America’s National Ignition Facility’s announcement is neat is principle. But inertial-confinement by laser is not the basis for a workable reactor
America’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, announced that the country’s National Ignition Facility had lived up to the “” in its name, by achieving ignition. The stuff ignited was some pellets of a frozen mixture of deuterium and tritium—isotopes of hydrogen that have, respectively, one and two neutrons in their nuclei in addition to the single proton that is hydrogen’s nuclear characteristic.
In a bomb that bang is big, and is triggered by a smaller fission explosion, involving plutonium. In one of’s pellets it is tiny, and is triggered by the convergence on the pellet of 192 laser beams, in a process called inertial confinement. The compression caused by the beams overcomes the mutual electrical repulsion of the nuclei of the atoms in the pellet, which are all positively charged. It thereby pushes those nuclei close enough to one another for a different fundamental force, the strong nuclear force to take over.The strong force is attractive, not repulsive. So it pulls the protons and neutrons of the parent nuclei together to form a new, heavier, daughter nucleus.
Neat, in principle. And important for understanding hydrogen bombs. But this approach can be a power source only if the energy released exceeds that employed to generate the laser beams, rather than merely exceeding that incident upon the pellet. Unfortunately, the huge inefficiencies involved in creating those beams mean that only a tiny fraction of that generative energy does arrive at the pellet. Not really the basis for a workable reactor.
It thus seems unlikely that the future of civil fusion power lies with inertial-confinement by laser. The technology is fiddly. And even with lasers more modern than that used by the process of “pumping” the device to create the beam is inherently inefficient. None of the increasingly numerous attempts to commercialise fusion employs inertial-confinement by laser.
Belgique Dernières Nouvelles, Belgique Actualités
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