would also be able to convert NIF laser energy to a wide variety of x-ray and particle sources needed to address important questions in basic and applied physics. With the NIF, scientists could push the x-ray laser interferometer to shorter x-ray laser wavelengths so that it would be a more valuable diagnostic tool in the study and characterization of large-scale plasmas. In short, the NIF would enable scientists to explore a previously inaccessible region of physical phenomena that could validate their current theories and experimental observations and provide a foundation for new knowledge of the physical world.
To ensure the safety of workers and the public and to assess potential environmental impacts, we have completed the first of a series of safety and environmental analyses related to the proposed National Ignition Facility (NIF). On the basis of its review of the Preliminary Hazards Analysis report, the DOE has concurred with the categorization of the NIF as a radiological low-hazard, non-nuclear facility. Our studies to date show that the NIF will present no significant environmental or health and safety risk. For example, the average annual biological radiation dose to a NIF worker is estimated to be about 0.01 rem. This value is less than 10% of the DOE guideline. As part of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) determination process established by the DOE, the public will be invited to participate in reviewing environmental, safety, and health issues related to the NIF.
December 1994 in PDF format (3,300K)
and LLNL Disclaimers
UCRL-52000
Rep rate is a bit low, granted.
When Illiac IV (the first real supercomputer) did it's first "hello world," it could only run for a few seconds at at time before crashing and requiring hours of trouble-shooting. Such is life on the bleeding edge.
I assumed the 10 kJ level of performance had been achieved long ago. Maybe the holdup has something to do with the priorities of the previous Administration, but who knows?
(steely)
...upon hearing this news, Governor Gray Davis immediately shut the facility down after denouncing it as a 'waste of energy that could be better used to power low-income housing'.
This was set as an initial requirement !
Keep this away from JimRob and the AMs!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.