Laser fusion trio team up to develop clean power

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20903-laser-fusion-trio-team-up-to-develop-clean-power.html

Laser fusion trio team up to develop clean power

17:19 13 September 2011 by Jeff Hecht

There's a big new kid on the nuclear energy block. Last week British firm AWE (formerly the Atomic Weapons Establishment), based in Aldermaston, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Harwell, UK, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California said they would team up to develop laser fusion as a clean energy source.

Laser fusion is an alternative to magnetically induced nuclear fusion, which is used in the Joint European Torus (JET) now operating in Culham, UK, and the test reactor ITER, under construction in Cadarache, France.

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When will laser fusion come to the power grid?

Livermore's Mike Dunne says that if all goes well, a plant delivering about 440 megawatts of electricity could be up and running in a decade; full-scale versions that follow would deliver about 1000 megawatts.

But don't hold your breath. "So far this is at the border of science fiction," says Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project of the Federation of American Scientists. "The technological hurdles are not nearly explored yet."

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https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/missions/energy_for_the_future/life/

Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE):
Tackling the Global Energy Crisis

Providing for the world's energy demands is one of the most urgent—and difficult—challenges facing our society. Even with likely improvements in efficiency and energy conservation, there is a critical need to rebalance electricity supply away from fossil fuels to ensure long-term sustainability of natural resources, reduce carbon emissions over the next half-century, and stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations thereafter. The projected electrification of transport further increases this need, as does our increasing reliance on products fabricated from the very same natural resources that are currently being burned to create electricity.

Renewable sources such as solar, photovoltaic, wind, and hydro will play an essential role in meeting this challenge, but do not have the storage capacity or available land to meet the majority baseload power requirements of most countries. Nuclear energy offers many attractions, but requires addressing the safety and proliferation problems associated with enrichment, reprocessing, and high-level waste storage. While these solutions could and should be pursued within the United States, the need to replace the current fleet of power plants provides a clear window of opportunity to transform the energy landscape from 2030 onwards.

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Delivering Fusion Energy Soon Enough to Make a Difference

Despite fusion's potential benefits for a low-carbon energy economy, the long timescales typically associated with fusion development have excluded it from mainstream energy policy considerations. The United States is in a unique position to change this paradigm, and deliver laser fusion power stations on a timescale that matters—with LIFE.

The path to LIFE is a four-step process:

1. NIF: Construction and operation of a laser facility at the scale required for energy production (Achieved 2009)
2. Ignition: Demonstration of net energy gain from fusion fuel (On target, by end of 2012)
3. LIFE demonstration: Integration of all the technologies required for a power station (Planned for mid-2020s)
4. Commercial LIFE fleet: Rollout of LIFE plants onto the electric grid (Late 2020s and beyond)

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[kristopher]

1. From OP: ""So far this is at the border of science fiction,""

Yep

[AtheistCrusader]

2. Call me a simpleton but...

I'd rather put my money in wind turbines.

[TheMadMonk]

3. Ten years? Hmm, where have I heard that before?

Who has noticed that virtually all of the fusion research money goes to the big projects with the greatest complexity and the greatest costs?

I do not know if Bussard's electrostatic confinement will work, but for at least the last ten years, it has been full scale testable for a fraction of the annual Tokomak research budget. For the last 5 years I strongly suspect it has been possible to get a definitive yes/no answer within 12 months of funding and 5 seconds of punching the start button.