Luminaries gathered today at a lab in Livermore, California to toast the opening of the National Ignition Facility, a massive physics experiment aiming to recreate the reaction that takes place in the hearts of stars: nuclear fusion. “Bringing Star Power to Earth” reads a giant banner that was recently unfurled across a building the size of a football stadium [The New York Times]. Scientists are now ready to begin firing the world’s most powerful laser, comprised of 192 separate beams, at a target the size of a match head. Yet for all the celebration and hoopla, doubters note that there’s no guarantee that the fusion researchers will achieve their goal.
The project’s director, Ed Moses, said that getting to the cusp of ignition (defined as the successful achievement of fusion) had taken some 7,000 workers and 3,000 contractors a dozen years, their labors creating a precision colossus of millions of parts and 60,000 points of control, 30 times as many as on the space shuttle. “It’s the cathedral story,” Dr. Moses said…. “We put together the best physicists, the best engineers, the best of industry and academia” [The New York Times]. The project has also cost at least $3.5 billion. NIF’s researchers will spend the next year gradually increasing the energy of the laser beams, and say serious ignition experiments will begin next year.
NIF aims to trigger a tiny thermonuclear explosion inside the huge target chamber, a blast sparked by the lasers, which bounce off a series of lenses and mirrors, intensifying and multiplying with each pass. “Pretty soon you have a lot of ‘em,” says Moses, “and we have enough energy to drive our targets, to a point where they get to over 100 million degrees and it’s a pretty warm day” [Fox News]. The facility has three purposes: to conduct experiments that will help U.S. defense agencies understand how nuclear weapons function as they age, to allow astrophysicists to get up close and personal with the reactions that take place in stars and supernovae, and to determine whether nuclear fusion power plants are feasible. It’s the third goal that has sparked the popular imagination, as a nuclear fusion plant would create huge amounts of energy from tiny amounts of fuel. It would produce far less radioactive waste than conventional nuclear reactors [Fox News].
While Moses and the NIF’s other boosters seem confident that they’ll achieve fusion reactions that release more energy than it takes to produce them, many doubters remain. “I personally think it’s going to be a close call,” said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who directed federal energy research for the first President George Bush. “It’s a very complicated system, and you’re dependent on many things working right…. There’s plenty of room,” he added, “for nasty surprises” [The New York Times].
Related Content:
80beats: Countdown to Nuclear Fusion: National Ignition Facility Warms Up
DISCOVER: Countdown to Fusion: National Ignition Facility in Pictures (photo gallery)
Image: National Ignition Facility, Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The interior of the target chamber.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Fusion really is the preferable energy source of the future. However, it is still not known whether we can generate enough energy with manmade fusion to make the costly process worthwhile. Students interested in energy science fair projects can learn a great deal from the fusion experiments taking place today.
May 29th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Yeah, I’m totally gonna have my kid build a fusion reactor for the science fair.
Hey, my synthesizer has 192 oscillators.
Also, I’d like to note that the Bush family has had ties to middle eastern oil since G. H. W. Bush’s father was a young man in the early part of the 20th century, so anyone involved with them may have a slight bias against anything that stands to replace oil as our international currency and energy source.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:28 am
@ NIck
I totally agree with the last part
May 30th, 2009 at 11:20 am
I remember in the news a few years ago a high school student had built a real fusion experiment device using parts bought online etc :-)
Nothing to be scared, it would not blow your neighborhood! (maybe just your house :-)
Creating fusion reaction is not the hard part though, the problem is producing energy
from it continuously and efficiently.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Fusion has been the power source of the future for the last 50 years… and still hasn’t arrived. I guess we shouldn’t be too discouraged since Mother Nature needs a whole giant planet worth of hydrogen to ignite deuterium fusion within it and a whole star’s worth to ignite proton fusion.
June 1st, 2009 at 11:12 am
Good call, FB36. DISCOVER covered high school student Thiago Olson and his benchtop fusion device here: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/mar/radioactive-boy-scout
June 1st, 2009 at 9:49 pm
If anyone remembers the old “Omni” magazine, it had an article once that covered the possibility of small fusion reactors in every home. Just think of where that could lead, especially if Apple were to make them…”Dad, can I have a new reator for my room? Like, orange is such a gross color and this old model just sucks the deuterium.”