Maybe you heard this announcement from the US Department of Energy:
On December 13, 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced the achievement of fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) — a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and lays the groundwork for inertial fusion energy as a potential energy source for the future.
The US corporate media went gaga. Here is an example:
A large manure spreader is needed to separate all the baloney from a microscopic bit of truth.
If fusion is carbon free, isn’t fission also carbon free?
No machinery yet to turn reaction into usable electricity (True. Is there even a concept to extract energy from the laser ignited pellet?)
Latest fusion reaction created more energy than it consumes (True, but so what? The point is to produce usable energy. Nuclear weapons produce more energy than they consume.)
“Could” bring cheap electricity to impoverished parts of the world. (A solid gold meteorite “could” land in my yard tomorrow.)
No radioactive waste (Not true. The fusion reaction produces high energy neutrons, which will require reactor shielding to protect people. Additionally, the neutrons will activate and make radioactive the materials they penetrate. This will eventually have to be dealt with.)
With clowns like these, I literally have an endless supply of material for my substack. Sorry to have to tell the bomb boys of Liverwurst that their colleagues at Oak Ridge did everything a fusion reactor claims to do back in the late 1960s, more than half a century ago, with the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE).
Here is a photo op of the head girls of the DOE.
Secretary Granholm hyperbolizes the “whatever” and compares it with Kitty Hawk. I say “whatever” because I can’t understand what they really did.
I know a little bit of the history of aviation and it developed very quickly after the Wrights flew at Kitty Hawk. Fusioners have been spending billions for 70 years and are arguably no closer to producing usable energy.
Years ago, I went to USU and saw a working fusion reactor built by a high school student. Yes, Virginia, a working fusion reactor - a Farnsworth Fusor.
“But” says the Liverwurst Lackey, “a fusor can never produce net usable energy”
UTE, “Neither can your national laser ignition toy, that cost billions of dollars.”
Upon further reading, I find this:
Mark Herrmann is the Program Director for the Weapon Physics and Design (WPD) Program at LLNL. In this role, Herrmann leads LLNL’s efforts to strengthen the U.S. nuclear deterrent by advancing the understanding of nuclear weapons physics and design. This includes the physics design, assessment, and certification efforts. He also leads weapon science research and development, including focused experiments, integral hydrodynamic and subcritical experiments, high-energy-density (HED) experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), and modeling and simulation of these experiments using NNSA’s high-performance computing capabilities.
It seems like the technical folks are really salivating over the bomb connotations of the “breakthrough”, much more so than the “coulds” and “maybes” of peaceful fusion energy, if that is even a thing.
So the actual configuration of these experiments is what we call indirect drive. We actually – so this shows you the laser beams coming into our little target that I just showed you a picture of. The lasers heat up this little gold can, and – that we call a hohlraum. It creates X-rays; those X-rays bathe that capsule uniformly, and we squeeze. The outside of the capsule blows off, the inside of the capsule goes in. At the very inside of the capsule, we have deuterium and tritium. And eventually, as it’s rocketing in, it stops, it stagnates; temperatures and pressures go enormously high, the temperatures get up to hundreds of millions of degrees, the pressures go up to pressures greater than the pressure at the center of the sun. So very, very extreme conditions.
And then we get into a race. So that very high pressure, very high temperature plasma wants to fall apart, it wants to lose energy, it wants to cool. But the fusion reactions that are taking place want to deposit heat. The fusion reactions are – related to the fusion reactions that take place in the sun. They create energy. And so there’s this balance between the heating from the fusion reactions and the cooling. And if we can get it a little bit hotter, we get more fusion reactions. And if we get it a little bit hotter, we get more fusion reactions.
And so if you can win this competition between heating and cooling, you can actually get a runaway reaction, which we call fusion ignition, and that’s what happened for the first time in this experiment last month. This is a long-term effort, and I’ll talk a little bit about the history as well in just a couple slides.
So why are we so interested in this? So one of the reasons is that these very, very extreme environments in the – being able to study these very extreme environments in the laboratory enables us to understand and maintain our nuclear deterrent.
Read that last sentence again (“nuclear deterrent”).
If the DOE clowns had any real interest in cheap, abundant, safe energy, they would continue the work started with the MSRE in 1960. That was 62 years ago!