Large Hardon Collider

[Woozie]

I think we have more than enough motivation for room temperature super conductors. It would be one of the most important technological advances ever, and whoever finds it is guaranteed to win a Nobel prize and will probably become rich.

[Eliseos]

Oh sorry, I meant from the government's point of view with funding research.

Also, is there a free version or trial version of mathematica, matlab, etc? I have to plot isotherms for a Van der Waal's gas at certain temperatures, and I don't feel like paying the $100 for a student version. I don't have access to any safe-ish torrent sites either, all the ones I've found appear to have trojans in them judging from the comments.

[Woozie]

I got matlab from Demonoid iirc. I haven't gotten sued, nor have I gotten any viruses. If you need a demonoid invite, PM me.

Edit: Does your math or physics department have a computer lab? You should have access to these programs at school, now that I think about it.

[Kryssan]

Making progress. Been a few months since NiF has had a press release.


Initial NIF experiments meet requirements for fusion ignition


Crossposted:

New physics effect achieves symmetrical target compression

LIVERMORE, Calif. — The first experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) have demonstrated a unique physics effect that bodes well for NIF’s success in generating a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction.

In inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments on NIF, the energy of 192 powerful laser beams is fired into a pencil-eraser-sized cylinder called a hohlraum, which contains a tiny spherical target filled with deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen. Rocket-like compression of the fuel capsule forces the hydrogen nuclei to combine, or fuse, releasing many times more energy than the laser energy that was required to spark the reaction. Fusion energy is what powers the sun and stars.

The interplay between NIF’s high-energy laser beams and the hot plasma in NIF fusion targets, known as laser-plasma interactions, or LPI, has long been regarded as a major challenge in ICF research because of the tendency to scatter the laser beams and dissipate their energy. But during a series of test shots using helium- and hydrogen-filled targets last fall, NIF researchers were able to use LPI effects to their advantage to adjust the energy distribution of NIF’s laser beams.

The experiments, described in an article in today’s edition of Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, resulted in highly symmetrical compression of simulated fuel capsules – a requirement for NIF to achieve its goal of fusion ignition and energy gain when ignition experiments begin later this year.

“Laser-plasma interactions are an instability, and in many cases they can surprise you,” said ICF Program Director Brian MacGowan. “However, we showed in the experiments that we could use laser-plasma interactions to transfer energy and actually control symmetry in the hohlraum. Overall, we didn’t find any pathological problem with laser-plasma interactions that would prevent us generating a hohlraum suitable for ignition.”

Using LPI effects to tune ICF laser energy is “a very elegant way to do it,” said Siegfried Glenzer, NIF plasma physics group leader. “You can change the laser wavelengths and get the power where it’s needed without increasing the power of individual beams. This way you can make maximum use of all the available laser beam energy.”

In the Science Express article, Glenzer, MacGowan and their NIF colleagues reported that “self-generated plasma-optics gratings on either end of the hohlraum tune the laser power distribution in the hohlraum, producing symmetric X-ray drive.” Glenzer said the gratings act like tiny prisms, redirecting the energy of some of the laser beams just as a prism splits and redirects sunlight according to its wavelength.

Glenzer attributed the new LPI phenomenon to the size of the test hohlraums, which, while somewhat smaller than actual NIF ignition targets, are two to three times larger than hohlraums used in previous ICF experiments at other laser facilities. He said the increased amount of the high-temperature, low-density plasma in the areas where the laser beams enter the hohlraum was responsible for the spontaneous generation of the plasma gratings.

The technique of slightly shifting the wavelength of some laser beams to control the transfer of energy between the beams and equalize the laser power distribution in the hohlraum had been predicted and modeled by NIF scientists using high-fidelity three-dimensional simulations. In last fall’s experiments, an initially asymmetric target implosion with a “pancake” shape was changed to a spherical shape by the wavelength-shifting technique, validating the modeling results.

The NIF laser system began firing all 192 laser beams onto targets in June 2009. In order to characterize the X-ray drive achieved inside the target cylinders as the laser energy is ramped up, these first experiments were conducted at lower laser energies and on smaller targets than will be used for ignition experiments. These targets used cryogenically cooled gas-filled capsules that act as substitutes for the fusion fuel capsules that will be used in the ignition campaign that begins this summer.

Before the wavelength-shifting effects were tested, the only way to adjust the laser energy reaching the walls of the hohlraum, where it is converted into X-rays that heat and ablate the outer surface of the fuel capsule and cause the compression of the fuel inside the capsule, was to adjust the relative energy of the laser beams in the early stages of a shot, during preamplification.

By taking advantage of the LPI effects in the target, as the beams crossed at the entrance of the hohlraums, the scientists could make use of minute wavelength adjustments, ranging from a fraction of an angstrom to a few angstroms (an angstrom is one ten-billionth of a meter, about the size of an atom). With the LPI scheme, “you can run every beam at maximum power and have another distribution mechanism to achieve symmetry,” Glenzer said.

The test shots proved NIF’s ability to deliver sufficient energy to the hohlraum to reach the radiation temperatures – more than 3 million degrees Centigrade – needed to create the intense bath of X-rays that compress the fuel capsule. When NIF scientists extrapolate the results of the initial experiments to higher-energy shots on full-sized hohlraums, “we feel we will be able to create the necessary hohlraum conditions to drive an implosion to ignition,” said Jeff Atherton, director of NIF experiments.

At the end of the experimental campaign, the NIF lasers set a world record by firing more than one megajoule of ultraviolet energy into a hohlraum – more than 30 times the energy previously delivered to a target by any laser system.

“This accomplishment is a major milestone that demonstrates both the power and the reliability of NIF’s integrated laser system, the precision targets and the integration of the scientific diagnostics needed to begin ignition experiments,” said NIF Director Ed Moses. “NIF has shown that it can consistently deliver the energy required to conduct ignition experiments later this year.”

NIF’s next step is to move to ignition-like fuel capsules that require the fuel to be in a frozen hydrogen layer (at 425 degrees Fahrenheit below zero) inside the fuel capsule. NIF is currently being made ready to begin experiments with ignition-like fuel capsules in the summer of 2010.

NIF (lasers.llnl.gov), the world’s largest laser facility, is the first facility expected to achieve fusion ignition and energy gain in a laboratory setting. NIF is an essential part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Stockpile Stewardship Program, which ensures the reliability and safety of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile without live testing. NIF experiments will also be used to conduct astrophysics and basic science research and to develop carbon-free, limitless fusion energy.

The NIF fusion ignition experiments are part of the National Ignition Campaign (NIC). NIC is a partnership among the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, General Atomics, and Sandia National Laboratories as well as many other national laboratories and universities.

Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a national security laboratory that develops science and engineering technology and provides innovative solutions to our nation's most important challenges. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

Edit: Not news related, but some stuff I found at Toshiba's nuclear website that goes into some detail over the ABWR design.

Catalog 1
Catalog 2
Catalog 3
Catalog 4
Catalog 5


Also, this control room makes me jealous:

http://www.toshiba.co.jp/nuclearener.../newabwr03.jpg



Edit the Second:


Another story about the same as the first, but from another source:

Scientists set for nuclear fusion fuel switch-on

Crossposted:

A pivotal step in the march towards fusion power, the "Holy Grail" of sustainable clean energy, could be taken this year.

Scientists in the US are preparing for the dramatic moment when the world's most powerful laser unleashes the nuclear force that lights up the Sun and achieves "ignition".

At that moment, 192 laser beams housed in a building the size of three football pitches will focus on a target the size of a peppercorn to trigger a self-sustaining fusion reaction.

If all goes according to plan, this could be achieved in October. Although no more than a test of the technology, it could mark the start of a revolution that will change the science and politics of energy for ever.

Scientists have spent decades chasing the dream of fusion power, which holds out the promise of producing unlimited amounts of clean energy from hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe.

Nuclear fusion happens when the nuclei of atoms are driven together so hard that they fuse to form a heavier particle. A self-sustaining chain reaction occurs as more atomic nuclei collide, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process.

Stars are driven by nuclear fusion, as is the immense destructive power of the hydrogen bomb. But no-one has yet managed to contain and sustain a fusion reaction under controlled conditions.

The biggest problem facing fusion scientists is how to generate the enormous temperatures and pressures necessary for long enough in a confined space.

Self-sustaining fusion requires conditions more extreme than at the centre of the Sun, with temperatures of around 100 million centigrade.

At the new National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, scientists are closer to overcoming this hurdle than anyone has been before.

The 10-storey high NIF is a £2 billion sledgehammer built to crack a nut.

Opened last year, the facility houses an array of optical and electronic devices designed to split a laser 192 ways and boost the combined energy of the beams to 1.8 megajoules.

At its heart the "nut" is a tiny beryllium capsule the size of a peppercorn, designed to hold a dash of nuclear fuel in the form of deuterium and tritium.

Both are isotopes, or different atomic versions, of hydrogen.

The aim is to focus the laser beams on the capsule and blast it with a pulse of energy that causes the fuel to implode in an instant, reaching temperatures and pressures greater than those at the centre of the Sun.

Crushed together, the deuterium and tritium nuclei will fuse, releasing a flash of energy. If the experiment is a success, more energy will be generated than was pumped into the capsule in the first place.

A report of the latest progress at the NIF published last week in the journal Science shows that the scientists are on target.

Dr Siegfried Glenzer and colleagues described the first experiments in which all 192 of the lasers were tested on targets empty of fuel, achieving a beam energy of about 40% the NIF's maximum.

A major problem that had to be overcome was getting the capsule to implode evenly.

This was done by encasing it in a gold cylinder called a hohlraum, pierced by holes through which the laser beams were shone.

"We're doing the real thing, and it's going better than expected," said Dr Glenzer, quoted in a Science news article.

The facility's "ignition campaign", leading to the first attempt to produce a self-sustaining fusion reaction is due to start in earnest in May.

A decision will be made in July on whether or not to push ahead with full-scale fusion experiments paving the way to ignition in October.

British expert Professor Mike Dunne, director of the Central Laser Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, Oxfordshire, said: "It's come up better than anyone thought. They're ahead of the curve predicted."

[Eliseos]

Edit: Does your math or physics department have a computer lab? You should have access to these programs at school, now that I think about it.

Yeah, I think we have Matlab and Mathematica and some others, but I won't be back on campus until tomorrow and my assignment is due then. I kind of forgot about that problem, so I had to figure out a way to do it at home lol. Is there a way to graph a function (in this case specifically, it's the isotherms for a gas using Van der Waal's gas law), without solving the function for a variable? Like could I just use plug in the equation and it give the correct plot? Somehow I don't think so, just trying to find an easier way to do this since I've never really used Matlab/Mathematica.

[Enkidu]

Yeah, I think we have Matlab and Mathematica and some others, but I won't be back on campus until tomorrow and my assignment is due then. I kind of forgot about that problem, so I had to figure out a way to do it at home lol. Is there a way to graph a function (in this case specifically, it's the isotherms for a gas using Van der Waal's gas law), without solving the function for a variable? Like could I just use plug in the equation and it give the correct plot? Somehow I don't think so, just trying to find an easier way to do this since I've never really used Matlab/Mathematica.

The help files for Matlab are very thorough. It will take you step-by-step through the process of making the plot.

IIRC you can input any equation, specify the variables, and it'll pop out a plot for you. For what you're doing it'll probably take just a minute or two.

[Eliseos]

Oh awesome, thanks. I downloaded a Matlab book also, so I'll take a look through that and the help files. I noticed it does ODE and PDEs, that will be nice to have to check my work for my classes this semester. Thermo looks like it's going to be pretty tough, mechanics doesn't look too bad, but I'm just basing this off of the first assignment and I'm sure that will change as the semester goes on lol.

[Kaylia]

Making progress. Been a few months since NiF has had a press release.


Initial NIF experiments meet requirements for fusion ignition



http://www.toshiba.co.jp/nuclearener.../newabwr03.jpg


Crossposted:

Is this control room real? It looks like something from a 70 movie.

[Kryssan]

Is this control room real? It looks like something from a 70 movie.

Are you kidding? That's a state of the art room.


This is what Catawba's room (SC commercial power plant, pretty standard, Shearon Harris looks similar which is what I have experience with on commercials, test reactors have much smaller control rooms obviously) looks like:

http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI...ck_857-110.jpg


This is PULSTAR's (Burlington Lab's NCSU reactor) control room:

http://www.ne.ncsu.edu/NRP/images/class.jpg

Pretty much the only one I have actually operated that I can show pictures of. But you can see it's similar to a commercial plant, just smaller. Obviously, no power production in a research reactor.


This image is to give you an idea of what I'm used to operating:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/86/23...5f20bcdfe8.jpg

That's not my panel obviously since I can't show you that, but it's only slightly more archaic than the stuff I'm used to; but the one I do operate has ONE digital meter on it (why, I'll never know). Everything is either DC or AC peanut bulb, no LEDs. Some of the newer ships/subs have digital/plasma displays now, but I've not been fortunate enough to operate them. The most high tech I've personally operated on had one 'plasma' screen (orange/black colors only - like what you'd see in an old movie) and digital meters. Everything else with what I'm on now is analog and looks very similar to the stuff you see there. In case you forgot, most of our technology is 70s era. We rarely if ever get control upgrades; what's built into the plant is pretty much what's going to be there.



Tch. People with their preconceptions. Nuclear power does not mean 'high tech'.

[Kaylia]

I meant 70 sci-fi movie. Your come straight from the 70.

[Kryssan]

I meant 70 sci-fi movie. Your come straight from the 70.

Turns out we really haven't advanced that far in 40 years. Might have something to do with inane public fear, I 'unno. And also a lot of fear in technology, it's only been recently that machines have started seeing more use. Certain people in high administration for nuclear power decided, like von Braun, that using people is a better idea than using machines, and it's only been recently that trend has started being reversed. I can certainly understand where they were coming from. While computers are a nice addition, they promote complacency.

That said, our 'newest' plants are still fairly old. One just needs to see the list of all the 'cancelled' reactor plants to see how much we could have vs how much we do have. Using Shearon Harris as an example again, it was designed for 4 units, instead only has 1. So the space for the other 3 now gets used as a fuel repository until a national storage facility gets built.

[Mizango]

Interesting read: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0202101245.htm

New Research Rejects 80-Year Theory of 'Primordial Soup' as the Origin of Life

ScienceDaily (Feb. 2, 2010) — For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a 'primordial soup' of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the 'soup' theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth's chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life....

"Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won't work at all," said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. "We present the alternative that life arose from gases (H2, CO2, N2, and H2S) and that the energy for first life came from harnessing geochemical gradients created by mother Earth at a special kind of deep-sea hydrothermal vent -- one that is riddled with tiny interconnected compartments or pores."

The soup theory was proposed in 1929 when J.B.S Haldane published his influential essay on the origin of life in which he argued that UV radiation provided the energy to convert methane, ammonia and water into the first organic compounds in the oceans of the early earth. However critics of the soup theory point out that there is no sustained driving force to make anything react; and without an energy source, life as we know it can't exist.
"Despite bioenergetic and thermodynamic failings the 80-year-old concept of primordial soup remains central to mainstream thinking on the origin of life," said senior author, William Martin, an evolutionary biologist from the Insitute of Botany III in Düsseldorf. "But soup has no capacity for producing the energy vital for life."
In rejecting the soup theory the team turned to the Earth's chemistry to identify the energy source which could power the first primitive predecessors of living organisms: geochemical gradients across a honeycomb of microscopic natural caverns at hydrothermal vents. These catalytic cells generated lipids, proteins and nucleotides which may have given rise to the first true cells.

The team focused on ideas pioneered by geochemist Michael J. Russell, on alkaline deep sea vents, which produce chemical gradients very similar to those used by almost all living organisms today -- a gradient of protons over a membrane. Early organisms likely exploited these gradients through a process called chemiosmosis, in which the proton gradient is used to drive synthesis of the universal energy currency, ATP, or simpler equivalents. Later on cells evolved to generate their own proton gradient by way of electron transfer from a donor to an acceptor. The team argue that the first donor was hydrogen and the first acceptor was CO2.
"Modern living cells have inherited the same size of proton gradient, and, crucially, the same orientation -- positive outside and negative inside -- as the inorganic vesicles from which they arose" said co-author John Allen, a biochemist at Queen Mary, University of London.
"Thermodynamic constraints mean that chemiosmosis is strictly necessary for carbon and energy metabolism in all organisms that grow from simple chemical ingredients [autotrophy] today, and presumably the first free-living cells," said Lane. "Here we consider how the earliest cells might have harnessed a geochemically created force and then learned to make their own."
This was a vital transition, as chemiosmosis is the only mechanism by which organisms could escape from the vents. "The reason that all organisms are chemiosmotic today is simply that they inherited it from the very time and place that the first cells evolved -- and they could not have evolved without it," said Martin.

"Far from being too complex to have powered early life, it is nearly impossible to see how life could have begun without chemiosmosis," concluded Lane. "It is time to cast off the shackles of fermentation in some primordial soup as 'life without oxygen' -- an idea that dates back to a time before anybody in biology had any understanding of how ATP is made."

[Mizango]

Figured I'd post that before Yahoo gets a hold of it and butchers it all to hell.

[Kaylia]

Figured I'd post that before Yahoo gets a hold of it and butchers it all to hell.

LIFE WAS BORN INSIDE VOLCANOS





Pretty cool article. I liked the soup better, but as long it's fairly common and could be found anywhere in the universe, I'm happy.

I'm curious to see the particular parameters it would take to start the process. Is it something very specific, or there is a large range that allow these reactions.

[Woozie]

I liked the soup better because everything is better when there's food involved, even science. Until we learn to cook food in vents on the ocean floor, I'm going to keep believing that the first life was formed in something we can call 'soup'.

[Mizango]

Man it's funny seeing some of those thermal worms and crabs thriving in 600 degree water, no sunlight.. no nothing. Just them making their own food and living in one of the planets most volatile and hostile domains.

Extremophiles are simply remarkable creatures. But you are right Woozie, I could totally go for some soup now. Soup makes everything better.

[zoobernut]

I came to this thread for science and now I am hungry. I want to feed my brain not my stomach!

That is an interesting article though and extremophiles are crazy creatures. I like the water bear personally crazy little bug that can go dormant and live through just about anything.

There is a new show on Discovery that they have been playing called Earth Extremes and there was a portion where they covered the ecosystems that evolve around thermal vents on the bottom of the ocean. It is amazing that all it takes is one creature that can convert chemicals to energy and they support the rest of the ecosystem around them.


Similar to the bacteria that live in the boiling hot pools in Yellowstone park.

[Woozie]

What's crazy is that some life forms are so resilient that NASA is afraid that sending robots and ships and stuff to other planets may "contaminate" the planets (which basically implies that some of our microbial life forms could potentially survive weeks/years in freakin outer space).

Edit: Now that I think about it, there was an episode of The Most Extreme (animal planet show) where the number one animal could survive in outer space. It was called the something-bear. It's not actually a bear though (obviously), it looks like a little worm or bug or something, but I think it's microscopic.

Edit 2:

My bad, zoobernut already said it lol. The water bear.

from Wikipedia

Tardigrades (commonly known as water bears or moss piglets[3]) form the phylum Tardigrada, part of the superphylum Ecdysozoa. They are microscopic, water-dwelling, segmented animals with eight legs. Tardigrades were first described by Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773 (kleiner Wasserbär = little water bear). The name Tardigrada means "slow walker" and was given by Lazzaro Spallanzani in 1777. The name water bear comes from the way they walk, reminiscent of a bear's gait. The biggest adults may reach a body length of 1.5 mm, the smallest below 0.1 mm. Freshly hatched larvae may be smaller than 0.05 mm.

More than 1000 species of tardigrades have been described. Tardigrades occur over the entire world, from the high Himalayas (above 6,000 m), to the deep sea (below 4,000 m) and from the polar regions to the equator.

The most convenient place to find tardigrades is on lichens and mosses. Other environments are dunes, beaches, soil, and marine or freshwater sediments, where they may occur quite frequently (up to 25,000 animals per litre). Tardigrades often can be found by soaking a piece of moss in spring water.[4]

Tardigrades are polyextremophiles and are able to survive in extreme environments that would kill almost any other animal. Some can survive temperatures of -273°C, close to absolute zero,[5] temperatures as high as 151 °C (303 °F), 1,000 times more radiation than other animals such as humans,[6] almost a decade without water [7], and even the vacuum of space.[8] In September 2007, tardigrades were taken into low Earth orbit on the FOTON-M3 mission and for 10 days were exposed to the vacuum of space. After they were returned to Earth, it was discovered that many of them survived and laid eggs that hatched normally, making these the only animals shown to be able to survive the vacuum of space.[9]

[zoobernut]

Yeah water bears (Tardigrades) are crazy little creatures. They are thought to be able to lie dormant and then come back to life for extremely long times too on the order of hundreds of years. Imagine there might be a chunk of rock floating through space with dormant water bears on it.

If a large enough meteor slammed into Earth and pushed a chunk of rock out into space with a water bear on it maybe it colonized another planet.

[Kryssan]

Loan guarantee expansion


Crossposted:

There will be a $56.5 billion pot of loan guarantees available to support nuclear power projects after a massive boost from the FY2011 US budget.

An extra $36 billion in guarantees has been promised, on top of $18.5 billion that was announced with the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and $2 billion that was subsequently added for fuel cycle facilities. The financial support cannot come soon enough for the US nuclear industry, which is still waiting for allocation of the 2005 guarantees.


"Nuclear energy
currently provides
approximately 20% of
the nation's electricity
and 70% of the nation's
clean non-carbon
electricity. Over 100
nuclear power plants
[reactors] are offering
reliable and affordable
baseload electricity in
the USA, and they are
doing so without air
pollution and
greenhouse gas
emissions."

The Department of Energy's
summary of the nuclear sector

Loan guarantees are meant to help utilities that want new nuclear reactors obtain private finance, which is the most challenging and costly part of new nuclear build. Provided the US Department of Energy (DoE) has confidence in a project, it can guarantee up to 80% of the total debt. This security should entice more lenders and reduce the cost of the loan for the utility, while costing the DoE only for administration.

US prospects for new build have been hit hard by a combination of a temporary drop in power demand on the global recession and a related drop in gas prices. Several projects have been put on hold until power demand picks back up. Utility heads now say loan guarantees are vital for the economics of new build, but none have yet been announced despite rumours about DoE shortlists.

More welcome news for nuclear in yesterday's US budget was a commitment to continue funding the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP), which is to be an advanced reactor with co-generation capability at Idaho National Lab. This was originally meant to actually operate in 2010, but its priority has fluctuated. NGNP is part of the 'Reactor Concepts RD&D' program, which will also begin working on small modular reactor concepts with a total budget of $195 million.

All funding for the former Yucca Mountain project has now been officially ended, with the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management wound up and responsibility for meeting the goals of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 now passed back to the main Office of Nuclear Energy. The license application submitted to regulators by the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management has also been officially discontinued. The DoE noted: "The administration has determined that developing a repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada is not a workable option... The nation needs a different solution for nuclear waste disposal." Yesterday a 'Blue Ribbon' commission was named to develop a new strategy and correspondingly the DoE today increased fuel cycle research by 47% to $201 million.

Overall, the DoE is to undergo management changes meant to make it more 'results-oriented'. Changes are to be made across all departments as well as the office of the secretary.

YAY Money. Or something.