What Goes into a Shot at the National Ignition Facility?

[Winston]

 

[aerostadt]

And the work for achieving controlled nuclear fusion continues... A dream more than 80 years in the making.

 

[Winston]

And the work for achieving controlled nuclear fusion continues... A dream more than 80 years in the making.

That's a part of it, probably a very small part since laser pumped inertial confinement fusion is almost certainly a serious dead end.

What it is primarily intended for is to, as stated in the video, "support national security," as stated elsewhere in other nuclear lab videos, to provide nuclear weapon stockpile "stewardship" (making sure our existing nukes will still work without full scale testing), as not stated anywhere but obvious to me according to the many pieces of publicly released data found elsewhere which I've previously linked to here, the verification by testing and measurement of the accuracy of predictions by computer codes which once perfected can then be used to design (without full scale testing) reliable highly optimized nuclear weapons and (speculating) ones with very interesting characteristics like extremely small size (hinted at by nuclear device designer Theodore B. Taylor decades ago), directed energy like a shaped charge (hinted at by nuclear device designer Theodore B. Taylor decades ago), devices with a very high percentage of clean fusion yield (the ideal), radiation spectrum optimized for EMP, etc. Note that exactly the same kinds of computer codes which would be required to verify the continued functionality of existing designs would be just as useful in the creation of new designs.

 

[Winston]

See my other posts here for more:

https://www.rocketryforum.com/threa...l-revealed-plus-stockpile-stewardship.145497/

https://www.rocketryforum.com/threads/llnl-nuclear-test-films-on-youtube.145572/

 

[Winston]

I was wrong about fusion energy generation experimentation being only a small part of NIF's reason for being. I've found a ton of papers on that via Google Scholar searches. All of the NIF materials I've found are behind paywalls, so only abstracts and Google preview text fragments can be shown, the ones shown here likely confirming the weapons design mission. VERY few mentions of that can be found:

2016 publication - "...cm3 density will enable major fundamental advances in support of DOE's national security..." mission

1999 publication - "may identify a need for a high-yield post-NIF facility for national security purposes"

Google Scholar search on "national ignition facility implosion":

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=national+ignition+facility+implosion&hl=en&as_sdt=0,6

Sample paper titles:

Detailed implosion modeling of deuterium-tritium layered experiments on the National Ignition Facility
Implosion dynamics measurements at the National Ignition Facility

2D x-ray radiography of imploding capsules at the National Ignition Facility

Three-dimensional HYDRA simulations of National Ignition Facility targets

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.1356740

ABSTRACT: The performance of a targets designed for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) are simulated in three dimensions using the HYDRA multiphysics radiation hydrodynamics code. [M. Marinak et al., Phys. Plasmas 5, 1125 (1998)] In simulations of a cylindrical NIF hohlraum that include an imploding capsule, all relevant hohlraum features and the detailed laser illumination pattern, the motion of the wall material inside the hohlraum shows a high degree of axisymmetry.

Hohlraum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohlraum

In radiation thermodynamics, a hohlraum (a non-specific German word for a "hollow space" or "cavity") is a cavity whose walls are in radiative equilibrium with the radiant energy within the cavity.

Inertial confinement fusion

[snip]

Nuclear weapon design

The term hohlraum is also used to describe the casing of a thermonuclear bomb following the Teller-Ulam design. The casing's purpose is to contain and focus the energy of the primary (fission) stage in order to implode the secondary (fusion) stage.

Note that the thermonuclear bomb casing which acts as the hohlraum is cylindrical, at least in the US "physics package" warhead components I've seen photos of on-line. Example, the W-80:

 

[OverTheTop]

Very cool facility. I am lucky enough to have one of the spectrometers I designed in their facility. They use it for checking the laser amplifier plates (Nd-YAG).

 

[aerostadt]

In the 90's information was released showing how non-spherical fusion bombs could manipulate the direction of x-rays to produce fusion prior to the bomb blowing itself apart.

 

[aerostadt]

It looks the National Ignition Lab has succeeded in producing liquid metallic hydrogen, a substance that may be present in the interior of Jupiter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/metallic-hydrogen-lasers.html

 

[Winston]

In the 90's information was released showing how non-spherical fusion bombs could manipulate the direction of x-rays to produce fusion prior to the bomb blowing itself apart.

Interesting. Source or links?

 

[aerostadt]

Interesting. Source or links?

Actually, I didn't have sources when I made this statement. I was going on memory from publications that someone was circulating at work in the 90's. I think by that time the information had been become unclassified and was publicly becoming known. Also, in my opinion Kip Thorne in his layman's book about wormholes eluded to this information as being known to the Russians during a recreational hike with a Russian friend. I found these sources from a Google search:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_implosion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon