wingolog

Good evening, internet. I've got a personal story to tell, then something of immediate relevance. I just can't stand these stories about the NIF, this test fusion facility at Lawrence Livermore. But the personal bits first.

nukular

Faced with the typical dilemma of "what to do with your life", as a 16-year-old high school student, I was sure I wasn't going to be a nuclear engineer. My dad worked for the power company at that time, and I had grown up in the figurative shadow of McGuire nuclear station. The nerdiness of the whole thing attracted me, but the nuclear profession seemed so dead, like so much office work.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself that summer at a camp run by the nuclear engineering department at North Carolina State University. To this day I'm not sure why I went. But go I did, and ended up being attracted by the promise of solving our world's energy problems via fusion power. Limitless energy! And I, your humble writer, could have a hand in it. Surely there would be a corner of the spotlight reserved for my modest contributions, and if not the spotlight, then some nook in engineer heaven.

Nothing about the education there had much to do with fusion, though. Most undergraduate programs are basically funded by the nuclear power industry. There is some medical work, a fair amount of plasma work, and a modicum of fundamental work, but the professors who do well (and transitively, their grad students) sell to the fission power industry. Thermal hydraulics simulation codes. Safety assessments. Sponsored chairs. Fuel rotation algorithms (my department chair got rich off that).

But it took me a couple years to realize that, because you know, it's the bait and switch thing. Even to the very end. In my last year there I was working for a professor on a monotonic X-ray source, for medical imaging applications. As it was sold to me, this was going to allow more accurate mammograms, without the need for painful compression. All the simulations were coming out good, the device looked quite powerful, and my advisor said, "This will make a great gun!"

A gun! Because I didn't mention the other funder: the military. This guy was a Naval Fellow This and a Thank You From The Army That, and here I was thinking I was earning my honorable discharge via working on a medical imaging device.

I did end up getting my BS there, and at the top of my class, which that year was a class of one. But that's another story.

fusion

Well, longer story shorter. When I went into nuclear engineering, in 1997, the main way of thinking about fusion energy was the tokamak, the donut-looking thing that tries to make a ring of plasma, then magnetically compress it into a density and temperature that will sustain fusion. Then somehow you extract the heat, boil water, turbines, generators, same old story.

It's an enormous complicated thing, into which billions and billions of dollars were sunk, both in the US (like at the Princeton facility) and internationally, through ITER. About the same time I went into NE, US funding for ITER was pulled.

So what was I to do, the erstwhile fusion power Nobel prizewinner? Well the US story was that they had another thing going, the so-called National Ignition Facility. Perhaps you've seen it in the news recently. Their PR agency is quite good; the message was mainly conveyed as "plucky and valiant scientists make step towards fusion energy".

But the NIF has little to do with energy. Here's the deal: due to popular protest, the US can't make test explosions of H-bombs any more. But how are they to know what would happen if they dropped a bomb on some unsuspecting adversary, if they can't test their weapons? Well they simulate those explosions with computer codes. (That's why LLNL and LANL have the some of the world's fastest supercomputers.)

But how will they know if their codes actually work? They need actual fusion explosions. So they concocted a plan to sell Congress a power plant driven by fusion bombs.

That plant is NIF.

Of course, the actual development of this story has more nuances, but the reason that the US is funding NIF is entirely due to its military applications.

energy

Peak oil, peak coal, peak gas. Blood for oil. Global warming. Poisonous gas wells. Vampire hydro dams. These things are well-known.

Peak uranium is also fairly well-known, but fission energy has other problems, of which I'll touch only one today. But first, the engineering issues with internal-confinement fusion power.

NIF claims to be a power plant. But actually getting useful power out of bombs is very unlikely. How are you going to harvest the resulting heat energy without destroying the enclosure? What about all those neutrons? What about the radioactive trash that the neutrons make?

But beyond that, how would you sustain ignition of fusion bombs? The idea is, one explosion goes off. Then you position the next pellet, fire on it, and so on at such a rate that the residual heat creates conditions for a sustained reaction: ignition. When I was studying these things, the estimated necessary rate for this process was 10 to 20 times a second.

This is an engineering nightmare. Fission is easy in comparison.

I don't think ICF will ever achieve ignition, but this is a prediction from someone who's been happily out of that industry for almost a decade.

An almost equally large problem is money. Finance, rather. Nuclear fission plants can deliver effective per-unit costs of electricity, of course ignoring externalized costs. That is, effective if you don't count in finance costs. Building a fission plant typically costs multiple billions of dollars. Fusion plants are probably just as costly. The NIF test facility is already brushing 5 billion, though I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up costing twice that.

This financing issue turns out to affect not just the bottom line. It ends up being large, centralized agencies that control such large investments. Centralized power is centralized control, and that goes for electrical power too.

powerdown

As someone who went in idealistic, with the hopes of solving the world's energy problems, I am still an optimist. The solution to the world's energy problems will be twofold: power-down, and energetic democracy. One way or the other, we will consume less energy in the future. That's power-down. The other side is people producing sustainable energy for themselves and their community: geothermal heat, solar power, wind power.

There's simply no other way. We can try other ways, but they will only hurt us in the end.