Talk:National Ignition Facility

"Test the theory of fusion power"

Orly? ~~

National Ignition Facility

Hi, regarding the cites at the above article, please have a look at WP:CITENEEDREMOVE. You may feel that the tags are unnecessary, but the policy at WP:V requires that citations be provided for material which is challenged. By challenging this material with a {{cn}} tag, I am requesting that someone provide a cite. If the material is all cited in the main article, then it shouldn't be too difficult to use the same cites at this article, but citing things in other pages is never a substitute - articles are expected to be standalone, if only because content can change in other articles. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 21:41, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

As stated in my edit summary: I am the first to add "more refs needed" and I have here, but NOT in this spot!- You can find refs all under inertial confinement fusion#ICF mechanism of action- it is not the point of this page. If you want to comb through the page looking for unreferenced spots you d have to go way further than that. Or contribute ! So I will revert your meaningless ref needed flags again.

Wuerzele (talk) 21:44, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

@Wuerzele: as I said in my comment above, cites in some other article are not a substitute for having them here in this article. Everything I have flagged for citation is an unverified statement as it stands, and per WP:CITENEEDREMOVE, you should either form a consensus here for removal or provide the citations. Removing maintenance tags is not permitted without a consensus that they are invalid. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 21:56, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Start being constructive, instead of ref tagging and reverting. Where were you when 20K people looked at this article to improve it ? You havent contributed anything constructive, man. This is a total waste of time and electrons.--Wuerzele (talk) 22:42, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

No, he is correct. We cannot drag material from one article to another without references if it goes beyond the redirect. Either just have the pointer without details, or provide the inline citations.74.37.206.38 (talk) 01:43, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

It's fine to tag individual statements that are challenged for a reason, but blindly putting CN at each paragraph that does not have a reference for the last sentence is not productive in any way. --mfb (talk) 06:06, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Yep balance is the key, those tags, generally speaking, appear often in rather peculiar places like "rain is made of water [citation needed]" it's sometimes quite awkward. On the other hand, no "maintenance tags" at all is obviously a bad idea. But I'm not accustomed to contributing myself to the Wikipedia project (the rules etc) so I'll leave it to you guys. 80.215.80.31 (talk) 15:32, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Scientific Breakeven

I think this article needs to account better for the fact that the NIF itself proposed this "scientific breakeven" measure, and that getting more energy than the lasers put in is not equivalent to getting more energy than was put into the lasers. Tangle10 (talk) 16:34, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Yes I think they should for the time being just state that DOE/NIF claims to have had this success. It will take some time to sort out what level of significance this test really had. No evidence but for all we know this may one day be found to have been a ploy to boost electric car related stocks, or to get more procurement dollars for weapons grade materials.

https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/12/11/fusion-energy-breakthrough-scam/ Jessica-albatross (talk) 11:03, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

I think it is disingenuous to claim breakeven when excluding the energy into the lasers and so much of the energy cycle was left out. They claimed forty years ago, that commercial fusion was a decade away and thus fission nuclear power plants must not be built or there would be no room for fusion power plants. (I worked at GE and talked to the second in command at LLL.)

The lasers didn't produce X-rays; hitting the hohlraum produced the X-rays. Later calculations showed that the hohlraum produced more X-rays than expected, thus diluting their made up breakeven definition.

The energy into the lasers and the building lighting and cooling was not included.

They are hiding the obvious energy cycle costs from enriching water with deuterium using fission reactors, energy costs of cooling deuterium down to its solid state, yield in making targets, etc.

People have gone to jail for claiming they could do medical lab tests with a drop of blood. This program has spent more money and produced less than what they claimed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.45.154.60 (talk) 20:02, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Origins of the National Ignition Facility

There is a nice description of the "early days" at https://www.llnl.gov/archives/1970s#event-laser-program-established. I think the current article is not quite right in asserting that the Livermore Lab initially decided to focus on "glass" (Nd-YAG) lasers. This was cetainly the focus of Emmett (who had worked on ND-YAG systems at the Naval Research Laboratory, if memory serves me correctly) and Krupke, but others, such as Yu Li Pan (phonetic), were working on high powered carbon dioxide lasers. There were other significant players as well - Lowell Wood and Edward Teller. Teller was head of the Physics Department at Livermore at the time, and Lowell worked with him on special projects. These comments reflect my perceptions, based on working for Lowell within project Y in the summer of 1972. I am not going to start editing on this subject, but perhaps this will be food for thought for other people. Y-project, by the way, was not strictly fusion at that time, but nevertheless was the home for what would evolve into that effort. 2601:151:4680:3990:34B2:9DFE:BFDB:7797 (talk) 22:35, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Conflicting statements about scientific breakeven in 2022

Our article currently says that the NIF achieved "scientific breakeven on December 5, 2022, with an experiment producing 3.15 megajoules of energy". It then says "The feat required the use of [blah blah blah], yielding 3.88 MJ, an 89% surplus." So which is it? 3.15 MJ or 3.88 MJ? Nosferattus (talk) 19:48, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

The December 2022 shot was 3.15 MJ. 3.88 MJ was July 2023. I'll fix it. Justin Kunimune (talk) 02:39, 11 May 2024 (UTC)