Hot fusion's future in doubt

This past Sunday's New York Times carried an article, "So Far Unfruitful, Fusion Project Faces a Frugal Congress" on the future funding prospects for the National Ignition Facility. NIF, located a few miles due east of the San Fransisco Bay on the campus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Wikipedia entry), is a decades long program, started in the 1990's, to initiate fusion in a "peppercorn" sized nodule of nuclear fuel (a solid and gaseous deuterium-tritium mix). At issue are both the scientific and political value of continuing such a large scale research program. I'll argue here that it is -- especially in light of the unbelievably wasteful nature of typical large-scale government expenditures like the military and weapons budgets. And the incomparable pay-off of actually achieving a fusion reaction (even the one-time, pulsed event that NIF aims to achieve).

We first cover the physics of hot fusion (and remind the reader not to confuse this process with so-called "cold fusion) -- how it works and the some of the technology being developed to initiate it. Then we'll cover the history of the NIF and where it stands now. Finally, all too briefly, the funding of NIF and its erstwhile future.

What is fusion?

All of the useful energy that falls upon the earth, courtesy of old Sol up there 93 million miles away, is a consequence of fusion reactions that occur in the solar interior. Basically, if you have a chunk of matter -- let's take water as our fusion `fuel' to emphasize how astonishing fusion is -- and you compress it and heat to sufficiently high pressure and temperature you'll initiate fusion reactions among the particles (protons and neutrons) that comprise the nuclei of the water atoms. Of course, in order to do this, you'll have to do a lot of squeezing (compressing) and heating. You'll pretty much need to heat and squeeze the water to temps and pressures that are found in the middle of the sun. (For the numerical folk out there the temp is about 15 million degrees Kelvin or Centigrade and the pressure is about 350 billion times earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.)

Having explained the initiation of the fusion reaction, I should tell you why the heck you would do something that even sounds this difficult. It's because there's a huge pay-off when the reaction 'goes.' A tremendous amount of energy is released. By "tremendous" we're thinking of 'big' on scales compared to the sub-nuclear and atomic scales. In fact, the energy is chicken-feed for you and I. If a fusion reaction happened next to your ear you wouldn't even flinch. But when many, many (like on the order of 10^{23} per second) fusion reactions occur nearly simultaneously and in close proximity, you have the most intense -- and clean! -- source of energy known to human beings.

To do:
[Mention tritium "problem".]

[Short entry] FY 2013 Appropriations Committee Reports: National Nuclear Security Administration

The American Institute of Physics reports in its useful FYI report that the Senate Appropriations Committee

is concerned about recent findings in a February 2012 National Research Council study that concluded that the overall management relationship between NNSA and its national security laboratories is dysfunctional. The Committee recommends that NNSA and the laboratories identify and eliminate unnecessary bureaucratic functions that affect the quality of science and engineering at the labs and detract from primary mission goals. The elimination of these functions shall not undermine operational goals related to safety, security, environmental responsibility and fiscal integrity.

This echoes sentiment expressed in a recent paper by George Mason University's Hugh Gusterson (professor of anthropology and sociology) titled "The assault on Los Alamos National Laboratory: A drama in three acts". [Here for comments on slashdot.] Gusterson's point is that poor management is destroying the academic and creative environment at Los Alamos National Lab.
Interestingly, Foreign Affairs carried an article this month on a related topic. Hymans argues there that we shouldn't get our shorts in a bunch over Iran because, paraphrasing, they're likely to fail anyway, being as they are a dictatorial regime that pushes on scientists too hard.

[short entry] Could North Korea hit the US with a missile? (CS Monitor)

CS Monitor: Could North Korea hit the US with a missile?
There's a lot of noise coming out of N. Korea's recently installed dictator, Kim Jong-un. But it's completely overblown. (We'll get into this in a regular entry soon, I hope.)
Here's something to note about NK's Unha rockets:

But previous launches of Unha-based rockets in 2006 and 2009 failed, raising questions about the technology’s reliability, CNS points out. In addition, it is a liquid-fueled rocket. This means it has to stand on the launchpad for hours, indeed days, for fueling. During that time it would be a sitting duck for attack.