National Geographic on Fusion Energy
Bill Chameides, writing for The National Geographic’s blog, “The Great Energy Challenge,” posted a good article on fusion energy on October 12. He outlines the promise of fusion – a clean, safe, secure and abundant source of energy, which would provide baseload power, much like nuclear fission, without the downsides.
He also notes the difficult circumstances that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) currently faces. The NIF is using 192 lasers to achieve inertial confinement fusion, but has come under fire for missing its goal before the end of the fiscal year. Unfortunately, scientific milestones do not operate on fiscal deadlines. However, the NIF continues to make progress and the scientists believe they are on the right path to fusion. From the article:
In March the journal Nature reported “Laser fusion nears crucial milestone,” and quoted Lawrence Livermore National Lab director Ed Moses saying that, as far as the lab’s efforts on ignition were concerned: “We have all the capability to make it happen in fiscal year 2012.”
But by July 19, 2012, the fusion bubble was burst. An external review [pdf] of NIF by the National Nuclear Security Administration presented a mixed bag of praise — “NIF has demonstrated an ‘unprecedented level of quality and accomplishment’”— and circumspection — “considerable hurdles must be overcome to reach ignition … [G]iven the unknowns with the present …approach, the probability of ignition before the end of December is extremely low.”
Bad Timing
Just so happens that LIFE’s funding was to run out at the end of this fiscal year, which fell on September 30. Perhaps that’s why the fusion researchers were so publicly sanguine about having results by the end of 2012. So now the scientists hand off this energy holy grail to the politicians, transforming, at least for the time being, a scientific quest into a political football, or, you might say fusing the scientific and the political. What should Congress do? Scrap the project or double down? Just another spending issue poised on the fiscal cliff our folks on the Hill will have to wrestle with.
To read the full article, click here.
