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Although the headlines are rightly dominated by the hair-raising/attention-seeking antics of Republican “legislators” trying to destroy democracy and mortally harm the United States, there is actually some good news today (albeit in the realm of research rather than within the acrimonious affairs of state): the National Ignition project, a laser-based inertial confinement fusion device which has been testing breakthrough nuclear fusion technology is now producing bursts of nuclear fusion which engender twice the energy which scientists put into the system.
For more than a decade Ferrebeekeeper has been following the amazing (yet also frustrating) saga of the National Ignition Project. The all-important project was built with national security money, putatively as a means of modeling the conditions and temperatures of nuclear weapons. This funding story illustrates the alarming strangle-hold which fossil fuel companies still have on our government (which must sell critical blue sky energy experiments as national security experiments so as not to offend knuckle-dragging oafs). The National Igniter consists of enormous banks of super lasers and super capacitors capable of emitting a brief burst of laser energy equal to 500 trillion watts of energy! I enumerated some of the other amazing facts and stats about the project in some of those other posts, or you can head over to Wikipedia to see even more amazing numbers and science facts.
Indeed, it is also well worth reading the National Ignition Facility’s Wikipedia entry as an extremely valuable lesson concerning the political, administrative, and logistic complexity of operating this kind of experiment. Unfortunately I cannot possibly do justice to the intradepartmental/multi-institutional wrangling about funding, building, and staffing (except to opine that even the largest and most sophisticated private companies would be unable to accomplish such projects because the managers would cancel all of the expensive or confusing things and give that money to themselves as buy-backs). This doesn’t even get into the engineering and nuclear physics of the project. At any rate, the National Ignition Facility has a complex history and has nearly been canceled multiple times by cost-cutters who have deemed the project impossible–which makes the fact that it is now surpassing new benchmarks all the more impressive.
One of the last posts I wrote in the old Ferrebeekeeper blog (before embarking on a year-long sabbatical) concerned the all-important milestone which the facility reached in December of 2022 when they finally got more energy out of the reaction than they put into it. Now that they are doubling their energy returns perhaps the lazy petrol-prone lords of finance will take abother look at funding some nuclear fusion power plant projects. Even if America’s hyper-efficient market-facing companies have no use for infinite wells of pure celestial energy perhaps someone from East Asia or Europe would be interested in a huge stake of humankind’s future.
Longtime reader recall Ferrebeekeeper’s strange obsession with the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (which we have blogged about numerous times). When last we checked in with the National Ignition Facility (which is ostensibly designed to model the behavior of nuclear weapons, but which is really used to research useful mechanisms for generating power from nuclear fusion), the laboratory had successfully obtained a burning plasma by changing up the size and shape of the tiny gold pellet in which they enclosed the nuclear fuel. Great things seemed imminent!
And indeed, this week, the National Ignition Facility has finally made headlines around the world by obtaining more energy from a moment of nuclear fusion than the (enormous amounts of) energy which was used to power the reaction. The facility pointed its 192 super lasers at a tiny gold capsule filled with deuterium and tritium nuclear fuel. Then, for 20 billionths of a second, the lasers concentrated 500 trillion watts of energy on the nuclear fuel and presto! a moment of truly stellar energy output ensued (I wonder what sort of esoteric energy was released during this infinitesimal second). To quote the United States Energy Secretary, “Ignition allows us to replicate, for the first time, certain conditions that are only found in the stars and sun. This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon, abundant fusion energy powering our society.”
So far the newspapers and blathering heads on TV have all been stressing that the process is not yet ready for commercial use and emphasizing how long it takes to develop commercial procedures of any sort. MBA types call this phenomenon “the valley of doom” which describes a scenario wherein the government discovers something worthwhile and amazing, but trained MBA-economist types think that it will take longer than 10 years to develop commercial technology and therefor do not bother. Anything which takes more than 10 years is effectively non-existent to MBA people because (A) that is how financing works and (B) that is how they are indoctrinated by their shitty schools.
This case may prove an exception since the government (and all people of conscience) have a very strong incentive to move human society beyond fossil fuel dependency which is injuring life on Earth. Unfortunately, fossil fuel companies, Republicans, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and most of the world’s billionaires will now belittle this accomplishment and attempt to squelch it as quickly as possible (since their wealth and power are dependent on the fossil fuel economy). It is up to all of us (including you liberals in the back who have traditionally espoused that anything nuclear is fundamentally unwholesome) to make sure that we don’t squander this stupendous opportunity to move society forward and undo some of the terrible harm our never-ending thirst for dirty energy has wrought upon our beautiful world.
Buried among today’s ghastly news stories was an interesting micro-nugget of potentially good news: the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California managed to trigger a 1.35 Megajoule reaction by firing an ultraviolet laser array into a tiny target of nuclear fuel. Now Doc-Brown-style engineers/mad scientists might scoff at that number since 1.35 Megajoules is about the same amount of kinetic energy as in a Con Edison Truck rolling down a gentle hill. However the National Ignition Facility is meant to test colossal forces in tiny, manageable packages (it is putatively designed to model the extreme temperatures and conditions of nuclear weapons without requiring actual nuclear testing).
The real purpose of the National Ignition Facility is to try to leapfrog the moribund engineering quest for usable fusion energy. I wrote an overly optimistic piece about the place over a decade ago and have barely heard anything about it since then aside from a story about how they finally got their laser array to work right back in 2012. To briefly recap the methodology of this process, here is a simplified description. Scientists fire a burst of extremely intense energy through the futuristic laser array for 20 billionths of a second. This energy is theoretically meant to vaporize a small gold capsule containing deuterium and tritium. If lasers strike the gold correctly, the disintegrating gold releases a high-energy burst of x-rays which compact the capsule and force the hydrogen isotopes to fuse. On August 8th, for the first time, this process mostly worked and the reaction actually yielded 70% of the energy used to fire the lasers (an enormous improvement from the previous 3% maximum which had been the benchmark for years).
Apparently the breakthrough involved improving the size, shape, and microscopic surface preparation of the capsule (classic engineering stuff!). Nuclear engineers are quick to point out that the result still leaves us a long way from figuring out how to produce the clean abundant energy which humankind desperately needs to solve our (rapidly growing) problems and needs. Yet they also have a long-absent glint in their eyes and a new spring in their step. This is real progress in the search for a goal which has proven maddeningly elusive. Let’s keep an eye on the National Ignition Facility, and, maybe, just maybe this would be a worthy place to spend some more of our national budget.
According to ancient Chinese mythology, humankind was created by the benevolent snake-goddess Nüwa (who is one of my very favorite divinities in any pantheon, by the way). But keen readers wonder: where did Nüwa come from? Whence came the ocean and the earth and the sea and the winds and the heavens. Oh, there is a story behind that too, but it is strange and troubling—sad and incomplete and beautiful like so much of Chinese mythology and folklore.
In the beginning there was nothing except for the universe egg—a vast perfect egg which contained everything. Within the universe egg, yin and yang energies were mixed together so completely and perfectly that they were indistinguishable. Then, through some unknown means, the egg changed—mayhap it became fertilized—and a being began to grow within it. This was P’an Ku, the great primordial entity. The yin and yang energy began to separate and build complex forms. P’an Ku slowly grew and grew. He started as something infinitely small but gradually he became larger and larger until eventually his vast arms came up against the sides of the everything egg. The little embryo became a vast god. The walls of the egg became a prison.
Then P’an Ku grabbed an axe (which appeared from who knows where). Using all of his gargantuan might, he smashed a great blow through the shell of the egg, which exploded. He was born—as was the universe. Beside him, in the gushing yolk, the primordial magical beings came into being—the dragon, the tortoise, the phoenix, and the quilin. These special creatures helped the first deity as he began to separate chaos into order. P’an Ku split the yin into darkness and the yang into light. He laid the foundation stones of the vault of the everlasting sky and filled the ocean with the waters of creation dripping from the shattered egg shell.
But as he built, a strange thing happened (though maybe not so strange to my fellow artists who can never quite craft their dreams into their works). The world he made became inimical to him. He aged. He suffered. His creation was unfinished…and he died. His breath became the clouds and the wind. His body became the mountains and the plains of China. His eyes became the sun and the moon. The hair of his body and head became the plants and trees.
It was in this corpse-world that the creator deities moved: Nüwa, a child born of P’an Ku’s genitals…or an alien outsider? Who knows? Who can say? What is important is that eggs are important. In Chinese myth they are the source of everything. The beginning of the universe.
Chinese mythology does not dwell on the end of the world quite the way other cosmologies do. Our world is sad and broken enough that we don’t need to think about its ending. But there are ethereal hints from before the Chin emperor’s great purges which suggest that time is circular like an egg. Somehow, as we all began, so we will end back there again in the homogenized grey yolk of chaos.
Furnace Edifice (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink)
Here are two more funny drawings from my little book. The first is a drawing from February, when I can never get warm enough. A strange furnace edifice of ovens and stoves chugs away: its fires produce delightful heat. Two monsters have come to bask in the warmth (maybe the anglerfish is part of the mechanism for fueling the array). At the top an attendant pours water onto the furnaces to produce great clouds of steam. I am not sure if this is about cleanliness or energy or entrapment…or maybe all three.
The Cave Beneath the Icing (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016, colored pencil and ink)
In the next picture a glistening pink temple made of melting pink icing glistens above a purple cavern. In the depths of the cavern an addict grovels for drugs and medicine as an anglerfish lures him further down into the darkness. A glistening glazed doughnut sits in the middle of the composition as an avatar of appetite. Is this picture about illicit drugs or about legitimate medicine or about money? Does it matter?
Many people complain that the news is all bad. That is not true at all, but good news is sometimes harder to quantify or follow than bad tidings—plus human progress tends to be incremental. I bring this up because this week did feature a good news story—and Ferrebeekeeper has been following along (as best we can) for years. The nuclear scientists at the National Ignition Facility (a part of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) have been attempting to use a vast laser array to heat/compress a deuterium and tritium fuel pellet to the extreme conditions necessary for nuclear fusion.
The container for the nuclear fuel
Nuclear fusion involves compressing/heating the elementary particles which make up atoms until the atoms fuse into new atoms. Such a process releases outrageous amounts of energy but it does not start easily–indeed so much energy is required to begin the reaction that “hot” fusion typically requires a star or a nuclear fission detonator. These items are dangerous and alarming to have lying around so scientists have been attempting to find a more controlled method of fusing atoms together.
The NIF Target Chamber
Earlier this week the science journal Nature published a paper which details how NIF scientists finally managed to produce more energy than was initially put into the fuel pellet (albeit not into the overall system). This does not sound overwhelmingly exciting—yet it is farther than nuclear engineers have got in 50 years. To quote the amazingly named head scientist, Omar Hurricane, “We’ve assembled that stick of dynamite and we’ve gotten the fuse to light…If we can get that fuse to burn all the way to the dynamite, it’s going to pack a wallop.”
Just dream what we could accomplish with such energy!
Abundant safe energy from nuclear fusion would be an astonishingly transformative innovation for humankind. Immediately our principle economic and environmental problems would be forever altered. Additionally having such a cosmic wellspring of energy available would allow us to embark on engineering works of a vastly greater scale than any known so far.
Planetary Engineering!
A mosaic image taken by the Hubble Telescope of Messier 82 (NASA, ca. 2000)
Twelve million light years from Earth lies Messier 82, a starburst galaxy 5 times more luminous than the entire Milky Way galaxy. Messier 82 (AKA M82) is a very happening and dynamic galaxy: stars are being created there at an exceptionally high rate—most likely because the galaxy is “interacting” (or possibly colliding) with its neighboring galaxy M81. In 2005, the Hubble Space Telescope detected nearly 200 massive starburst clusters near M82’s center. Within these huge masses of dust and gas, stars are being birthed (and dying) at an astonishing rate. The high energy released by this cosmic upheaval is nearly constant and the outflow of charged particles from M82 is evocatively known as “superwind”.
Lovell Telescope, Jodrell Bank Observatory (Mike Peel; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester)
In 2010, astronomers working at Jodrell Bank Observatory in England discovered a mystery at the heart of M82: an unknown object was emitting high energy electromagnetic radiation in a pattern unlike anything else so far observed in the universe. The mystery object appeared to be moving at 4 times the speed of light (which is, of course, quite impossible according to the standard model of the universe. Newscientist.com offered the following explanation (of sorts) for the mystery object’s perceived velocity:
Such apparent “superluminal” motion has been seen before in high-speed jets of material squirted out by some black holes. The stuff in these jets is moving towards us at a slight angle and travelling at a fair fraction of the speed of light, and the effects of relativity produce a kind of optical illusion that makes the motion appear superluminal.
At present, the best explanation astronomers have for the mystery is that it is some sort of microquasar or black hole which is interacting in an unusual way with the tumultuous mass within a starburst cluster. At present, the mystery is unexplained.
A super-dramatic before-and-after animation/photo of the type Ia supernova in M82
However, at present, M82 is doing entirely different things which have captured the attention of the international astronomy community. On January 21st, 2014, Steve Fossey and a group of his students at University College London spotted a colossal explosion within M82. The event was quickly identified as a type Ia supernova, a bright and consistently energetic star explosion which occurs in binary stars where at least one star is a white dwarf (the dead, but energetic fragment of a larger star). CBS News explains the phenomenon and its historical significance:
[When a] white dwarf siphons off too much mass from its companion star, a runaway nuclear reaction begins inside the dead star, leading to a brilliant supernova. Because Type Ia supernovas are believed to shine with equal brightness at their peaks, they are used as “standard candles” to measure distances the universe.
The supernova in M82 is the nearest supernova of its type observed since Supernova 1987A was spotted in February 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud (the dwarf galaxy which is companion to the Milky Way). Telescopes around Earth are turning towards Ursa Major (where M82 is located in the sky). Although the supernova is big news here, it is a very stale story in M82 where this all happened 12 million years ago.
An Artist’s Conception of a Type Ia Supernova
Ghosts and the disquieted dead abound in China and, as elsewhere, these manifold specters hold up a dark mirror to society as a whole. Chinese folklore features hungry ghosts, hanged ghosts, sexually abused ghosts, and happy, helpful servant ghosts. There are the wrongfully dead ghosts who were denied justice by merciless bureaucrats and there are drowned ghosts who always lurk in the water grabbing at things. There are ghost brides, ghost thieves, and ghost hunters. All of this is in addition to the countless fiends, demons, nature spirits, immortals, monsters, gods, and supernatural animals which make up the endlessly invigorating Chinese pantheon. Yet out of all the many sorts of ghosts and revenants, one particular category of Chinese apparition stands out as an exemplary type specimen of the undead. These are the jiāng shī, the hopping reanimated corpses which are analogous to the vampires and mummies of western horror. In English such undead beings are called hopping ghosts or Chinese vampires.
Here’s a diagram?
Like vampires, jiāng shī feed off of the life energy of the living and command supernatural powers, but there are some big differences. Jiāng shī are created in many different supernatural ways when the po, an aspect of the soul, is returned to the body (this often involves a shock of yin energy from cats or the moon), but they are essentially of two varieties: 1) recently dead souls who died far from home and literally hop back to where they are from sometimes with the help of a Taoist sorcerers, and sometimes through pure homesickness ; and 2) ancient corpses which have gone so long without decaying that they become reanimated by dark yin magic. The Chinese name means “stiff corpse” and the undead monsters are literally stiff from rigor mortis. Because of this handicap, jiāng shī have a hard time with mobility and their movements are often unnatural and erratic—hence they are believed to move by means of hopping (although some of the more powerful and ancient ones are also reputed to fly). Unfortunately their lack of agility is more than made up for by superhuman strength.
They are not ladies’ men like western vampires and–hey! What’s going on here?
Contemporary hopping ghosts look like contemporary corpses–except for the fact that they are animated and are hopping violently and quickly towards you to suck out your qi energy (oh and they have long sharp fingernails). Ancient jiāng shī, however, have a very distinctive and operatic look: they are dressed in Qing dynasty graveclothes and they have pale green skin and white hair (as well as claws and fangs). Both sorts of hopping ghosts bear an overwhelming smell of putrefaction with them—which is so appalling that it is occasionally fatal. They feed on qi energy which they strangle/gouge out of their victims, either manually or by hopping on top of the heads of sleepers.
If you are having trouble with hopping ghosts, there are several ways of dealing with them. The animated corpses are driven off by Taoist mirrors, brooms made with real straw, rice, or fresh chicken blood. Sometimes applying a yellow and red Chinese death blessing to their forehead will give the jiāng shī peace (although this should be attempted only in extreme circumstances!). They cannot abide the light of the sun. In the end though there is only one sovereign remedy to permanently get rid of jiāng shī, and it is the ultimate solution to any undead problems. If you burn a jiāng shī and all of its accessories (creepy funeral suit, coffin, etc.) you will be permanently rid of the monster.
Good old fire!
Here is an exquisite painting by the Song dynasty master Ts’ui Po which shows two magpies haranguing a passing hare. It is strange to think that this delicate and refined work was painted 5 years before the battle of Hastings. The word for magpie is homonymous with the word for happiness—so two magpies represent double happiness–shuāngxǐ—which is one of the most universal Chinese concepts. Lucky shuāngxǐ symbols are plastered all over all sorts of Chinese establishments and goods (I put one at the bottom of this post and I’m sure you’ll recognize it). Ts’ui Po was famed for his ability to find the underlying rhythm in natural subjects and express it with simple fluid brushwork: the entire painting is structured as a gentle S-shaped curve, but within that compositional framework the hare and the magpies have their own calligraphic energy. Also note how wind is blowing back the branches, leaves, and weeds in the painting. Ts’ui Po captured the tao moving within a small ephemeral moment of natural beauty.
So, it is not easy to do what has never been done before. In October of 2010, I wrote about the National Ignition Facility, a joint scientific project run by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore California. The National Ignition Facility aims to recreate the heat and pressure of stars and hydrogen bombs on a microscopic controlled scale. The project is ostensibly designed as a United States defense project to model the nation’s next generation nuclear arsenal without use of (treaty-prohibited) nuclear testing, but cognoscenti have long suspected that it is a way that our country can pursue fundamental energy and physics research despite the apathy (or outright animosity) of a do-nothing congress and politically divided citizenry.
One of four banks of giant capacitors which power the laser microburst
Unfortunately the facility experienced a series of setbacks, and the massive laser array did not deliver the promised energy output. However, this month all that changed! On July 5th the facility briefly powered up its 192 lasers to deliver a 1.85-megajoule blast that released more than 500 trillion watts of power. Although the laser beam was only active for a miniscule fraction of a second, during that brief time it was focusing a thousand times more energy than the rest of the entire United States was actively using. Remember Doc Brown from “Back to the Future” shouting about “1.21 gigawatts!” and desperately running his hands through his hair? Well, a gigawatt is a billion watts. This laser beam produced a 500 terrawatt blast–500 trillion watts. So just imagine Doc shouting “1.21 gigawatts!” four hundred thousand plus times!
The successful test firing brings the NIF within tantalizing reach of their desired ignition breakthrough—the glorious moment when scientists flip a switch and create a controlled, contained fusion reaction. Building such a “star in a jar” is the first step on a road to titanic engineering and energy-creation achievements which could reshape humanity’s place in the universe.
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