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Large Hadron Collider to start hunt for ‘God particle’
The organisation that operates the Large Hadron Collider has set a date for the start of its science programme.
On Tuesday 30 March, engineers at Cern will make their first attempt to collide beams at an energy of 3.5 trillion electronvolts (TeV) per beam.
The LHC reached this beam energy last week, breaking its own particle beam energy record.
But, among other things, engineers will need to ensure the beams are stable at 3.5 TeV before trying for collisions.
The LHC will search for the elusive Higgs boson, dubbed the “God particle” because of its importance to our understanding of physics.
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 Getting beams circulating is one thing. Having them circulate for a reasonable lifetime is another  James Gillies
Director of communications, Cern |
“Symbolically, the start of the LHC research programme is when we start systematically colliding beams for physics at the energy we have chosen for this year,” Cern’s director of communications Dr James Gillies, told BBC News.
“That’s what we’re hoping for a week today.”
Steve Myers, director for accelerators and technology at Cern, explained: “With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we’re on the verge of launching the LHC physics programme.
“But we’ve still got a lot of work to do before collisions. Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself. It’s a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way.”
‘Golden orbit’
The experiment, housed in a 27km-long tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva in Switzerland, has only been back online since November 2009.
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WHAT IS AN ELECTRON VOLT?
 Charged particles tend to speed up in an electric field, defined as an electric potential – or voltage – spread over a distance
One electron volt (eV) is the energy gained by a single electron as it accelerates through a potential of one volt
It is a convenient unit of measure for particle accelerators, which speed particles up through much higher electric potentials
The first accelerators only created bunches of particles with an energy of about a million eV (MeV)
The LHC can reach beam energies a million times higher: up to several teraelectronvolts (TeV)
This is still only the energy in the motion of a flying mosquito
But that energy is packed into a comparatively few particles, travelling at more than 99.99% the speed of light
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A magnet fault caused one tonne of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel in 2008, shortly after the machine was first switched on, requiring a programme of repairs that lasted 14 months.
Between now and 30 March, the LHC’s team will be working to commission the beam control systems and the systems that protect the machine’s detectors, or experiments, from stray particles.
All these systems must be fully commissioned before collisions at 3.5 TeV can begin, Cern says.
“Getting beams circulating is one thing. Having them circulate for a reasonable lifetime is another. Having a ‘golden orbit’ – where the beams complete lap after lap after lap for hours – is important,” Dr Gillies said.
“All of these things you have to do before the machine operators can say: ‘the beams are now stable, you can switch on the detectors.”
The LHC is being used to smash together beams of proton particles in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.
Some 1,200 superconducting magnets bend proton beams in opposite directions around the tunnel at close to the speed of light.
At allotted points around the tunnel, the proton beams cross paths, allowing particles to smash into one another.
Detectors located at the crossing points will scour the wreckage of these collisions for discoveries that extend our knowledge of physics.
National Ignition Facility results promising for fusion
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside by results in a new report.
The controlled fusion of atoms – creating conditions like those in our Sun – has been touted as a potentially revolutionary energy source.
However, there have been doubts about the planned use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the “plasma” they create could interrupt the fusion.
The Science article showed that plasma is far less a problem than expected.
The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams.
Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser – by a factor of 20.
Star power
Construction of the National Ignition Facility began at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1997, and was formally completed in May last year.
The goal, as its name implies, is to harness the power of the largest laser ever built to start “ignition” – effectively a carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion.
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INERTIAL CONFINEMENT FUSION
 192 laser beams are focused through holes in a target container called a hohlraum
Inside the hohlraum is a tiny pellet containing an extremely cold, solid mixture of hydrogen isotopes
Lasers strike the hohlraum’s walls, which in turn radiate X-rays
X-rays strip material from the outer shell of the fuel pellet, heating it up to millions of degrees
If the compression of the fuel is high enough and uniform enough, nuclear fusion can result
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It is markedly different from current nuclear power, which operates through splitting atoms – fission – rather than squashing them together as in fusion.
Proving that such a lab-based fusion reaction can release more energy than is required to start it – rising above the so-called breakeven point – could herald a new era in large-scale energy production.
In the approach Nif takes, called inertial confinement fusion, the target is a centimetre-scale cylinder of gold called a hohlraum.
It contains a tiny pellet of fuel made from an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium.
A significant potential hurdle to the process that many have suggested over 30 years of the laser fusion debate regards the “plasma” that the lasers will create in the hohlraum.
The fear has been that the plasma, a roiling soup of charged particles, would interrupt the target’s ability to absorb the lasers’ energy and funnel it uniformly into the fuel, compressing it and causing ignition.
Siegfried Glenzer, the Nif plasma scientist, led a team to test that theory, smashing records along the way.
“We hit it with 669 kiloJoules – 20 times more than any previous laser facility,” Nif’s Siegfried Glenzer told BBC News.
That isn’t that much total energy; it’s about enough to boil a one-litre kettle twice over.
However, the beams delivered their energy in pulses lasting a little more than 10 billionths of a second.
By way of comparison, if that power could be maintained, it would boil the contents of more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools in a second.
‘Dramatic step’
Crucially, the recent experiments provided proof that the plasma did not reduce the hohlraum’s ability to absorb the incident laser light; it aborbed about 95%.
But more than that, Dr Glenzer’s team discovered that the plasma can actually be carefully manipulated to increase the uniformity of the compression.
The 130-tonne target chamber is kept under vacuum for the experiments
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“For the first time ever in the 50-year journey of laser fusion, these laser-plasma interactions have been shown to be less of a problem than predicted, not more,” said Mike Dunne, director of the UK’s Central Laser Facility and leader of the European laser fusion effort known as HiPER.
“I can’t overstate how dramatic a step that is,” he told BBC News. “Many people a year ago were saying the project would be dead by now.”
Adding momentum to the ignition quest, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced on Wednesday that, since the Science results were first obtained, the pulse energy record had been smashed again.
They now report an energy of one megaJoule on target – 50% higher than the amount reported in Science.
The current calculations show that about 1.2 megaJoules of energy will be enough for ignition, and currently Nif can run as high as 1.8 megaJoules.
Dr Glenzer said that experiments using slightly larger hohlraums with fusion-ready fuel pellets – including a mix of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium as well as tritium – should begin before May, slowly ramping up to the 1.2 megaJoule mark.
“The bottom line is that we can extrapolate those data to the experiments we are planning this year the results show that we will be able to drive the capsule towards ignition,” said Dr Glenzer.
Before those experiments can even begin, however, the target chamber must be prepared with shields that can block the copious neutrons that a fusion reaction would produce.
But Dr Glenzer is confident that with everything in place, ignition is on the horizon.
He added, quite simply, “It’s going to happen this year.”
Could This Lump Power the Planet?
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab are betting $3.5 billion in taxpayer money on a tiny pellet that could produce an endless supply of safe, clean energy. For some, that’s hard to swallow.
It doesn’t look like much from the outside—just a drab, 10-story building on the campus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about an hour’s drive east of San Francisco. But as I’m walking across the parking lot on a sunny day in October I can’t help thinking that someday I might be telling my grandchildren about the time I came to this lab and met Edward Moses and saw the technology that was about to change the world.
Maybe this means I’m an optimist. Or even a sucker; a fool. All I know is that when I meet Moses, the 60-year-old scientist who runs this place, and he shows me a tiny pellet, about the size of the multivitamin I take every morning, and swears it will provide an endless supply of safe, clean energy, I want to believe him. It seems so ridiculously simple, so utterly doable. The pellet Moses holds is a model, but the real version will contain a few milligrams of deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen that can be extracted from water. If you blast the pellet with a powerful laser, you can create a reaction like the one that takes place at the center of the sun. Harness that reaction, and you’ve created a star on earth, and with the heat from that star you can generate electricity without creating any pollution. Forget about nuke plants, coal, oil, or wind and solar. “This is the real solar power,” says Moses.
What Moses is talking about is controlled nuclear fusion—fusing nuclei rather than splitting a nucleus, as happens in ordinary nuclear-fission power plants. In a fission reaction, the nucleus of a uranium atom is split into two smaller atoms, releasing energy in the form of heat. The heat is used to make steam, which drives a turbine and generates electricity. In fusion energy, the second half of this process (heat makes steam makes electricity) remains the same. But instead of splitting the nucleus of an atom, you’re trying to force a deuterium nucleus to merge, or fuse, with a tritium nucleus. When that happens, you produce helium and throw off energy.
Scientists have been trying to produce energy with fusion for decades. So far, they keep failing. It’s not that fusion itself can’t be achieved. Fusion takes place in every hydrogen-bomb explosion. The trick is controlling fusion so that instead of a one-time blast you get a series of tiny, controllable explosions. The joke is that fusion energy is only 40 years away, and will always be only 40 years away.
Moses believes, however, that his lab, which is called the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, has cracked the problem. The big challenge fusion has faced is lack of power. Even the biggest lasers in the world could not generate enough energy to smash nuclei together and make them stick. But the reason the building we’re in is so huge—it covers the area of three football fields—is that it contains an enormous laser, or actually a system that combines 192 identical lasers and zaps them into a round chamber, about 30 feet in diameter, where the tiny pellet of fuel awaits the blast. NIF’s laser, which took a decade to build and was completed earlier this year, can produce 60 times more energy than any other laser ever built. Right now it’s still being tested. But next year Moses and his scientists will fire it up with a full load of deuterium-tritium fuel, and Moses feels confident it will achieve “ignition,” meaning a controlled burn in which you get out more energy than you put in. Moses, an award-winning laser scientist with a wry sense of humor, explains the whole thing as he leads me on a tour through the NIF facility. It’s a vast, beautiful, awe-inspiring machine, mind-blowing in its complexity, with miles of metal tubes—all part of a system that starts with a tiny pulse of light, channels that light through machines that amplify its intensity and rocket the beam along using specially grown crystals and thousands of lenses and mirrors, and finally focuses these beams down to hit a target that is the size of a peppercorn—all in one millionth of a second.
Professor David MacKay: Britain ‘must go nuclear’ to control climate
THE government’s chief scientific adviser on climate change has proposed a quadrupling of Britain’s nuclear power generation to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
Professor David MacKay believes nuclear power could be the only way Britain can meet its soaring demand for electricity while keeping emissions under control.
He has calculated that renewable energy sources such as wind and tidal power will never provide more than a fraction of Britain’s electricity needs.
Speaking last week on his first day as chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, MacKay set out a vision of how Britain could generate the threefold increase in electricity it needs, with nuclear power at its heart.
He cited Sizewell B, Britain’s largest nuclear power station, as a benchmark.
“This plan would involve a fourfold increase in nuclear power over today’s levels,” he said. “So at Sizewell, for example, you would have four Sizewell Bs and at other nuclear sites you would have another four Sizewell Bs, and so on.”
He added: “Britain could never live on its own renewables. If the aim is to get off fossil fuels, we need nuclear power or solar power generated in other countries’ deserts, or both.”
MacKay, who will advise Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, at the climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December, stressed he was not personally pro-or anti-nuclear. “My point is that whatever energy sources we choose, the sums have to add up,” he said.
Britain emits greenhouse gases equivalent to 680m tons of CO2 a year. The government has pledged to cut this to 140m tons by 2050 and has said it wants nuclear power to play a part.
In the next few weeks it is due to publish a shortlist of up to 11 sites where nuclear power stations could be built. Most are next to existing installations.
The scale of the nuclear programme hinted at by MacKay is far greater than that suggested by ministers, however.
There are 10 ageing nuclear stations in the country, with 12 gigawatts of generating capacity — about 15% of Britain’s needs. Two are due to close next year, the rest by 2023.
MacKay’s calculations, set out to an audience of Cambridge academics, are based on a new generation of nuclear power stations supplying 40 to 50 gigawatts of power by 2050.
Since modern nuclear power stations are likely to be much more powerful than those built in the past, this suggests fewer than 15 new reactors would be needed.
At the heart of his thinking lies a prediction that, by 2050, Britain will need three times more electricity-generation capacity than it has now.
This is partly because the only way to cut the surging emissions from road transport — roughly a third of all UK emissions — is to make most vehicles electrically propelled. Millions of electric vehicles would need regular recharging.
MacKay also wants to see an end to the use of gas for central heating and the replacement of boilers with heat pumps that extract heat from the atmosphere. They run on electricity.
“Setting fire to chemicals like gas should be made a thermodynamic crime,” he said. “If people want heat they should be forced to get it from heat pumps. That would be a sensible piece of legislation.”
MacKay said there were other ways of generating the electricity Britain needed. One was to rent swathes of desert from north African countries such as Algeria or Libya, cover them in solar panels and transmit the power to Britain along high-voltage cables.
In theory an area the size of Wales could meet all of Britain’s power needs, but the idea is fraught with technical and political problems. It would also leave Britain at the mercy of the countries whose territory contained the equipment.
Another possibility would be carbon capture and storage, in which CO2 emissions are captured before they enter the atmosphere and buried. MacKay said this was an untried technology, however, and should not be relied on.
UK consumers face hike in energy bills-Ofgem
Energy regulator Ofgem said on Friday the investment would be needed to pay for new power plants and other infrastructure.
“Given the massive levels of investment needed, there is a high likelihood of rising consumer bills, especially if oil and gas prices continue their underlying rise since 2003,” Ofgem said, following a review of Britain’s energy supplies.
The regulator said customers could face increases in domestic energy bills of between 14 and 25 percent by 2020, while wholesale price spikes could lead to temporary increases in bills of up to 60 percent in the interim period. Ofgem said Britain faces a number of challenges to its gas and electricity supplies over the next ten to fifteen years including power stations nearing the ends of their lives and an increasing need to import gas via volatile global markets.
“These are big challenges. Britain faces a tough challenge in maintaining secure supplies whilst at the same time meeting its climate change targets,” said Ofgem Chief Executive Alistair Buchanan.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said that Britain could balance the need to tackle climate change with energy security.
“The most important thing about Ofgem’s report this morning is that it emphasises the need to, as we are doing, get on with new nuclear power, new renewables, including wind which is unpopular with some people, and clean coal and we’re doing all of those things,” he told BBC Radio 4.
Miliband noted that the government planned to source 40 percent of its energy from low carbon by 2020.
“Most of that is home-grown energy and that helps us to stabilise gas imports rather than just increasing them,” he said.
Russians plan to break into British nuclear energy industry
The Russians have unveiled bold ambitions to break into the British nuclear market in a move which could revive nervousness about the Kremlin’s use of energy as a political weapon.
State-owned Atomenergoprom has already signed a joint venture with Toshiba, whose Westinghouse subsidiary manages the UK’s main nuclear fuel manufacturing plant at Springfields in Lancashire. It is in talks about a similar arrangement with Siemens, which wants to become a significant supplier to a new generation of reactors in this country.
The Russian group, which has access to the country’s uranium mines and has already provided some fuel to the Sizewell plant in Suffolk, is also understood to have made direct contact with British Gas’s parent group, Centrica, and turbine manufacturer Rolls-Royce, both keen to be at the heart of the UK atomic sector.
“There are some negotiations, or rather contacts, with British companies but nothing specific has been arranged now,” said executive director Kirill Komarov. “We can do everything [from providing nuclear fuel to operating plants] if one compares us with other players, such as Areva, so we are not limiting our options.”
The massive Atomenergoprom, which employs nearly 200,000 workers, operates 68 reactors and is building 14 of the 52 atomic plants under construction worldwide, wants to play a major role in Britain and further afield. But industry experts say it could be hampered by the bad publicity generated around another state energy group, Gazprom, whose cutting off of supplies to the Ukraine upset Kiev, but also London and Washington.
It is also tarnished in the west by the legacy of the Soviet nuclear industry, which damaged the prospects of the sector worldwide for decades following the Chernobyl accident in 1986.
Komarov is keen to stress that his marketing drive will be accompanied by a new openness. Nevertheless, he refuses to pass comment on Gazprom, saying this would be “unethical”.
He is insistent, though, that Atomenergoprom is not interested in politics, adding: “We are just businessmen.”
Komarov says it is unfair to make any connections between Atomenergoprom and Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear incident, pointing out his organisation did not even exist when the Ukraine reactor was razed to the ground.
And he says while the nervousness about the safety of Soviet reactors meant his company missed out to Westinghouse in supplying Soviet-built plants in Hungary and the Czech Republic, these have now been won back.
But Martin Forwood, leader of Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment, said the Russians would be unwelcome. “A few years ago I went to a conference in Russia and we went on a day visit to a Russian reprocessing plant that they had started to build but had run out of money. The storage ponds were in an awful state in terms of security and safety. I don’t think they [Russians] are up to our [UK] levels of competence, and even that can be questionable,” he said.
Atomenergoprom is not expected to put forward its own reactor designs for assessment by the British authorities but Westinghouse is one of the main contenders, along with Areva of France.
Neither Centrica, which is trying to buy a stake in British Energy from its new owner EDF, nor Rolls-Royce were available for comment about any talks with the Russians.
