Sorry, but The goal of the facility is to validate simulations of Hydrogen Bombs and test high energy laser not to generate net energy as they don't have anyway to capture energy produced in this test.
Not exactly. Or to put it more precisely, the goal is to better understand fusion, which by the way, helps us better understand bombs that use it and perhaps more importantly the old bombs we have laying around that we knew would work in 1974 but now we aren't so sure.
That said, one application of the NIF is as the ultimate incinerator. Using it to literally rip apart hazardous waste (either the nuclear or more mundane variety) into lower atomic number atoms which are not a problem.
And of course if they can get out more than they put in, then an energy neutral (and fast) disposal system.
That said, the physics of the place are astounding, I got to tour the place about 10 years ago when it was still being built and man, it is right up there with the LHC in terms of extremely large and at the same time precise physics machines.
That said, one application of the NIF is as the ultimate incinerator. Using it to literally rip apart hazardous waste (either the nuclear or more mundane variety) into lower atomic number atoms which are not a problem.
In the tour video they show a stream of plasma directed at the 'waste' of interest. This has two effects, one it disassembles any molecular bond reducing complex (and perhaps toxic) substances into their base atomic components, and two it accelerates the decay of unstable nucleotides into stable ones. I suspect that video is up on the NIF web site somewhere.
In the tour video they show a stream of plasma directed at the 'waste' of interest. This has two effects, one it disassembles any molecular bond reducing complex (and perhaps toxic) substances into their base atomic components,
That's real but that's not NIF or anything resembling it. The temperatures to tear apart molecular bonds are less than 10,000 degrees. NIF operates at nuclear fusion temperature s -- 100,000,000 degrees.
Except not all fusion research is particularly useful for building a fusion power plant. I mean if we where really desperate we could dig a large hole fill it with water, set a H-Bomb off under it and then extract energy from that water. However, while that works the ROI is rather limited compared to say just extracting geothermal energy in the first place.
PS: That could actually work, at 5% thermal efficiency a Castle Bravo device ~= 63,000TJ = 17500000000.014kwh *.05 = ~1GW for 1 month.
It couldn't work on that scale, because it's not practical to contain that big of an explosion. This is your Castle Bravo crater; it's more than a mile wide.
Moreover, about 2/3rd of the energy in that device were from fission (not fusion), so for any possible claimed advantage of fusion over fission, it's not here. The lowest fission-fraction test to date was Tsar Bomba, at 3% yield from fission. That was also the largest explosion to date (50 megatons!), which makes it even less feasible.
I think this is a fundamental tradeoff: you can't make a mostly-fusion weapon unless it is extremely large, as there's some minimum size for a fission explosion that achieves fusion conditions.
There was research project at Los Alamos about this general idea (Project Pacer), but it didn't go anywhere. According to Richard Garwin, they thought it was hopelessly uneconomical.
That may be the goal they sold to Washington, D.C., but the real goal was to develop high power laser technology. "Nuclear stockpile stewardship" was just a way to keep the tokamak politicians from killing the project out of spite.
Where do you get this impression? I'm a grad student at Los Alamos National Lab, a partner of Lawrence Livermore and a major contributor to NIF. I don't do nuclear physics, but I've attended a couple talks on NIF and spoken to several of the contributing physicist. The impression I get is that the number one purpose of the NIF is stockpile stewardship. Fusion energy research is a side project which is highlighted mostly for public relations.
In particular, I never hear anyone talk about the laser technology in anything but instrumental terms. (Instrumental to understanding the nuclear physics.)
They'll spend at least $5 billion on the project. That is enough money to completely remanufacture the entire arsenal several times using existing designs that are good enough.
They have been working on laser fusion since the 1970s, when they could test bomb designs by just setting them off. Indeed some of the early inertial confinement research was conducted using nukes as the radiation source.
Yes, it is true that the NIF data can be used to design and maintain bombs, but it is not required. We could provide a deterrent force without it. Therefore the real reasons are something else, my guess a combination of laser research, commercial and rocketry fusion research, and a large serving of national prestige.
That said, one application of the NIF is as the ultimate incinerator. Using it to literally rip apart hazardous waste (either the nuclear or more mundane variety) into lower atomic number atoms which are not a problem.
And of course if they can get out more than they put in, then an energy neutral (and fast) disposal system.
That said, the physics of the place are astounding, I got to tour the place about 10 years ago when it was still being built and man, it is right up there with the LHC in terms of extremely large and at the same time precise physics machines.