24
When the race for fusion ground to a halt
(www.technologyreview.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Fusion was never viable. The things that NIF puts out is a pretty, sanitized excuse for general public for nuclear weapons development (not complaining about it)
I'm not sure how a tokomak or laser confinement reactor translates to nuclear weapons. Those are completely different processes for creating fusion reactions. A fusion bomb literally just explodes a fission bomb next to the fusion fuel to get it started. No lasers or magnetic fields required, because the fuel in that case is compressed by a carefully engineered blast wave.
Well, that's your lack of imagination or domain knowledge, or both.
As it happens in current political climate, you can't just pull out a half megaton thermonuke and test it over some desert or atoll. The second best thing is simulating the entire thing as well as you can and that's what all countries that have thermonuclear weapons did after testing was banned. Probably the most open and transparent about it is France, with them stating that they did just that, complete with their own NIF-like facility.
Inertial confinement fusion experiments (which can be achieved by squeezing it with single current pulse like Z-machine or, better yet, heating with lasers like in NIF) mimic closely conditions within secondary stage of thermonuclear weapon, but it's more to it than fusion. Compression of capsule involves ablation of external layer - rapid evaporation pushes the rest of capsule inward, then hydrogen is compressed and ignites - again, not a simple process, because things happen so rapidly that there's not even a single temperature that can be ascribed to that plasma; then capsule and plasma interact - again, nothing is simple about it, because denser medium is on the outside, that means any imperfections will start turbulent mixing, something you want to avoid. Then, you can measure how materials behave under this intense 14MeV neutron and gamma pulse, something they do and something that's more useful for military purposes
You can't simulate (reasonably accurately anyway) these complex phenomena out of first principles, but you can make minuscule diorama and measure it. That's what NIF is for, with the only differences being 1. scale and 2. that NIF uses UV and real world nukes use X-rays. NIF is even located within LLNL, where about all modern american nuclear weapons are designed ffs. Straight from wikipedia headline:
Same for Z-machine:
Fusion power, especially pulsed approach, is and always will remain a pipe dream and nice, palatable cover for general public, to be believed in by wide-eyed idealists and people who confused B-class sci-fi with documentaries. The value of collecting all that critical data for simulations, is just too great, and it's something that you can't obtain in any other way. Well, at least if you want to have functional diplomacy.
And it's not like that I'm against development of nuclear weapons, I'd just appreciate some clarity and honesty in this topic
Both NIF and Z-machine are part of stockpile stewardship, continuing nuclear weapons refurbishment and redevelopment program managed by DoE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship
Well you are correct that it never was and we still don't know if it ever will be. And even if it is tomorrow building new powerplants will take at least 30 years. Our current fossil power problem should have been solved 30 years ago!
However I still think the research is important