Was the show in black and white, and was the Vietnam war still going on? We are way past the problems of getting more energy then it costs to produce it, and on to the problems of how to practically use the excess energy.
Livermore lab nears launch of fusion quest, though ignition not expected this monthBy Suzanne Bohan
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 09/20/2010 03:09:04 PM PDT
Updated: 09/20/2010 03:56:24 PM PDT
Within the next 10 days at a high-security building in Livermore the size of a football stadium, scientists will hunker down to conduct an experiment backed by billions of dollars and promises to change the world's energy supply.
The scientists at the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory are preparing to meet an end-of-month deadline for the first set of experiments in the final stretch of a national effort to achieve the long-sought goal of fusion -- a reaction in which more energy is released than put into it.
Lab officials promised congressional funders that before Sept. 30, the end of fiscal year 2010, they would start "credible ignition experiments" in the enormous facility, which officially opened in spring 2009.
The facility's primary mission is to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's aging nuclear weapons stockpile through fusion experiments. If fusion is achieved, it also would open the door for research into unlimited sources of energy, such as using seawater as fuel, and would allow scientists to study celestial phenomena such as supernovas in new ways.
"And credible means that we have no reason to believe it's not going to work," Thomas D'Agostino, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the Livermore lab, told Sen. Dianne Feinstein during Congressional testimony in March.
Expressing doubt
However, most independent experts doubted that these first experiments this month would result in fusion ignition, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in the spring.
Even Lynda Seaver, a lab spokeswoman, said this week that, in fact, there's no expectation of achieving ignition this month, given the composition of the fuel capsule at the heart of the experiment.
"This is not ignition. It will take a year or two to get ignition," she said.How do you get excess energy when y'all don't even have sustained ignition?