Nuclear mattersLivermore scientists to begin fusion quest before end of month
Before the end of the month, scientists at Livermore’s National Ignition Facility will conduct an experiment backed by billions of dollars — and which promises to change the world’s energy supply; the scientists are preparing to meet an end-of-month deadline for the first set of experiments in the final stretch of a national effort to achieve the long-sought goal of fusion — a reaction in which more energy is released than put into it
Before the end of the month, at a high-security building in Livermore, California, the size of a football stadium, scientists will conduct an experiment backed by billions of dollars and promises to change the world’s energy supply.
The scientists at the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory are preparing to meet an end-of-month deadline for the first set of experiments in the final stretch of a national effort to achieve the long-sought goal of fusion — a reaction in which more energy is released than put into it.
Contra Costa Times’s Suzanne Bohan writes that lab officials promised Congress that before 30 September, the end of fiscal year 2010, they would start “credible ignition experiments” in the enormous facility, which officially opened in spring 2009.
The facility’s primary mission is to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. aging nuclear weapons stockpile through fusion experiments. If fusion is achieved, it also would open the door for research into unlimited sources of energy, such as using seawater as fuel, and would allow scientists to study celestial phenomena such as supernovas in new ways.
“And credible means that we have no reason to believe it’s not going to work,” Thomas D’Agostino, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the Livermore lab, told Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) during Congressional testimony in March.
Bohan notes that according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in the spring, most independent experts, however, doubted that these first experiments this month would result in fusion ignition. Even Lynda Seaver, a lab spokeswoman, said this week that, in fact, there’s no expectation of achieving ignition this month, given the composition of the fuel capsule at the heart of the experiment. “This is not ignition. It will take a year or two to get ignition,” she said.
Fusion ignition results when extreme pressures and temperatures force two or more atoms together, releasing helium atoms, neutrons and enormous amounts of energy — far more than the energy required to generate the ignition. If all goes well, a burst of fusion energy in a lab setting would, in turn, fuse nearby atoms in a self-sustaining process known as thermonuclear burn. Fusion is the same process that gives hydrogen bombs their awesome explosive energy, and it also powers the sun and the stars.
For years, the Livermore lab has declared fiscal year 2010 as the year it would first
