Harnessing a Star's Power for Clean Energy

For nigh on 40 years now I've been reading about the vaguely imminent promise of controlled fusion energy production. And yet it remains just about as frustratingly distant as it ever was.

Yeah, fusion power and "Dipping Dots" ice cream. The power of the future and the ice cream of the future. A future which never quite seems to arrive.

Guys,

surely we should encourage anyone who has the facilities and the ideas to make clean energy a practical proposition.

We should not naysay them.

Too many others may be put off by such negative comments.

Go for it guys

Sleepy

Hello? We've got a perfectly good star right there (points to the sun). All the energy you'd ever need, just figure out how to collect it.

Yeah, yey'll get it sorted at about same time as we all get our jet boots.
Del

Kind of odd to see this hyped just now. In January they announced they expected "ignition" by the end of this year. But the latest actual news from the facility is a report released in April stating they would not reach that goal in 2010 after all.

In a previous discussion it was pointed out that the NIF is not designed for power production at all, there is no energy capture mechanism, etc etc, however the research is expected to help the (underfunded) actual fusion energy research at Lawrence Berkeley.

I'm waiting for my jetboots (KrisDel of course).

Hi,

no clean energy expected. Only heating the chamber wall with the multiple ports and instruments.

After 14 years of planning and construction and spending near 4x10⁹ $ they can now fabricate one of the ignition capsules per day!

If really fusion is going on within the next months then a replacement of the gold chamber (a few centimeter diameter and length) is necessary (This is converting the incident laser energy into x-rays to heat indirectly the capsules that have some condensed layer of frozen deuterium and tritium on the inner wall.)

So this is and will be a slow instrument to watch the very first moments of fusion.

Fascinating fact is the pure US funding of this approach at LLNL.

Also the similar French and British systems that are far behind but also financed only by one country.

I miss informations about equivalent Russian, Chinese and Israeli systems.

More details on:

https://lasers.llnl.gov

RHABE