Science News's Andrew Grant has the goods on the great NIF, which stands for National Ignition Facility which in turn is, we all know, a gigantic laser complex at the Livermore National Laboratory. It cost $3.5 billion dollars or so and so far has done everything (the lasers are stupendously competent) except live up to its name. Grant's cover story does not dance around the abject failure of this monster squeeze box to roundly crush hydrogen isotope- filled targets down so hot and tiny they transmute to helium and a whole lot of energy. Instead of making small spheres of instant star stuff, the lasers huff and puff perfectly as engineered but the targets smoosh and squiggle and evade the mighty machine's blow sufficiently to dance far, perhaps irredeemably far clear of fusion.
This has the whiff of scandal. Not the scandal of deceit or fraud, but simply of failing to deliver on a near promise. A promise of a specific result, his story implies, is the sort of thing that scientists at the edge of the unknown ought never make. Especially with this much of the public's money in play.
The piece has most everything that a good explainer should have including, in this case, a little bit of physics, a goodly amount of history, well-chosen pithy quotes on the maddening refusal of reality to agree with mankind's fond expectations, and context with other fusion and non-fusion matters. It is particularly good on that last item. For years, many and perhaps most reporters who wrote on NIF's purpose have erroneously declared it got DOE's big bucks to bring fusion energy closer to commercial use. Grant's story regards it correctly as a side-show to the facility's primary motivation: as tool for physicists and engineers tending the nation's nuclear weapons. But the whamming of lasers into matter, a good way to test nuclear weapon components without actually lighting such a weapon off, just happens to provide a hypothetical route to fusion that unbottles more energy than it took to pull the cork. As for whether NIF in the end is worth it for reasons unrelated to fusion, as Grant points out, such information is classified. So, out in the sunlight all you can see is egg on the faces of the NIF gang.
Of course it may some day work anyway. Grant's piece explains what a long shot that is. So kudos and huzzah but with a caveat regarding craft. The story has a writerly touch – an opening that refers to provisional blueprints for a working fusion reactor that are getting a polish job at Livermore on the presumption that NIF will achieve fusion. Grant names Mike Dunne as the designer in the lede. The anecdote seems to promise that readers will learn a little something, anything, about this guy. And he's at the end in a similarly crypic kicker. But we never learn what his job is or anything else. One hopes that Grant had it in there. We've all been there – the reference to something that than gets dropped out in edit and nobody misses till it's in print.
!! Just checked my email. I did query Grant earlier today. He replies, to the surprise of nobody in this business, "..thanks for pointing out the lack of attribution. Not sure how that slipped by me and the editors. Dunne is the program director for Laser Fusion at LLNL. I'll work on getting that added online." Well yes, NIF's boss is a source one ought to give his due.
UPDATE (Sat. Apr 6: Dr. Dunne's title is now where it belongs, in the top graf.
While this feature is particularly good explanatory journalism, NIF's steady metamorphosis from one of DOE's prospective shining jewels to fusion lemon has been clear to close observers of energy physics for some time. Back in September, Daniel Clery in Science Magazine wrote a piece with much the same gloomy outlook for his rather insider readership. One guesses that a few other journalists have done so.
Twelve years ago, according to this website, a former Livermore physicist told the Albuquerque Journal's Lawrence Spohn that NIF would turn out to be… a lemon! One of the quotes from the ex-lab guy, weapons designer and oft-gadly in the lab's hide Ray Kidder, is priceless: "If they flop on their face with the laser, it's curtains. You're stuck with a lot of lavender glass."
One might also quibble that the story could have said more about other projects aimed at harnessing fusion as a commerical electricity generator. There is more than the ITER magnetic confinement test reactor in early stages of construction in France. One idea, in the smart inertial-confinement genre as NIF and worth mentioning (and worth a feature story on another trail of frustration) is the Z-Pulsed Power Facility, nee Z-machine, at Sandia Labs in Albuqurque. Other geometries in magnetic fusion aside from ITER's Tokamak are often listed as plausible.
Just a suggestion here. NIF is a magnifient-looking thing with its bundles of lasers big around as steers and hundreds of feet long arrayed in galactic battle cruiser fashion, and with its target chamber looking like something from Vulcan's workshop but shinier. Maybe DOE could get some of the construction money back by giving it double duty as a set for science fiction movies. The old NOVA laser set-up was, as I recall, featured in the immortal movie TRON.(Oh, that's right. Such sets are mostly digital special effects these days). CORRECTION – Hat tip to Mike Ross (see comments). It was the Shiva laser complex, not the more recent NOVA, that posed for TRON.
*UPDATE: Another writer recently went through the same essential info as Grant did and came up with more optimistic view of NIF's longer term prospects:
- IEEE Spectrum – Rachel Courtland: Laser Fusion's Brightest Hope ; Still plenty of question marks here but with a gentler take than Grant had. She writes, nonetheless, that repeated missed deadlines for fusion burn mean "expectations have been significantly scaled back." As one would expect of something served to the IEEE's savvy readers, Courtland provides plenty of detail, in plain English too, on the fusion program's stall. She also and notably delves as far as she can reasonably speculate into the NIF's ability to perform its stockpile stewardship job for the DOE's shadowed side. She can't say what it did, because those in the know wouldn't spill it (jail time may be a factor there), but she reports NIF has already proved of significant service in exploring the physics of nuclear weapon preservation and performance.
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