[HN Gopher] Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab ___________________________________________________________________ Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab Author : zackoverflow Score : 464 points Date : 2022-12-11 18:29 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.ft.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com) | [deleted] | Doorstep2077 wrote: | I keep seeing lots of talks of nuclear energy being the next | greatest form of energy, but ever since Chernobyl, it seems like | people are afraid even though Chernobyl was a one-off incident | that wasn't regulated well. | LatteLazy wrote: | The 457th "breakthrough" in fusion this year... | lambdatronics wrote: | I would say there have been a handful of important milestones | this year, but this I would consider a breakthrough. Most of | the other stuff is overhyped for sure. | riffic wrote: | good, keep em coming. | LatteLazy wrote: | 10k more and we might actually make some progress. Just 20 | more years! | motoxpro wrote: | From the article. | | "Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are | still decades away, the technology's potential is hard to | ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long- | lived radioactive waste and a small cup of the hydrogen | fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of | years." | | Not sure if you were expecting things to progress faster. | But it it "only" takes 20 years. That would be insanely | fast and world changing. | LatteLazy wrote: | Sorry, I was actually making a joke: fusion power has | been described as "a decade away for the last 50 years" | which I think sums it up pretty well... | | https://www.engineering.com/story/why-is-fusion-power-is- | alw... | | The potential is hard to ignore, but that doesn't mean | the potential will ever be achieved. This (like crypto | currency) is the realm of vapourware I am afraid. Always | just around the corner. :( | weberer wrote: | >vaporware | | Have you never heard of ITER? Its set to power on in | 2025. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER | LatteLazy wrote: | What's sort of my point: we've had big projects that | would totally definitely work this time every few years | since the 90s. Will ITER work? Maybe. Would it be the | first to fail (or even the 10th) if it doesn't? No. Per | your own link there are literally 100s of other | "reactors". | | Its the same as crypto or emissions reductions. | omniglottal wrote: | What value are you contributing to this conversation? | tazjin wrote: | I remember hearing about ITER back in school, a long time | ago, and being told that they were just about to finally | assemble the thing now. | | That's pretty much the definition of vaporware, but maybe | it will actually go the route of Duke Nukem :) | postingawayonhn wrote: | It is being assembled right now, it is just taking a | bloody long time to do so. | simiones wrote: | > produce no long-lived radioactive waste | | It's important to note that while this is technically | true, it's mostly irrelevant. Sure, there's no material | that will remain radioactive for the next 10k years, but | instead you get much more highly radioactive material | that will emit high doses for a "short" hundred years or | so. | LatteLazy wrote: | It's worth noting that the last 2 generations of fission | plants were guaranteed to produce no waste, to be cheap, | efficient, reliable etc. The unpalatable truth here is | that we have no idea what fusion power will look like | until we have built a few. The quoted section made me | laugh as it's easy to be zero carbon when you don't | actually exist... :) | zackoverflow wrote: | Can you elaborate more about the guarantees about no | waste? | fusion_for_all wrote: | came to HN to post this!! Potentially 2.5 megajoule output from | 2.1 input | mirekrusin wrote: | ...where 2.1 "input" is generated from >400 input. | [deleted] | hannob wrote: | Usual caveat about all fusion "got more energy out than we put | in" stories: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close- | is-nucle... | | From a quick skimming it seems only one of the experts quoted | here even mentions that (Tony Roulstone). | | (Update: i wrote this comment in response to another story and | the comment got moved here, so it lost a bit of context | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33958678&ref=upstract.c... - | the press release indeed does mention this caveat, but many news | stories missed it) | [deleted] | tunesmith wrote: | So... Q-plasma is above 1 for the first time, which is a huge | deal. | | Q-total is still below 1, but some of that can be improved | through already-known laser efficiency advancements, and also | by pushing Q-plasma higher. | | I think pushing Q-plasma above 1 is the big gate though, isn't | it? I mean, partly psychologically. Showing that it's actually | technically possible. | whimsicalism wrote: | > all fusion "got more energy out than we put in" | | I'm curious - given that this is the first time we have ever | done this (even with the constrained definition as discussed in | this article), how there can be a '"usual caveat" about all of | the "got more energy out than we put in" stories'? | | AFAICT, this is the first such "story" to have ever happened | artificially in history. | guelo wrote: | The caveat still applied when experiments reported energy | gains below 1.0. | idlewords wrote: | Because all the interest of these stories is in fusion as a | source of energy, and there's a long history of declaring | we're near to break-even by leaving the most energy intensive | part of the apparatus out of the equation. | | With no disrespect to the researchers in this experiment, | it's not like we're surprised that fusion works or that a | pellet can generate more power than is put in. | kelnos wrote: | Because people like to shit on fusion, sometimes | understandably so, after decades of over-promising and under- | delivering. It's annoying and tiring, but there we have it. | | Yes, it's true that in this case we didn't actually "get more | energy out than we put in" when considering the full closed | system, but the point of this research was to see if they | could get more energy out of the reaction itself than was put | into it by the lasers themselves. Presumably the next step is | to see how far they can push this, still without bothering to | think about the energy needed to power the lasers themselves, | because, again, that is not the purpose of this research. | There are other people working on making lasers more | efficient, and the overall project will benefit from that | research (and so will the NIF, if they decide it's worthwhile | to upgrade their 90s-era lasers to something modern). | | I think a lot of people here are having knee-jerk reactions | and didn't read the article where they very clearly explain | the caveat and what the researchers actually did. | whimsicalism wrote: | To be fair to the original commentator, their comment was | moved from a different article where it was not so clearly | explained. | operator-name wrote: | "That's because they had to use 500 MJ of energy into the | lasers to deliver 1.8 MJ to the target - so even though they | got 2.5 MJ out, it's still far less than the energy they needed | for the lasers in the first place. In other words, the energy | output (largely heat energy) was still only 0.5% of the input." | BurningFrog wrote: | Converting the heat energy to electricity loses an additional | 50-70%. | DennisP wrote: | Partly that's because they use laser tech from the 1990s, | with less than 1% efficiency. Now we have NIF-class lasers | with over 20% efficiency. | | https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102. | .. | ghostly_s wrote: | They'd still be getting only ~1/4 of power input with a 20% | efficiency laser. | zbobet2012 wrote: | Yes, but the overall we get "more power out of the | building then we put in" isn't the goal. They are trying | to drive the Q factor of the reaction itself up. If they | get that to > 5x what the laser strike hits (a very real | probability) it's likely trying to make a building that | has a net positive Q makes sense. | | That building would use modern lasers, modern | supercapactiors, etc. to significantly change the "other" | parts of the equation. | eloff wrote: | I don't see that scaling anytime soon, still more than two | orders of magnitude away. But never say never. | zbobet2012 wrote: | If they replaced the lasers in this building from the 90's | with a modern light source it would immediately do two | orders of magnitude. Research like this needs to focus on | solving, and experimenting with one problem (in this case | the physics of inertial confinement fusion). They are not | _trying_ to build something which gets "net power out of | the building". So don't assume you're net in, net out | ratios are representative of what a plant targeted doing | that would be. | | It's quite easy to see that replacing the lasers, the | capacitors, etc. with more modern technology would have an | immediate effect. But it doesn't matter until doing the | reaction at all makes sense. That's what they are focusing | on. | jerf wrote: | The exact numbers depend on the form of fusion in question, | but fusion does have some several places where it has quite | substantial x^n growth possibilities, where "n" is | definitely greater than one and can be greater than two at | times, sometimes even substantially so. This means that | there is some real, concrete hope for improvement in a way | that, say, solar could never improve more than 4-5x where | it is now because the absolutely best it could ever hope | for is 100% efficiency. At the core, this is because as you | get the plasma hotter and more confined, the rate of fusion | goes up very quickly, much much beyond linear increases. | eloff wrote: | This is laser based fusion, which is super cool, but it | might be a stretch to expect 200x more efficient lasers. | Still maybe there's other things you could do, like make | a bigger fusion reaction. Hydrogen bombs do it, so maybe. | zbobet2012 wrote: | The lasers they use today are 20x less efficient than | state of the art. The capacitors are also massively less | efficient. So they only "need" to drive the Q factor of | the reaction up by ~5x to be positioned to build | something with a net energy gain. | | Because of the physics of fusion (or ICF) returns on | power are non linear. It's very much possible research | here results in a path to a "net gain facility". | alephnil wrote: | And they mention this right in the press release. Quote: | | "The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment shows | that scientists can get more energy out than put in by the | laser itself. This is great progress indeed, but still more is | needed: first we need to get much more out that is put in so to | account for losses in generating the laser light etc (although | the technology for creating efficient lasers has also leapt | forward in recent years). Secondly, the Lawrence Livermore | National Laboratory could in principle produce this sort of | result about once a day - a fusion power plant would need to do | it ten times per second. However, the important takeaway point | is that the basic science is now clearly well understood, and | this should spur further investment. It is encouraging to see | that the private sector is starting to wake up to the | possibilities, although still long term, of these important | emerging technologies." | | While this spins it in an optimistic way, the challenges to | make this work are significant. The laser is quite inefficient, | so the gain must be much much larger before you have net energy | gain. To scale it up to implode a capsule tens of times a | second rather than a few times a day, is in the order of | 100.000 times more frequent than today.Thus this is a long way | from commercial production. | zbobet2012 wrote: | The NIF uses lasers produced in the 90's because their core | mission isn't to make lasers better. We already have lasers | which are 20x more efficient, and hitting a pellet 10*s is a | trivial task. Those lasers can fire a 1khz or better. The EUV | light sources for semiconductor lithography do this tens of | thousands of times a second. | | The goal of the research being done at NIF is to understand | inertial confinement fusion. "Solving" these other problems | isn't as important, other folks are solving these all day | long for commercial industries already. | steve_avery wrote: | I have personally taken a tour of the NIF at Livermore. The guide | was an old hand, who constantly remarked about the efforts of NIF | towards "stockpile stewardship," ie the maintenance of the US | arsenal of nuclear weapons. It seemed like NIF was all about the | stockpile stewardship first, and fusion research was a secondary | consideration. | | The capability of the NIF to get positive energy from the energy | that they impart on the Hohlraum itself is neat, but I constantly | discount any milestones that Livermore/NIF report, because the | inertial confinement approach has such higher barriers to | commercialization than tokamak style approaches, that I just | consign it to "boondoggle" in my head. | | Yeah, the lasers could be 20x more efficient, and yeah, they | probably could figure out how to pump 10s of targets into the | chamber per second, but the energy extraction is just completely | missing from the considerations. The engineering challenges are a | whole 'nother level for NIF, a big barrier to usability. | DennisP wrote: | Seems like energy extraction would be similar to other D-T | designs: surround the reaction chamber with molten FLiBe or | lead-lithium and run some coolant pipes through it. | rawgabbit wrote: | What is your opinion of ITER? | https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2022/05/world/iter-nucle... | petermcneeley wrote: | What is "zero-carbon" in this context? No graphite control rods? | elil17 wrote: | I think it's there for people who may not be familiar with what | fusion energy is, so they can understand that it's a potential | climate change solution. | [deleted] | SuperFine wrote: | There are no control rods in fusion reactors. | ceejayoz wrote: | It means no fossil fuels required to sustain the reaction, and | no carbon emissions resulting from it. | FuckButtons wrote: | A fusion rector does not have control rods. It has a magnetic | containment field around a plasma which is, something like 10x | hotter than the sun. if you put a control rod in there it would | instantly vaporize. | HillRat wrote: | At the risk of being pedantic, if this is the LLNL NIF, then | it's ICF, not MCF, though putting a graphite rod at the heart | of a laser-driven thermonuclear event probably looks about | the same either way. | drak0n1c wrote: | It's unnecessary greenwashing hyperbole. Of course there will | still be carbon emissions from the production of the reactor | parts and the sourcing of fuel ingredients. The potential | benefits of working fusion are far greater than carbon worries, | and the media sells it short with narrow-minded labeling. | p0pcult wrote: | Just because _you_ understand the impact of fusion on carbon | emissions, does not mean | | >It's unnecessary greenwashing hyperbole | | OP's question provides evidence that not all people | understand the carbon benefits of this technology. | Ruq wrote: | The pessimist in me says that some building(s) are going to burn | down, one or more persons will be found with two bullet wounds as | "obvious suicide", and that any and all supporting documents will | be "lost". | | Because we simply cannot live in a world where we are independent | from the current power structure. They won't allow it. | | Hopefully I'm wrong, I'd love to see progress in energy | production that is actually sustainable. | megaman821 wrote: | This is like the "great-man" theory applied to scientific | research. Even if this were to happen, I don't think it would | matter much in the long term. The scientific community seems to | independently come up with the same or similar solutions to the | problems being concentrated on. | 93po wrote: | We'll see the same thing we see around fission. Lobbying and | fear mongering. Politicians lining their pockets in exchange | for delaying and blocking and refusing to fund fusion. | NN88 wrote: | do I just wait until this gets walked back or...? | jcadam wrote: | When can I pick up a Mr Fusion at Home Depot? | flowersjeff wrote: | I just hope it isn't another ( there's been more than one ) NASA | level "announcement" on astrobiology that's going to rewrite the | "book". These sorts of headline grabs do nothing to help in the | end. This is feeling like another one of these, and I'm hoping to | be proven wrong - as who wouldn't love a mr. fusion in their | future. | greybox wrote: | I don't yet understand why this is better than Fission. Surely | Fission provides us with unlimited carbon free energy (given | enough fissionable material). | | What will Fusion give us that Fission can't already? Is it safer | perhaps? | 93po wrote: | > I don't yet understand why this is better than Fission | | Realistically, today, it's only better because of decades of | lobbying and propaganda for fear mongering around fission. | There is no reason why nuclear energy couldn't be the vast | majority producer of all electricity in the world while | massively lowering environmental damage and loss of human life. | | Long term, fusion might be better because it can produce a lot | more energy and be safer. I feel like the safety improvement is | negligible however compared to modern fission reactors that are | properly maintained and governed. | acidburnNSA wrote: | I think it's just like thorium molten salt reactors. It's a new | awesomer kind of nuclear energy that doesn't have any of the | baggage of fission! | | Certainly, fusion does have the big advantage that it makes far | fewer Curies of radioactive material per kWh as it operates. | That has been the main driver of nuclear fission safety and | waste issues. | | On the other hand, there are good arguments suggesting that | conventional fission has been reasonably good at containing and | controlling the radiation, such that it's among the safest and | cleanest forms of energy known already. But the PR issue is a | hard one, and people don't think like actuaries. | usrbinbash wrote: | Issues of potential output and safety considerations aside: | | > Surely Fission provides us with unlimited carbon free energy | (given enough fissionable material). | | The crux of the problem is, there is a limited supply of | fissionable material. If we manage to survive as a species, our | energy demand will continue to grow, and one day we would meet | a hard cap, limiting what humanity as a species, is able to do. | | As a very very rough estimate, if we burnt through all the | fissionable material that we have available on earth, it would | be about enough energy to launch the mass of Mt. Everest into | orbit. Long term (as in, many generations from now) we will | need more energy than that. | justsocrateasin wrote: | I think the main difference is safety. Simplifying / | IAMAPhysicist, but you can't get a runaway chain reaction with | Fusion, and the reaction tends to just burn itself out if you | shut it off. | | That being said, fission is already pretty darn safe. But the | public perception of it is not good. | ibejoeb wrote: | Very encouraging to see at least some enthusiasm for this. This | is the real way forward. | | We can't just stop using energy. We can't buy our way forward | with "carbon offset" fees. And, most importantly, we can't just | redirect all of our environmental conservation efforts to | eliminating energy use. Remember when we were going to save the | rainforests? Don't forget why we called these "green" initiatives | in the first place. | leaving wrote: | You are correct. We need to control our own numbers at a | sustainable level. | VaxWithSex wrote: | The net energy gain is very slim and has to be converted to | electricity to power the lasers - in doing so, there's so much | loss, it is again NEGATIVE. | | It's always the same... | Robotbeat wrote: | This isn't the same; this hasn't been done before. | | New things are hard. Nothing truly worthwhile is easy. | VaxWithSex wrote: | Presenting the progress of fusion in such a way to give the | impression that commercialisation is right around the corner | has been done before. | Robotbeat wrote: | Nothing like commercialization happens without an insane | amount of work. It's easy to criticize, hard to actually | help. | VaxWithSex wrote: | Yes because it's hard to make fusion viable since 50 | years my guy... | | Am I talking to a ChatGPT instance or what is happening | here. Let's find out :D | | \\\\\vig-128 ?{/subject unlink;;; | [deleted] | jeffbee wrote: | I guess I don't really get it. Nobody doubts that you can get a | tremendous output of energy from a fusion bomb with modest | inputs. This thing they've ignited is a tiny fusion weapon | without a fission blanket and with a huge, inconvenient optical | primary. I mean I'm all for science but I don't see the road from | this to civilian fusion power as people generally understand the | term. | thehappypm wrote: | This is like a version 1.0 steam engine. Miniaturization and | optimization can come next. | jeffbee wrote: | The analogy doesn't really work. The utility of a steam | engine was obvious to antiquity, but they did not have the | materials technology to build it. They did not need basic | science to do steam power. The first practical steam engine | predates the understanding by chemists of combustion. It was | invented when phlogiston was still the going theory. | | NIF on the other hand is already a miracle of materials | science. An absolute triumph. But you can't enumerate the | list of unsolved problems that, if eventually solved, lead to | inertial confinement fusion as a civilian energy source. On | the other side you can make that list for magnetic | confinement. There is a clear path from magnetic confinement | research to commercialization, with a known set of major | problems. | thehappypm wrote: | People in antiquity did build a functioning steam-powered | engine, but dismissed it as a curiosity. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile | ufmace wrote: | This fascinating article goes into more detail on the | reasons why: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections- | why-no-roman-indus... | | They correctly dismissed it as a curiosity because it was | far too inefficient to do anything useful with the | amounts of fuel they would have had available. They | couldn't have made a more efficient one because they | didn't have any idea how to construct reasonably uniform | pressure-bearing cylinders. | | Real innovation didn't happen until much later on, at | British coal mines because 1. there was lots of fuel | because it's already at a coal mine, 2. there was a | useful task for the work in pumping water out of the | mine, and 3. materials technology had advanced enough to | make it possible to construct an engine that did a useful | amount of work from a manageable amount of fuel. | tsimionescu wrote: | No, this is like research into TNT being presented as a | potential way of creating a power plant by capturing the | energy of the explosion. The real purpose is producing better | explosives. | | This is not some bizarre idea - Lawrence Livermore is | officially a part of the DoE's research into maintaining and | improving thermonuclear weapons. That there are some vaguely | imaginable applications in energy generation is at the very | best a bonus. | | Remember that each shot of the lasers also destroys 10 | million dollars or so of the highly precision engineered | "housing" for the fuel pellet (called a hohlraum). | | The lasers don't directly hit the pellet - they hit the metal | walls of this hohlraum, causing it to grow so hot that it | emits x-rays, and its shape is perfectly aligned so that | those pellets hit the two sides of the pellet at exactly the | same time, causing two "ripples" to compress it so much that | they force the atoms to fuse in the middle and produce a | chain reaction that has to consume the entire amount of fuel | before the force of the implosion dissipates, at which time | all of the matter violently explodes. The brunt of that | explosion (and the neutron bombardment from the fusion | process) is taken up by the hohlraum, which is ireedemably | destroyed and can only be, at best, melted down as raw | material for the next hohlraum. | | Edit: tldr, this is exactly as useful for energy generation | as an internal combustion engine whose pistons are destroyed | every time the fuel ignites. | thehappypm wrote: | I'm not following exactly--are the lasers destroyed after | each shot? The fuel being destroyed of course makes sense.. | idlewords wrote: | The problem is you can say that about any wildly inefficient | new technology, but it doesn't always pan out. | tsimionescu wrote: | There isn't any, not for ICF. These labs are part of the DOE's | thermonuclear weapon research programs, not energy research. | | It is possible though that they could also use this for some | fundamental research into how fusion works as a process. | bnjemian wrote: | I'd be very interested to see the breakdown of input energy | costs. Most notable is the raw energy cost required to power the | lasers and control machinery in the experiment. But then there | are other costs, all of which must be amortized over time for any | real-world use case to exist. I say this because the journalists | in this piece imply that net gain is simply based off of the | amount of energy pumped into the experiment while it operated, | but the total input energy would clearly be more than that. | | On the extreme end, there's the energy cost of building the | machine and engineering its components. For the vast majority of | these, we can probably all agree that were a fusion power plant | to be built, the net gain would fully eclipse these initial | inputs fairly quickly. This may sound silly, but remember that | the economic context where fusion so often sits is one that | centers on renewable energy and sustainability. These costs do | have to be accounted for. | | On the other end, there's the energy cost consumables. For | example, the deuterium and tritium fuel input into the device, | which need to be purified (deuterium from water, possibly tritium | from the atmosphere) or otherwise isolated (from what I | understand, tritium is a byproduct from fission reactors and they | serve as its primary source in scientific applications). It may | well be that the energy cost of acquiring these consumables is | fractions to fractions of a fraction of the energy cost of | running the device, effectively constituting a rounding error. | But I think when we're talking about net gain, a clear definition | and accounting of the input energy required to run the experiment | would be useful to communicate to the public. | | I hope we see disclosure of these details with all the expected | caveats when the peer-reviewed article goes to print and | journalists have another feeding frenzy. | ashurbanipal wrote: | Is this cold fusion? The article contrasts this experiment with a | plasma tokamak in the UK. I suppose the lasers require a lot of | energy but it doesn't sound like there is a plasma is there? | bufferoverflow wrote: | Definitely not cold fusion. Using powerful lasers to heat up | and pressurize the target. | throw1234651234 wrote: | Could someone break down the costs of realistic fusion for me | like I am 12 please? | | For example, for fission, my 12 year old understanding is: Stack | uranium plates until the reaction is self-sustaining, boil water | to spin turbine, if reaction gets too fast, cover it with lead / | cool it with water. Circulated water is slightly radioactive. | Main costs are keeping reaction container / need power to | circulate water cooling, disposing of spent fuel is a problem. | Power output is 100s or 1000s times more effective than coal / | oil once running. In addition to meltdown risk, public opinion is | concerned about radioactive cooling water near their community. | | What's the same tldr for fusion? (and feel free to correct my | tldr) | Robotbeat wrote: | Tiny H-bomb except pure fusion, and instead of a fission bomb | as the trigger, you have huge lasers. You'd produce energy the | same way, with heat being captured by some sort of spherical | shield around the tiny bomb (which could also be breeding some | of the fusion fuel out of lithium) and used to produce steam to | run turbines. | | This is the first time that the laser's photon energy was | exceeded by the energy produced by fusion. But this machine | isn't optimized as a power plant, just to demonstrate fusion | (mostly to improve modeling of H-bombs, actually). The shots | take hours to do, the tiny bombs are currently expensive to | make, the chamber for the tiny bombs isn't designed to capture | heat, breed fuel, or even withstand damage from higher yield | fusion. Another machine would be needed to demonstrate like | 10-100 tiny bombs per second, and the efficiency (and | repetition rate) of the lasers would need to be higher and the | energy gain also needs to be much higher (but if they got | "ignition" where the fusion heat helps sustain the reaction, | this may be doable). And need to find a way to make these tiny | bombs cheaper. | jokteur wrote: | Realistic fusion (with the best understood technology): build | powerful magnets around a donut shaped chamber, which allows to | contain a plasma comprised of Deuterium and Tritium (both | Hydrogen isotops) which is then heated by externals sources. | Reach very high temperatures such that fusion reactions occur | frequently. Some of this energy stays inside the plasma, and | some of it escapes under the form of neutrons. Capture these | energetic neutrons in a blanket around the chamber, creating | fuel (tritium) and heating water pipes that then drive a normal | steam turbine. Tritium is radioactive (but has a very short | shell life; just wait a couple of decades), and the chamber may | be slightly radioactive after decades of neutron bombardment. | There are no problems of long term radioactive waste, and the | reactor can't do a chain-reaction, so no Fukushima or | Tchernobyl. | | I need to explain what Q is in the context of fusion. | Basically, you heat the plasma with some energy (Energy In), | and the fusion reactions produces some energy (Energy out). Q | is basically the ratio (Energy out)/(Energy In). When Q is | bigger than 1, we call it break-even. However, (Energy In) is | not the actual cost of energy you need to run the whole | facility, it is only the Energy that reaches the plasma. The | same goes for (Energy out): this energy cannot be captured 100% | efficiently. Some of it will heat the plasma itself, some of it | will escape but the conversion back to electricity is not 100% | efficient. | | So in a sense, Q > 1, aka break-even, does not mean commercial | fusion, it is only a kind of a psychological barrier to achieve | (so this is what the NIF announced; still a major | breakthrough). We need at least to achieve (Total Electrical | Energy out)/(Total Electrical Energy In) > 1 to achieve | commercial fusion. But physicists consider the rest as | engineering problems, not physics problems. And great news, | there is no theoretical limit on how big Q can be: for example, | the sun has a Q of infinity, as there is no required energy | input. Current estimates put Q at least 30-40 to achieve | commercial fusion (again: there is no physical limit to achieve | that, only engineering difficulties). | | Main costs are: difficult to define, because we haven't | commercialized a reactor yet. I would say, for now, everything | around it is expensive (magnets, the blanket, the fuel | (tritium)). However, once we have sufficiently understood the | optimal parameters on how to produce net gain energy, there is | no reason why the design of the reactor can't then be | simplified to be mass-produced. | | Note: the technology used by the NIF is very different from | what I described for a realistic fusion device: what I | described is called magnetic confinement, and what the NIF did | is called inertial confinement. | throw1234651234 wrote: | Thank you, "Current estimates put Q at least 30-40 to achieve | commercial fusion (again: there is no physical limit to | achieve that, only engineering difficulties)" is exactly what | I was looking for. | gigel82 wrote: | This is no different than the hundreds of "fusion breakthroughs" | we've been reading about over the past 20+ years. Progress is | good, sure, but we're tired of celebrating small incremental | gains. | | A leap forward or two might be worth celebrating along the way, | sure, but we're at least 3 orders of magnitude away from actually | generating net power here. | PeterCorless wrote: | They'll get greater efficiencies at scale with a hydrogen-helium | target around 1.989 x 10^30 kg. [Nice science joke for those who | get it.] | Trouble_007 wrote: | https://archive.ph/fny0J | eqmvii wrote: | This would be incredible... very excited for the details in the | announcement coming Tuesday. | lost_tourist wrote: | I hope I'm wrong, but this seems like a lot of other "firsts". | I'm guessing the total (and I mean -total-, lasers typically | aren't that efficient) energy put into this will be much greater | than the output. | chabad360 wrote: | At least according to the TFA, it seems that the breakthrough | is that they got 2.5 mJ out vs. the 2.1 mJ that was used to | power the laser. | Oxidation wrote: | MJ, not mJ. 2.5mJ is roughly the energy of a single keyboard | keypress. 2.5MJ is over half a kilo of TNT. | | Fun fact that Wolfram alpha just informed me of: a phone uses | between 10 and 20 MJ a year: multiple kilos of TNT. 4000mAh * | 3.7V * 365: yep, it's about right. | chabad360 wrote: | Oh, oops that's a mistake, thanks for catching that. | | Also, interesting fun fact indeed. | ThomPete wrote: | By now everyone knows that Fusion, if we succeed, is going to | provide us with abundant clean energy. | | But Fusion is not just another way to power your lightbulbs, | fusion is a completely new type of energy. | | With fusion we can in principle reach 10% of the speed of light | which would be revolutionary for space travel. | | But even wilder, because it's technically a sun we would over | time be able to create basic materials like, Gold, Neon, Sodium, | Magnesium, Silicon, Nickel, Copper, Zinc, Gallium, Germanium. | | It would also mean abundant energy to create synthetic materials | that could even replace use of fossil fuels in our materials. | VaxWithSex wrote: | It's a different environment than the sun and other isotopes | are fused. The plasma is a lot less dense, with a lot less | pressure but much higher temperatures. The current technology | will not generate other elements. And Gold etc are not created | in the sun via fusion. they are generated by a different | process involving stellar catastrophies. | ThomPete wrote: | It's a different environment which is in principle possible | to recreate. First step is to get basic fusion working. | melling wrote: | Any opinions on the book mentioned: Star Builders by Arthur | Turrel | | https://aeturrell.com/ | dicroce wrote: | One thing to consider: Even if you prefer solar, you still need | to initially make those solar panels and that is an energy | intensive process. | | I think we're still probably 20 years away from commercialization | of this, but I still think this is a very big deal. | Blue111 wrote: | > you still need to initially make those solar panels | | Can't you use energy produced from existing solar panels to | create more of them? | MattPalmer1086 wrote: | If this is the laser inertial fusion for the National Ignition | Facility, the purpose is not to generate energy. It is to study | fusion in the laboratory in order to maintain the nuclear weapon | stockpile. | PaulHoule wrote: | The efficiency of the lasers is awful though and they will have | to get at least 100x that energy yield for it to be a net power | source. A lot of heat winds up in the laser glass and it takes it | a long time to cool between shots so you are doing very good to | make a few shots a day. A real power plant is going to need more | like 10 shots per second. | | Heavy-ion fusion has been talked about since the 1970s and it | seems much more practical than lasers for energy production | because the efficiency of particle accelerators is pretty good | (maybe 30% or more) but it takes a very big machine, the size of | a full powerplant, to do do meaningful development. Something | like that seems to need about 100 beamlines because otherwise | space charge effects prevent you from getting the needed | luminosity. Given that you are going to need to protect the wall | of the reactor and the beamlines from the blasts and also have a | lot of liquid lithium flowing around to absorb neutrons and breed | tritium it is hard for me to picture the beam quality being good | enough. | | There hasn't been much work on it since then. If I had $48 | billion to spend I'd think a heavy ion fusion lab would be better | than some other things I could buy. | entropicgravity wrote: | Unfortunately large fusion is unlikely to ever be economic | because the cost of solar/battery is coming down so quickly and | is already in the 1-2 cents per kilowatt hour for the solar | component. And costs will continue to drop. | | Small scale fusion on the other hand would have a viable niche | application at the poles, in the sea or underground or any | other environment that is without sun or space. | 543g43g43 wrote: | We won't know what the cost of solar/battery will be in a | sustainable energy economy, until someone builds a solar- | powered solar panel and battery factory. At the moment, | productions costs are heavily (as in, entirely) subsidised by | fossil fuels (mostly coal). | lambdatronics wrote: | Yeah, either heavy-ion beams or electrically-pumped excimer | lasers seems like the path forward for the driver. Higher | efficiency, higher repetition rate, possibly more robust. They | also need to do away with holraums and switch to direct drive, | to reduce target cost, ease alignment issues, and increase | energy efficiency. | | I don't hold out much hope for a practical, economical reactor | from inertial confinement, but it's certainly exciting to see | them achieve ignition & scientific breakeven, even if it's 10 | years behind schedule. The one nice thing about ICF is that the | energy gain shoots up dramatically once you cross the ignition | threshold. That means they're arguably closer than tokamaks, | even though both concepts need ~100x the demonstrated gain to | get from where they are now to a workable reactor. (Ie, | tokamaks have hit Q~0.3, need to get Q~30, vs ICF that has hit | Q~1, needs Q~100). | Oxidation wrote: | It's not worthless research (not that you said it was), as it | still validates various aspects of fusion energy and some of | the engineering around it. And it's always been ahead of | magnetic containment devices because they only have to keep the | conditions for nanoseconds. | | But NIF was never, and is not, designed to be a generating | reactor, or even a prototype of a testbed. It's a weapons | physics facility that happens to do some energy generating | research sometimes. | | That aside, hitting Q=1 (and be able to use the device again) | in any way at all using any equipment is a major milestone that | proves humans can get there. From that point, in theory, it's | just engineering. | monocularvision wrote: | It's a real bummer to me that hype around fusion has faded so | much because of the false hopes that this sort of thing barely | registers on HN anymore. | boringg wrote: | I think that people are waiting to see the real announcement | not the scoop with limited details. Let's see what the Granthom | announces tomorrow. Tough to be excited about scoops with | limited information and without the level of robustness of the | accomplishment. | [deleted] | xyst wrote: | This is very promising. Hopefully this can be one of the primary | tools used to remove our dependency on dirty fuel sources | ChuckMcM wrote: | This is great! Why is this great? It is great because between | magnetic confinement and inertial confinement approaches to | fusion generation it is the FIRST one to demonstrate energy gain. | | If you are programmer, think of it like your program compiled | successfully for the first time. It means that all of the bits | between you designing the program, the program being compiled, | and the operating system recognizing it as a program, all did | what they were supposed to. Of course your program probably | doesn't do what you want it to yet, but you have validated a huge | chunk of the "pipeline" between what you are trying to do, and | doing it with the equipment you have. That is what this is, | "hello world" for Fusion Physicists. | | And the reason they are so pumped is that they have literally | been told for DECADES that why they proposed to do "wasn't | possible" (and by that I mean creating actual fusion through | inertial confinement.) | | Steps 2 - n look a LOT more like engineering steps than "can this | even work" steps, okay? | whiplash451 wrote: | When your program compiles for the first time is usually when | the real trouble starts. | zaking17 wrote: | Would anyone knowledgeable about the field update their priors | about whether we'll see commercial fusion in the next 30 years, | after seeing these results? If not, is there a big milestone | we're waiting for? Or will fusion advancement be a slow grind | with many small improvements over decades? | ak217 wrote: | I'm not an expert but I've been following the field for a | while. It's telling that negligible venture capital is pursuing | this route to commercial fusion, and the only cheerleading for | it comes from DOE lab press releases. That's because the NIF is | a thermonuclear bomb simulator developed by a lab tasked with | both thermonuclear bomb development and also developing a | portfolio of civilian applications for its technologies. Even | if the NIF were to break even on the entire power plant package | in theory, harvesting energy from fast fusion neutrons is hard | enough in magnetic confinement designs without them pulsing | like a bomb as they do in ignition designs. | | Meanwhile the VC money is quietly piling into tokamak and | stellarator magnetic confinement designs, driven by high | expectations from real breakthroughs in ReBCO tape | manufacturing technology. These superconducting tapes can be | manufactured like semiconductors and can develop magnetic | fields that were previously impossible, which is a key | manufacturability enabler in a design whose path to | commercialization is far better de-risked overall. There are | still concerns with the durability of equipment needed to | capture the neutrons in these designs too, but ReBCO tapes were | the real prior changer. | zaking17 wrote: | Thank you - exactly what I was curious to learn more about!! | DennisP wrote: | Funding is starting to kick in for private laser fusion | attempts. Over the past couple decades, lasers have advanced | even more dramatically than superconductors. | | https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102. | .. | stevespang wrote: | foota wrote: | How does something like this produce power? With tomamoks etc., | it seems like they draw out some of the heat (somehow) but how | does this work with a pellet that has to be hit by a laser? I'm | confused about what the working fluid is, if you will. Is there | some kind of plasma chamber that the laser has to go through, | that heat is then extracted from? | DennisP wrote: | The energy output is 80% neutron radiation. Surround the | reaction chamber with a mix of molten lead (for neutron | multiplication) and lithium (for tritium breeding) and run some | cooling pipes through it. | alfiedotwtf wrote: | If this were hosted on a science website, I would be more | inclined to believe it. But because it's on FT, it smells like | the Stein had their "free energy breakthrough" on the Economist - | i.e yet not another science website buy a website for investors. | di456 wrote: | First flight 1903 Moon landing 1969 | | It took 63 years of progress in flight technology. Not counting | earlier experiments and R&D time. | | First fusion experiment was 1933 Fusion seems a lot more complex | to a layman (me) than spaceflight. | | Excited for what's to come | mgoetzke wrote: | While I appreciate all the effort in nuclear fusion and do think | we should continue to invest a little of each years global R&D | budget, it seems these reactors (e.g ITER and this one) still | require tritium which is rather hard to come by efficiently. | | Which means normal nuclear reactors will be needed to make it and | minimising any economic viability of the dependent fusion rector | for a long long time. | echelon wrote: | > tritium which is rather hard to come by efficiently | | I'm not by any means well informed on the matter, but isn't the | lunar surface covered in tritium deposits? | | It might make sense to mine the moon sooner than later. Once we | have the necessary equipment and resources there, the delta-v | for getting the mined product to Earth isn't nearly as | substantial. | | Building lunar mining tech is likely to unlock all sorts of | advances for the human race. | ceejayoz wrote: | You're mixing up tritium (hydrogen-3) and helium-3. | 0xbadc0de5 wrote: | I believe the tritium issue is addressed through the inclusion | of lithium in the reactor's inner blanket [1]. Something about | the neutron interaction with the lithium results in some non- | trivial production of tritium which is then freed into the | reactor. tl;dr - they've thought of that. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeding_blanket | deelowe wrote: | My understanding is that this is proposed, but has not yet | been tested. In fact, one of the goals of ITER is to test | various breeder blanket designs. | 0xbadc0de5 wrote: | Isn't this the case with nearly every aspect of "proposed" | fusion reactors. Just because it's proposed or "not yet | tested on a commercial fusion reactor" does not necessarily | mean that the mechanism is not well understood. | deelowe wrote: | I think if it were so well understood, ITER wouldn't be | testing over 100 different breeder blanket designs. I've | seen breeder blanket design described as one of the | biggest challenges with fusion today. | 0xbadc0de5 wrote: | I would expect that it is more a matter of selecting the | best/optimized design rather than demonstrating the | fundamental viability of tritium breeding. | atemerev wrote: | Normal nuclear reactors are a good thing too, and they alone | are enough to solve all of humanity's energy problems (though | we should pursue fusion power too, of course). See Integral | Fast Reactor. | VaxWithSex wrote: | Only if you use the notoriously dangerous breeder reactors - | otherwise there isn't enough fuel. | atemerev wrote: | Breeder reactors are not "notoriously dangerous", they are | just a little too expensive to justify their construction | when the uranium is cheap (like it is now). Also, there are | proliferation risks. However, these are not engineering | problems nor scientific problems, breeder reactors are | production-ready and safe. | OkayPhysicist wrote: | I've never really gotten the "proliferation risk" in the | context of US power production (or China, Russia, or even | France, for that matter). We're talking about existing | nuclear powers, they already have the capacity to make | nuclear weapons. If they wanted more they would make | more, for the simple reason that having nuclear weapons | is table stakes for being a serious player in | geopolitics. | JumpCrisscross wrote: | Suppose we have a world with working inertial confinement and | stellarator fusion. Are there applications where one does better | than the other? | DrNosferatu wrote: | Even if for workable viability Q (Q_? Currently 1.2?) must reach | values on the order of 50 to 100, if considering real-world | losses and efficiencies. It's absolutely great news! | | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor#Engi...] | cratermoon wrote: | just like this time in 2013, | https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-breakthrough-..., | and this one in 2021 https://www.sciencealert.com/for-the-first- | time-a-fusion-rea... | | Which definition of breakeven are they using this time? | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U&t | lucidguppy wrote: | Is overcoming fission's political problems harder than fusions | technical problems? | rcarr wrote: | Genuine question: I seem to recall there being some very similar | news about how 'ignition' had been achieved not too long ago. Am | I imagining things or is this a genuine new development? | wolverine876 wrote: | The story here isn't ignition. It's that they got out more | energy than they put in, which is of course necessary to use | fusion as an energy source. We'e been able to produce fusion | for awhile, but net positive energy hasn't happened before. | cartoonfoxes wrote: | NIF is still doing fusion research? I thought they pivoted to | materials research in support of stockpile stewardship years ago. | zaph0d_ wrote: | They are still doing plenty shots for the national ignition | campaign and figuring out the target manufacturing process. The | official purpose of NIF has just been shifted to support | security research. | kumarski wrote: | Solves no problem. | | Fusion plants have exorbitant feedstock price volatility and are | only marginally smaller than a fission planet, despite square | footage not being the scope of the worlds' energy problems today. | tempestn wrote: | This is an interesting video covering several alternative fusion | power initiatives being pursued currently: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNP8by6V3RA | | The common thread is that they tend to aim directly for an | electrical output rather than simply generating energy, and don't | necessarily plan to have a self-sustaining reaction. | rvalue wrote: | Donate the technology to the world after X number of years. | chiefalchemist wrote: | I live near Princeton NJ. Approx 4+ years ago years ago I bumped | into a friend one evening at a local restaurant / bar. As it | turned out, her date was a top guy at the Princeton Plasma Labs. | | Long to short, Gates assured me (paraphrasing), "We're close. | It's doable. All we need is more funding." | | I hope he's right. | | p.s. I know PPPL might not be directly involved in this | announcement. I was sharing context on the topic. | | https://www.pppl.gov/ | giarc wrote: | I'd take all of that with a grain of salt. First he was | probably trying to impress the girl, and second, every | scientist says their work is possible, they just "need more | funding". If they didn't think it was possible, they wouldn't | be working on it. | chiefalchemist wrote: | First, she couldn't hear the ccoconversation I had with him. | Second, that sounds sexist in that I'm sure she could figure | that out if he was. | | Third, the next day it was announced a reactor in China had | the longest sustained "burst" to date (at that time). | | And finally, if he was wrong, why is the US making an | announcement? | | You're correct. He might have been BSing. The point here | is...he was not. | e1g wrote: | Good write-up to temper expectations at | https://twitter.com/wilson_ricks/status/1602088153577246721 | | My TLDR (from a layman): * The output is greater | than the energy *in the lasers*, but the lasers deliver 1% of the | energy required to power them. Need 100x improvement to break | even. * Converting the generated energy into electricity | would cut the output in half. We need a further 2x improvement | here, so it's ~200x to break even end-to-end. * The | scientific equipment requires immense & expensive maintenance. | * Plus the $3B facility around the equipment, that theoretically | could deliver just 2.5 MW. | | So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always! | bombcar wrote: | The thing that would be surprising is if they discovered | something _new_ to do; but this seems like more refinement of | what they already know how to do. | | Continual refinement may finally get us where we need to be, | but it's going to take a long time. | SilverBirch wrote: | To be honest, looking at those numbers, that doesn't look 10-20 | years away. We'd need Moore's law style improvement in | efficiency _and_ to productionize it. So we 're really saying | 20 years at best for the technology, and then let's look at | quickly we can build Nuclear power plants today... uh oh. In | the UK for example it has taken 12 years to even _agree_ to | build a new Nuclear plant on a site that _already has Nuclear | plants!_. | carabiner wrote: | Probably 5-10 years if this turns out to be the key unlocking | it. If it is, the floodgates will open for funding, public and | private, and we'll see a race to build the first reactor. | Similar to how the first COVID vaccine was predicted to take | 2-3 years and it took 8 months instead because it was a | priority. | ShivShankaran wrote: | It took only 8 months because covid has been in existence for | decades. Covid 19 strain was new and the vaccines had to be | adjusted to new strains not created from ground up | pianoben wrote: | Not so; the mRNA technology used to develop and deliver the | vaccine has been in progress for decades. The hardest parts | were done before SARS-CoV-2 ever existed, but it's wrong to | claim that "the vaccines" needed to be tweaked - _they | never existed_. | pclmulqdq wrote: | For people confused about this, there were prior | commercial attempts at coronavirus vaccines, with mixed | success. They were not RNA vaccines. The COVID-19 | vaccines built on that research (regarding what proteins | to target, in particular), but the COVID vaccines that | were rolled out were completely novel technology. | yuuu wrote: | temper | e1g wrote: | What if my expectations are tamper-proof, can you still | temper them? Thanks, edited ;) | billiam wrote: | No, not as always. The laser confinement mechanism works, it | has been shown, lasers that are more than 20 times as efficient | as these NID lasers are now available, so the improvement | needed to scale and "commercialize it," whatever that really | means looks more like 10x than 200x. In the world of fusion, | that counts as really good progress. For one thing, perhaps a | lot of the research money will move to lasers now. | naasking wrote: | > so the improvement needed to scale and "commercialize it," | whatever that really means looks more like 10x than 200x. In | the world of fusion, that counts as really good progress. | | Yes it's good progress, but an order of magnitude is not | nothing. Squeezing another order of magnitude efficiency out | of the lasers will be very difficult. It took 30 years or so | to go from 1% efficiency to 20%, and law of diminishing | returns applies. | pclmulqdq wrote: | It's still probably about 100x, given efficiency losses all | around, even on the highest-efficiency lasers. | tsimionescu wrote: | ICF works for its purpose - research into thermo-nuclear | weapons (fusion bombs). | | It has nothing to do with energy generation though, and never | has. | zbobet2012 wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion#A | s... | | That's utterly incorrect: | | "Fast ignition and similar approaches changed the | situation. In this approach gains of 100 are predicted in | the first experimental device, HiPER. Given a gain of about | 100 and a laser efficiency of about 1%, HiPER produces | about the same amount of fusion energy as electrical energy | was needed to create it (and thus will require more gain to | produce electricity after considering losses). It also | appears that an order of magnitude improvement in laser | efficiency may be possible through the use of newer designs | that replace flash lamps with laser diodes that are tuned | to produce most of their energy in a frequency range that | is strongly absorbed. Initial experimental devices offer | efficiencies of about 10%, and it is suggested that 20% is | possible." | toomuchtodo wrote: | I mean, you nail it on the head. It's not "congrats on | limitless free energy" but more "looks we might still get | value in the future if we keep pouring money into this." | Positive indicators at milestones are good. Onward. | kelnos wrote: | The NIF is using old laser technology. Current tech can get | above 20% efficiency. Sure, that still means more improvement | is needed, but 200x is probably an overstatement by an order of | magnitude. | | > _So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always!_ | | I don't really get the cynicism here. This is a _huge_ | milestone that 's been passed. Maybe with this, we actually | _will_ be 10-20 years away. Or maybe it 's more like 30-40, who | knows. But this experiment shows that net-positive energy _is_ | actually possible to do with our current understanding and | technology; before this, I believe much of the skepticism was | based on a belief that it may not actually be possible to get | more energy out than put in, at least not without technology | that 's significantly out of reach. | floxy wrote: | Anyone have insight into how this new development differs | from this article from back in 2014 about the NIF, entitled: | "Fusion Leaps Forward: Surpasses Major Break-Even Goal" | | https://www.livescience.com/43318-fusion-energy-reaches- | mile... | Animats wrote: | Right. Livermore has been working on this since the 1970s, | with increasingly powerful lasers. Now, they claim | "theoretical breakeven" - slightly more energy came out of | the reaction than went into the reaction. But 100x less | than went into the lasers, let alone the whole facility. | Nor is energy being recovered. | | This was never expected to be a power plant technology. | It's a research tool, for studying fusion. | | "Technical breakeven" is when the plant generates enough | energy to run itself. This is at least 100x below that. | | "Commercial breakeven" is when it makes money. | | How's that Lockheed-Martin fusion thing coming along?[1] | | [1] https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact- | fusion.htm... | DennisP wrote: | Back then they were comparing to the energy actually | absorbed by the fusion fuel. This is indirect drive, the | laser hits a metal container first and only some of the | energy gets to the fuel pellet. | | This time, they're comparing to the total energy in the | laser beams. | | They're ignoring the inefficiency of the laser devices, but | that kinda makes sense because they're using really old, | inefficient lasers and much better ones are available now. | dools wrote: | Helion tech seems to be interesting in that they use the | electricity directly so avoids the costly conversion via | steam/turbines etc. | DennisP wrote: | And right now they're building their seventh reactor, for a | net electricity attempt in 2024. | eagsalazar2 wrote: | When you consider the power that big oil and gas have worldwide, | and all they've already done to sabotage adoption of clean | energy, it just seems improbable to me that one day tech will | arrive that provides unlimited clean energy without some kind of | big ugly fight. Big. Like I can see these guys doing everything | from run of the mill regulatory capture to kill it all the way up | to supporting right wing (or communist) conspiracy theories or | movements to destabilize democracies (all things that have been | done in the past). I seriously wouldn't put anything past them. | Maybe I'm being too paranoid but I have a hard time believing in | any future that involves yanking away trillions of $$ in power | from a small group of unscrupulous people. | DesiLurker wrote: | this is the reason I've been saying that we will have fusion | within a decade of when markets start to price in the decline | of fossil fuels because of renewable & other factors. its not | an impossible problem, it just needs more research | funding/focus. | acidburnNSA wrote: | After a few more major breakthroughs we'll be where fission was | in 1942 after Fermi made the first man made neutron chain | reaction. After that, we can see what a practical electricity | producing plant looks like, and see how much people actually care | about small amounts of tritium radiation. | | At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs | for a fission fleet. In fusion it could be lower, but that will | not be any means mean the overall system will be cheaper. | | We'll have to see the cost tradeoffs: fusion makes much less | radioactive material per kWh than fission (but it still makes | some) vs. simplicity. Fission is relatively trivial: just put | special rocks in a grid and pump water over them as they pour out | their star energy. | | Progress is good and exciting, but I don't see any reason to | think this will have major implications for energy systems | anytime soon. Would be happy to be wrong though. | | Disclaimer: I switched from studying fusion energy to advanced | fission 16 years ago. | SuperFine wrote: | >After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing | plant looks like | | I guess we still don't have anything better than boiling water, | right? | acidburnNSA wrote: | Right. But slapping boiling water around the burning plasma | is kind of a rube goldberg usually. See LLNL's LIFE design | for example [1]. Things like molten salt walls circulating | through a steam turbine and all that. | | There are other ideas too, but it's hard to beat a Rankine | cycle. | | [1] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy | eternalban wrote: | HILIFE-II Inertial Confinement Fusion Power Plant Design: | | https://web.archive.org/web/20150404075829/https://hifweb.l | b... | svantana wrote: | Well, there is hydro, wind and photovoltaic. And in the | fusion field there are startups working on aneutronic fusion, | which can generate power directly from charged particles. | LPPFusion is one that seemed promising a few years ago, but | unfortunately less so now. | knodi123 wrote: | I'm surprised too. I've looked into this before, and it's | absolutely right - just not intuitive to me. | | We do have radio-photo-voltaic devices, but they're so | inefficient it's laughable. And we have RTG generators, which | are only practical in limited situations, and again have a | very low efficiency. | | So hot water it is!! | eganist wrote: | It's still decades off but as I understand it, this was the | hardest nut to crack. They got what, 2.5 megajoules out of 2.1 | in? | | I might be in the opposite camp as you but this is very much a | "where were you when--" moment for me. I'm sure someone will | pop in to disappoint me but I think the point is it's no longer | a hypothetical exercise. | reacharavindh wrote: | Not an engineer in this field, so I may have | misread/misunderstood, but I read that 2.5MJ out for 2.1MJ of | laser energy in, NOT the total energy needed to make the | whole thing work.. So, in a layman's world, it is not a net | gain of power, only a small subset of the system yielding | more power than it took in. | | Happy to be proven wrong and told that it is more of a | breakthrough than I think it is.. | VaxWithSex wrote: | No, you are correct. | galangalalgol wrote: | So they are ignoring the laser efficiency as well as the | thermal to electric efficiency? If you did the same for a | tokamak, stellerator or Bussard, would you get a similar | ratio? | VaxWithSex wrote: | Jup. Fusion research is necessary and funding should be | provided. But it is not close to commercial or generative | viability. | | So there is at the moment no working design for a | generator as a plant that produces more electricity than | it takes in. | Someone wrote: | Electricity in, heat out, I think. Getting that heat back to | electricity will cost some, I expect more than that 0.4 | fanf2 wrote: | The efficiency of a thermal power plant is around 40%, | depending on the temperature of the steam it can produce. h | ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station#Thermal_ | ... | acidburnNSA wrote: | > They got what, 2.5 megajoules out of 2.1 in? | | Of laser energy into a tiny control volume that doesn't | consider how much energy went into the laser systems. If you | draw the control volume around the building and see that the | lasers require vastly more energy than what came out, I think | you'll be less excited, right? | | We've been getting lots of energy out of fusion since the | early 1950s with thermonuclear bombs. We know we can get | energy out of a control volume. But is it a practical energy | source is still the question imho. | sharikous wrote: | Could you elaborate on that? What do you mean that the | lasers could require more energy? | | Is it that in a specific volume they got X EM energy coming | in from the laser and Y thermal energy coming out, with Y>X | BUT the electricity consumption of the lasers is Z>Y>X? | | If so that's sort of misleading, like the plethora of | claims from ITER. I hoped this was different. | derefr wrote: | Presumably they mean that there are efficiency losses in | charging the supercapacitor banks used to fire the | lasers; so that if you consider the system over multiple | _duty cycles_ rather than over a single cycle, it 's no | longer energy-positive. (I.e. if the system were | capturing its emitted energy -- and that emitted energy | needed to be enough to act as a grid power source | _feeding input power to the supercapacitors_ , rather | than merely being the equivalent of the direct output | power of the lasers per shot -- then it wouldn't be | enough to sustain the reaction.) | | But personally, I don't know whether that's actually | important. Power plants _usually_ consume a nontrivial | fraction of their own produced power to power themselves, | and in fact consume _more than 100% of produced power_ | when starting from a full stop -- meaning that in initial | few-shot conditions, even when feeding back their own | produced power into themselves, they still need (huge | amounts of) external power input to get going, like a car | engine needing a battery + starter motor. Only a rare few | kinds of power plant can be used to "black start" a | power grid. Most types of generator need to overcome | initial higher resistances, e.g. inertia (and thereby | back-EMF resistance at the transformer) in getting heavy | turbines spinning from a stop. | | It wouldn't be at all strange if a practical fusion power | plant turned out to be energy-negative over a few-shot | run (i.e. required "bootstrapping"), but then became | energy positive over a theoretical 24/7 run at whatever | its optimal duty cycle is. And a single-shot run becoming | net-positive would be a good point to start to consider | those more practical calculations, since they'd have been | useless to consider until then--a power plant can't | possibly be net-positive over any kind of runtime + duty | cycle, if its core reaction can't be net-energy-positive | when considered in isolation. | | Which is, to me, why it probably _does_ make sense for | ITER to be excited. They 've reached the point where they | can stop using a lab-bench model of power efficiency, and | start trying to come up with another, more full-scale | model of power efficiency to replace it with. | danbruc wrote: | Exactly. Looking at the Wikipedia article [1] suggest | that they start out with 422 MJ stored in capacitors, | turn this into 4 MJ IR laser light, convert it into 1.8 | MJ UV laser light, this into x-rays of which 0.15 MJ heat | the target of which finally 0.015 MJ heat the fuel. | Depending on what in this chain you consider the input | energy, you can get orders of magnitude different numbers | - 15 kJ of energy produced could either be a gain of 1 or | a gain of 0.0000036 or anything in between. And this is | before trying to capture the released energy and | converting it into electricity, this will come with | another sizable loss. | | [1] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility | est31 wrote: | From https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec- | cfc345589... | | > The fusion reaction at the US government facility | produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about | 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the | lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, | adding that the data was still being analysed. | | They probably upgraded the rig since the Wikipedia | article was written, so most likely the 2.1 MJ refers to | the UV light numbers. | danbruc wrote: | If this is assumption is true, they only produced 0.6 % | of the energy they spent. Another question would then be, | how relevant this is, i.e. could the UV light be produced | _much_ more efficiently than the experiment does? Maybe | some constraints forces them to use a very inefficient | process? In that case it might be reasonable to use the | UV laser power as the reference for the gain. | kelnos wrote: | Sure, and if they upgrade the lasers themselves to | current laser tech (as I understand it, the NIF's | hardware is around 25 years out of date on that front), | then that 0.6% number probably jumps to 20% or so. Which | still isn't enough, but is _way_ closer than 0.6%. | | Add to that the fact that improvements in laser | efficiency is a hot research area (as lasers are used | commercially in a lot of places, and cost-cutting is | always a concern), and this is starting to feel a little | more attainable. | foxyv wrote: | So the laser energy that went into the reaction in the | form of light is less than what came out of the reaction. | However, the energy needed to produce that laser energy | may be orders of magnitude more depending on the laser. | AKA: the Wall Plug Efficiency. | | Tabletop rigs can be as efficient as 50%, however high | power such as we see here tends to come with drastically | reduced efficiency. | ansible wrote: | Not /u/acidburnNSA, but what was meant is that no laser | is 100% efficient. Not only do they not convert 100% of | their electrical input into laser energy, but they also | require other support systems, notably cooling. So we | need to consider the total energy costs of the building | the fusion experiment is conducted in, not just the | physically small area where the fusion reaction is | happening inside the reactor. | | Still, this is an important step in the development of | fusion energy reactors. | PietdeVries wrote: | I think fusion-plants have always been "15 years away", and | most likely will be so for quite a few years... | | Edit: I was wrong, fusion is always 30 years away: | https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear- | fusi... | soperj wrote: | I don't know what people get out of repeating this on | every single fusion article. It's not inventive or | insightful, and it doesn't further the discussion in the | slightest. | abfan1127 wrote: | some people are new to the Fusion discussion. They've | missed the last 50 yrs of "fusion is 10 yrs away" claims. | Over the years, I've learned to temper all discovery | excitement. Its the other side of the coin equivalent of | the the XKCD 10000 comic[1]. | | [1] https://xkcd.com/1053/ | TrevorJ wrote: | Because it is context that is rarely included in the | article. | dylan604 wrote: | Because it's A) true, B) relevant to keep all of the hype | in check. The year of Linux on the desktop is always | right around the corner too. Yes, they are tropes, but | they were not born out of nothing. | | Someone has to keep the bloviated PR campaigns checked | with reality. Otherwise, some crazy fools might actually | start believing that fusion is real and gets duped out of | their money. If you can't stand a bit of real criticism, | then maybe you should sell your scam somewhere else. | Otherwise, take it on the chin, retool your message, and | come at it honestly. | signatoremo wrote: | If you want to keep the hype in check, do it with facts | like /acidburnNSA did above. Let people debate. You don't | even know what will be announced. Repeating the same joke | in every single fusion article is tiresome and has long | past its funny expiration date. | dylan604 wrote: | Why does it have to be funny? It's just a sad statement | about the situation. Maybe you're tired of people not | being as excited as you, or even willing to for a second | hold their breath any longer on this topic. But here we | are at another announcement essentially saying "this shit | is hard. with more funding, we could possibly maybe do | something in the nearish future". Anything announced in | the PRs is just mumbojumbo hand waving to explain why | what they are saying isn't really saying anything | substantive other than to keep fusion in the news so it | is easier to raise money. This is the main perception of | fussion by the masses. | | Personally, I just don't see fusion being a viable | solution for anything in any of our lifetimes. I will | gladly admit how wrong I was if/when someone solves it. I | just have a much stronger doubt in sci-fi vs reality, and | don't get swooned by the hype machines surrounding | fusion. | | What is tiring to me is calling the skeptics tiring. But | to each their own | kelnos wrote: | I think one can be simultaneously excited about a big | breakthrough like this, but also understand that there's | still a ton more to do before we have viable fusion | power. | | And it's unreasonable and annoying to expect everyone to | say "This is amazing, but..." rather than just "This is | amazing". Yes, we know, fusion power isn't ready, and we | have no idea when (or if) it will be. | | I haven't been "holding my breath". I've been watching | from afar, checking in occasionally (like when this sort | of news comes out), and I genuinely think this particular | breakthrough is exciting. I don't need the tiresome -- | yes, incredibly, frustratingly tiresome -- legion of | naysayers coming in and stating the obvious every single | time. | Veen wrote: | It's not a trope; it's a cliche. There's nothing wrong | with poking holes in overinflated hype, but do they have | to be so boring and repetitive about it. | dylan604 wrote: | If you keep telling me the same thing with the same lack | of results, I could say the same to you as being boring | and repetitive. Just because you say 2+2=5 and someone | tells you you're wrong every time doesn't mean they are | boring and repetitive. | kelnos wrote: | How is this "lack of results"? This particular | announcement is a huge result! | | Maybe it's not the result you think it should be ("with | all they hype over decades, we should have fusion power | by now"), but... too bad. It is what it is, and this | particular announcement is indeed impressive. | soperj wrote: | It's not true. The original quote was 30 years given | current funding. They reduced the funding and surprise | surprise it didn't get done. It's like when you estimate | how long a project will take given a thousand people, and | they reduce the number of people on the project to one | person and then hold you to the original estimate. | dylan604 wrote: | Okay, but then if the funding has decreased, what hasn't | the "years away" increased? No, that wouldn't sound good | in a press release now would it. So they keep saying it | is just around the corner. It's like the religious people | saying that the second coming is right around the corner | for over a thousand years now. I know, I know, religious | zealots and science (zealots?) are different. Or are | they? | soperj wrote: | Show me a fusion scientist saying fusion is 30 years | away. No one in the article is even saying that. It's | people in the comments repeating the same thing from the | 80s. | dylan604 wrote: | What article? It's people speculating on the announcement | that another announcement is coming. It just feeds into | the hype machine. With this level of hype, watch them | come out and show off the Segway! | VaxWithSex wrote: | The net energy gain is very slim and has to be converted to | electricity to power the lasers - in doing so, there's so | much loss, it is again NEGATIVE. | | It's always the same... | Robotbeat wrote: | As it always is with new, unproven things. | VaxWithSex wrote: | or fusion. | | There are always these articles: net energy gain finally! | and then: no not really. | Robotbeat wrote: | Reminds me of solar. That took a century to get to where | we are today where the net energy output is much greater | than the energy needed to manufacture them. | | It being hard and it requiring continual progress does | not mean that progress does not occur. | hotpotamus wrote: | How long has humanity been working on fusion? Wasn't Ivy | Mike in the early 50's? Glaciers continually progress | too, but it's not obvious on human timescales. | VaxWithSex wrote: | Correct. Nuclear fusion research should be funded and | realistic goals be set. | Robotbeat wrote: | ...which is exactly what this is? | [deleted] | Izikiel43 wrote: | Since you seem to be an expert in that field, what is your | perspective on fission for the short term? Are smrs really | viable ? | acidburnNSA wrote: | I'm not super excited about current SMR projects either, | sadly. The economies of scale that they explicitly turn away | from are very real. The economies of mass production that | they rely on can't be achieved unless a lot of people are | willing to buy the first N for high cost. But who will buy | after the first few boondoggle a bit? | | I am excited about standardized large light-water reactors at | the moment, like the US/Japanese ABWR or Korean's APR-1400 | designs. I wish there was more hype around them rather than | SMRs and advanced reactors. | | My favorite idea in nuclear to rapidly deeply decarbonize is | to use a shipyard to mass-product large floating reactors. | This gives you economies of scale _and_ economies of mass | production. Amazingly, this was seriously attempted in the | 1970 and 80s in Jacksonville, Fl on Blount Island, where | Offshore Power Systems installed the world 's largest gantry | crane and got an honest-to-goodness manufacturing license | from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build 8 of these. | [1] | | Sadly, my concern above with SMRs happened to OPS and they | couldn't break through. Such a good idea though. | | [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html | ZeroCool2u wrote: | I'm curious, when you're talking about the SMR projects, | does that include the Natrium reactors from TerraPower? I | think they're backed by the Gates Foundation? Those seemed | pretty interesting to me as a nuclear layman. Also, I don't | know a lot about Bill Gates, but he does seem like the kind | of guy that if they showed some real success, boondoggle or | not, he'd be willing to brute force his way past those | issues by throwing money at the problem. | peteradio wrote: | Wouldn't the possible location for floating reactors be | much more limited than SMR projects? I would think special | financing might get the ball rolling for SMRs, strong | decades spanning incentives for first movers. | Retric wrote: | Fuel is hardly the only advantage, the major issue with fission | is the enormous costs of trying to avoid problems or cleanup | after them. Thus 24/7 security, redundancy on top of | redundancy, walls thick enough to stop aircraft etc. Fission is | still by far the most expensive power source even with massive | subsides and is only even close to economically viable as base | load power backed up with peaking power plants. | | In theory much of that is excessive but there is a long history | of very expensive mistakes with massive cleanup efforts. The US | talks about three mile island as the largest nuclear accident | ignoring the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One that | killed 3 people. All that complexity and expense comes from | trying to avoid real mistakes that actually happened. | Galaxeblaffer wrote: | this is simply not true. according to IEA | | https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating- | el... | | LCOE of nuclear is cheaper than almost all other | possibilities we have. sure nuclear is very expensive up | front, but a nuclear powerplant can run for 100 years while | wind and solar had to be completely replaced every 25 years. | | your correct that nuclear has had some very expensive | accidents, but the chance of a modern gen3+ plant that we'd | build today causing any accidents like that in a western | country is so very close to 0 that it's not even worth | discussing. | Retric wrote: | You see a lot of handwaving such as that very close to 0 | statement with nuclear but someone's got to be on the hook. | | The rate and cost of failures directly relate to insurance | costs. A 1 in 100,000 chance per year to cause a 500 | billion dollar accident represents a ~5 million per year | insurance cost to offset that risk before considering the | risk premium associated with insurance. And that's on top | of the normal risks for large complexes that have little to | do with nuclear just high voltage equipment etc. | Unsubsidized insurance costs are something like 0.2c/kWh | which is quite significant for these projects. | | In the end you see a lot of people talking nonsense around | nuclear costs using wildly optimistic numbers, but there | hasn't been a power plant built and operated in the last 20 | years that come even close to these numbers. Let alone when | you start to compare predictions for decommissioning costs | with actual decommissioning costs. | nwiswell wrote: | > but there hasn't been a power plant built and operated | in the last 20 years that come even close to these | numbers | | If we are being honest, that also has a lot to do with | _why_ nuclear is so expensive. | Retric wrote: | Sure, I have no issue saying nuclear could in theory cost | 40% less with reasonable regulation and a large scale | deployment across decades. I just have problems with | people saying well it could in theory cost X, therefore | it does cost X. | fundatus wrote: | > sure nuclear is very expensive up front, but a nuclear | powerplant can run for 100 years while wind and solar had | to be completely replaced every 25 years. | | Hinkley Point C is currently expected to cost around $31 | billion once finished for a measly 3,000 MW. | | For that money you could build ~2,300 15MW onshore wind | turbines - which would add up to roughly 34,500 MW | capacity. So even under the assumptions that | | - you have to replace the wind turbines 3x to reach 100 | years life span and | | - you always have to build more renewables since they don't | run at 100% their capacity throughout their lifespan | | wind make more sense economically nowadays. | augusto-moura wrote: | Much of fissions complexity comes from safety/damage | management. Even after years of advancements we hear about some | incidents and radioactive leaks every other decade. | | Fusion is a much safer alternative both in incidents and | fallout | kelnos wrote: | Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and | marketing one. I don't agree that the waste disposal issues, or | the safety issues, are quite the big deal people make of them. | (Not saying there are no unsolved issues, just that the issues | that exist are not significantly worse than those present | burning fossil fuels, and are better in some dimensions. | They're just different, and in some ways very emotionally so.) | | I think it might be fine that fusion power may be more | expensive in some ways than fission, as long as its reputation | is kept clean (figuratively and literally). Market fusion power | as the savior of humanity, and get enough people to believe it, | and it'll be fine. | peanuty1 wrote: | Nuclear plants are also very expensive, no? | fundatus wrote: | Yep, and fusion reactors will probably be even more | expensive (especially the first ones). Looking at the | current prices of renewables, I don't see a market for | fusion reactors at all to be honest. | | After all we already have a giant fusion reactor just 12 | light-minutes away from us! We just have to harvest that | energy. The direction were already going (mostly market- | driven nowadays actually!) is generation from renewable | sources, flexible grids and storage systems to balance | everything out. | amai wrote: | Mandatory video by Sabine Hossenfelder: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY | | So they probably are talking again about Q_plasma, not Q_total . | low_tech_punk wrote: | Asking as a layman, are there any hybrid solutions between | inertial and magnetic, or are they mutually exclusive? I'm | imagining using magnetic field for macro-control and laser for | micro-adjustment. Kind of like SOC designs that have separate | cores optimized for different workloads. | DennisP wrote: | NIF recently started experimenting with adding a magnetic | field: https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/magnetized-targets-boost- | nif-im... | | I don't think they used that for this recent event, so if it | works out that's potentially a significant improvement. | chaps wrote: | "The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment shows that | scientists can get more energy out than put in by the laser | itself. This is great progress indeed, _but still more is needed: | first we need to get much more out that is put in so to account | for losses in generating the laser light etc_ (although the | technology for creating efficient lasers has also leapt forward | in recent years). Secondly, the Lawrence Livermore National | Laboratory could in principle produce this sort of result about | once a day - a fusion power plant would need to do it ten times | per second. However, the important takeaway point is that the | basic science is now clearly well understood, and this should | spur further investment. It is encouraging to see that the | private sector is starting to wake up to the possibilities, | although still long term, of these important emerging | technologies." | | emphasis, etc | raylad wrote: | Not only that, but the capsules that are used for the | experiment are expensive and difficult to produce. And you'd | have to be continuously blasting new ones for each burst of | energy you want to generate. | | Taking those costs into account, being able to use this method | to generate power seems really non-optimal. | zbobet2012 wrote: | Yes, _but_ the problem of generating laser light efficiently | has and is being solved for elsewhere. Which is why the NIF | didn't focus on, or update their lasers. This is a major | problem for semiconductor lithography for example, and receives | literally tens of billions in investment every year and one | which has lasers that are already 20x more efficient than the | ones used by the NIF. | | The real question in the experiments here at NIF was about | whether inertial confinement fusion would work. This is very | promising progress. | | Also NIF spends a good portion of its time on weapons research, | not fusion power so it's only been a recent focus. | JStanton617 wrote: | The loss just on the lasers is 100x (i.e. delivered power is 1% | of the input energy). Add in a combined cycle effeciency of | only 50%, you're looking at needing a 200x improvement to have | commercially relevant "net gain" | DennisP wrote: | Yes but NIF's lasers date back to the 1990s, and laser | technology has improved a lot since then. NIF-class lasers | with over 20% efficiency are available now. | | https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.2.2021102. | .. | | Same article mentions that some petawatt lasers can fire more | than once per second now. | sbierwagen wrote: | >Add in a combined cycle effeciency of only 50% | | Some reactor designs let you harvest electricity directly | from charged ions: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion | boc wrote: | It's insane how much cynicism I'm seeing here. I know people who | are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they're excited about this | then it's a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy | than expected and damaged the sensors. | | This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and | it's a not healthy. | jsight wrote: | I'm not sure when it happened, but this place has become a lot | less inquisitive and a lot more dark in recent times. Possibly | its correlated with growth, but it feels like something else. | whimsicalism wrote: | Think it's correlated with growth. I've seen significant | post-pandemic degradation on all major social media platforms | I use (mostly here & Twitter), along with large increases in | volume. | jmyeet wrote: | It isn't cynicism. It's a reality check: | | 1. Energy output != power generation. At the end of every | fusion reactor is boiling water to turn a turbine to generate | electricity. There's a limit on efficiency and we still aren't | there yet; | | 2. Much like all of nuclear power (fission included) we brush | over capital costs and focus on operating costs because that | tells a much better story. | | 3. We still have energy loss from neutron loss; | | 4. We still have container damage to content with due to | neutron embrittlement. | | Even the article claims (and this is optimistic) that | commercial fusion power generation is "decades away". | | Much like FTL travel, we get suckered into unwarranted optimism | because we want it to be tru, particularly with the fuel | abundance and (no) waste issues. We also fall into th enaive | trap of thinking if stars can do it, it must work. But what | contains stellar nuclear fusion is gravity. | | I'd argue there's still way too much optimism. Pointing out | these issues doesn't make you a contrarian. It makes you a | realist. | sbierwagen wrote: | senko wrote: | > It's insane how much cynicism I'm seeing here. [..] This | website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and | it's a not healthy. | | The problem is that fusion "breakthroughs" have been hyped by | the press for many decades now. After a few such articles gets | people excited and then reality crushes the hype, people learn | to dismiss every new story as yet another inconsequential thing | blown out of proportion. | | I'm commenting about the coverage of fusion in general, not | about this particular thing. If it is actually a big deal, | great! | cpleppert wrote: | It isn't just hyped; popular reporting on fusion power hasn't | been very accurate. It doesn't help fusion power that things | like this are trumpeted as a breakthrough when the reality is | that the INF was never was a viable way to generate power in | first place. | chemmail wrote: | It doesn't matter if we find an infinite energy source. It will | just shuffle the powers around. Nothing will really change. | Humans will shift their fight to something else and inequality | will still be the source of most of our problems. | kranke155 wrote: | It's been clear like that for a while. Crypto threads are | infested with nonsense, ignoring anything that's even distantly | related and ignoring any breakthroughs. Any new tech is poo | pooed immediately. | jxramos wrote: | that's a brilliant phrase, a reflexive contrarian. They just go | the opposite of, I've been thinking about this behavior of | late, great way to characterize it. | bowsamic wrote: | I'm a physicist and it's absurd how much career concerns push | us to overhype even the most incremental research effort. I'm | not surprised the public are sceptical | kolbe wrote: | Maybe we paid attention when our parents told us the tale of | the Boy Who Cried Wolf. | throwawaymaths wrote: | Look if a scientist at LLNL is excited about it, then there's a | conflict of interest here. The fact of the matter is that there | is such a high likelihood that inertial confinement is a dead | end, because as far as I can tell there is not a realistic plan | to harvest the produced energy, which at least, some of the | other designs do. The bar is literally higher in other branches | of fusion research (and they too are getting called to task for | reporting plasma q values instead of estimated plausible total | yields). Until someone starts at least building a model of how | to collect this energy high levels of skepticism are warranted. | hardtke wrote: | Agree with the first sentence. I worked at a couple of | national labs and the number one priority is to keep the lab | open by justifying the flagship project. NIF has a long | history of disappointments so it's nice to see some success, | but it still isn't clear building this thing was justified. | The main rationale during the planning stages was "stockpile | stewardship" which loosely translate into "making jobs for | nuclear weapons scientists even though we aren't building | any." | cpleppert wrote: | I don't believe its contrarianism. Sure, its an interesting | science experiment but it has no viable way to generate power | in any way. The lasers needs to be more efficient by a factor | of 100x in the best case scenario(it depends on the specifics | of how they calculate net gain). Then you probably need to | increase that by another factor of 2-5x even assuming you have | a way to convert that thermal energy to electricity. | | No one has any idea how that would ever be viable; other fusion | alternatives at least have a way to accomplish thermal transfer | from the reactor. Then you somehow have to figure out how to | build a financially viable power plant. Oh, by the way, the | lasers need to fire 1000x more for that. No one has any idea | how that would work either. | | There is a reason no one but a national lab interested in | fusion reactions with massive financial resources has done this | before; its interesting but doesn't produce any kind of viable | power source. | | Edit: The INF was proposed and designed as means to ensure the | viabilty of the nuclear stockpile. It and the French equivalent | were never understood as somehow prototyping a fusion power | plant for the reasons laid out above. The press reporting here | is just not accurate. | politician wrote: | > "Initial diagnostic data suggests another successful | experiment at the National Ignition Facility. However, the | exact yield is still being determined and we can't confirm that | it is over the threshold at this time," it said. "That analysis | is in process, so publishing the information . . . before that | process is complete would be inaccurate." | | From the article!!! | rafaelero wrote: | > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians | and it's a not healthy. | | I can't imagine what it is like to be in their heads. Even for | things I am skeptical about, I still want them to be true if | they are truly transformative. My worst case scenario is being | cautious, but never, ever, negative. | talkingtab wrote: | HN comments are not thinking, doing anything, or building | something. It is a place where you gain attention and karma not | from some constructive act. People post constructive things, | then commenters vie for attention. If you look at threads, the | top "comment" on them is something about a completely different | topic. And then they mostly go downhill. | | Hacker News is a good source for interesting posts and idea. | The comments are mostly worthwhile for watching how a social | machine produces very weird stuff. It is not the people who are | contrarians, it a function of the machine. | | Zeynep Tufekci talked about how twitter affords outrage and the | Arab Spring, but did not afford a way to do anything | constructive with that outrage. (Twitter and Tear Gas, | available as a pdf). HN commenting system affords .... what you | see here. | raydiatian wrote: | You're just a reflexive (reflexive contrarian) contrarian | dundarious wrote: | "Exciting" for individuals within the field often does not | translate to "exciting" for everyone else. It's quite | reasonable to think there's a good chance this is not the | beginning of a "practical for energy generation" fusion | revolution. | | It is very interesting, but in the same way that advances in | particle physics are interesting. | [deleted] | dundarious wrote: | An example of the context in which I want to tamper | excitement comes from a post by a journalist writing for the | FT, an outlet that is (relative to its peers) usually quite | matter-of-fact: https://twitter.com/thomas_m_wilson/status/16 | 020118886526320... | | > SCOOP: Net energy gain in a fusion reaction has been a holy | grail in science for decades. Now I'm told US scientists have | done it. A massive breakthrough with revolutionary potential | for clean power. US Energy Secretary to hold a press | conference Tuesday: | https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec- | cfc345589... | | Instead of particle physics, perhaps a better comparison | would be to quantum computing "breakthroughs" that come out | from time to time. Within the field I'm sure there are | breakthroughs that inch us closer to something useful (useful | in the way it is described in these articles, solving | currently unsolvable problems, etc.), sure, but we are _so | far away_ from something useful that these inches are | ultimately quite underwhelming to the general public (people | like me). | | By all means, I will occasionally read and enjoy great | science reporting on these topics, but I have been | conditioned to massively downplay the general significance of | such news, and I think it's quite well justified, and not | mere cynicism (cast as a negative). | happytiger wrote: | Engineers tend to have a problem solving demeanor towards | novelty, which is excellent for finding the problem with | things. | | Showing a room full of problem solvers an unfinished problem | that lacks critical supporting evidence will no doubt elicit a | general response in the skeptical-to-cynical range. | | I would respectfully argue that is is a health and normal | response given the audience, and should be an expected bias on | HN. | | This is a "show me the evidence don't tell me about the | possibilities" crowd. | | I for one and deeply excited if the data proves out, but my | bias is "wait and see." This could be a massive leap towards | proof it will work. | SantalBlush wrote: | This could pass as satire of a Hacker News comment. | pavon wrote: | I agree that the discussion generated from this article is not | what we want on HN, but I don't think it is fair to criticize | the comments as being reflexive contrarians when they are | simply and correctly pointing out that the claims being made in | the article are misleading at best. And these aren't nit-picky | details about side-issues in the article - the are the core | headline claims that aren't further clarified or nuanced in the | article text, so guidelines to not "pick the most provocative | thing ... to complain about" aren't applicable IMO - without | posts correcting the article many reader would have a wildly | false understanding of what actually occurred which isn't what | we want either. | | I think the best way to increase the quality of discussion for | research results is to avoid posting misleading and hype driven | coverage, so the discussion can then focus on the actual | research results and their implications, rather than on the | poor coverage. | chaosbolt wrote: | People have just become unsensitized to clickbait, it's mostly | the media's fault, they always use titles like "cancer cure | discovered" to get more views and thus more money, the viewers | see a thousand articles like this and keep getting disappointed | to the point a real cancer cure could be discovered and no one | would believe it. tldr:crywolf | squokko wrote: | I think it's just the difference in expectations between | scientists and laypeople. "Major fusion breakthrough" to a | scientist could mean one step out of 200, over 3 decades, | towards functional fusion power. Scientists understand the long | arc of progress. But these labs need to market to the public as | well who invariably end up expecting a SimCity Fusion Power | Plant within 18 months. | wolverine876 wrote: | Many on HN have the same response to many things in every | domain, not just research. | xbmcuser wrote: | Yeah its the same here about most new technology like ai | and improvement in solar and battery technology. One thing | I have noticed is that some of the most vocal people have | formed their opinions years ago and now they are not aware | or ignore all the changes/improvements that have occured | since. | NicoJuicy wrote: | That's not completely true, but has a lot of truth in it. | | Everyone formed their opinion about eg. Blockchain a long | time ago. | | But they do admit that eg. Gpt-3 is pretty advanced, but | has it's own flaws. | Moissanite wrote: | On fusion energy and battery technology I see plenty of | cynicism, but given the history of wildly over-stated | "advances" in both fields I think people are justified in | leaning towards pessimism. | ethanbond wrote: | The reality of course falls short of the most optimistic | projections, but e.g. for batteries: look around! Wealthy | countries at least are now _full_ of little gadgets that | couldn 't have existed even a few years ago due to the | battery demands. A walk down any street in NYC you'll see | probably 5-8 different personal transportation systems | that are pretty close to sci-fi. | paxys wrote: | For being a tech entrepreneur forum people here are | strangely very anti science and technology. The top voted | responses to every new product announcement are essentially | "why do we need this? Pen and paper work just fine". | dsr_ wrote: | That's because for 90% of new products, the old stuff | performs better, uses fewer resources, and has been | debugged in ways the new stuff has not. | | All the new stuff, however, has marketing and looks | shiny. | xeromal wrote: | The problem is this might be true, but it will not always | be true. The horse was probably better than the first | cars for a while, but progress changed that. | paxys wrote: | If you are always a naysayer you will be right 90% of the | time and can feel smug and pat yourself on the back for | it (so, like everyone here). However, progress comes from | people willing to take risks and make wild bets for the | small chance that they are in the 10%. | nine_k wrote: | Rather, very anti science and technology _hype_. Many | visitors of this website measure experience by decades, | and have seen many waves of hype resiting in not much | progress in unyielding areas, from self-driving car and | silver-bullet methodologies to, well, commercial fusion. | | When demonstrable, measure progress is achieved, visitors | of this site get very excited and positive, from things | like the Rust language all the way to solar power and | reusable rockets. | | A breakthrough is a qualitative change, not (merely) | quantitative. 95% to 96% of reaction energy output is a | nice but quantitative advance. 99% to 101% is a | qualitative breakthrough: suddenly, it's a surplus, | actual generation. | | We are still far away from the latter, alas. | Robotbeat wrote: | This is the very opposite to silver bullet approaches to | fusion, though. This is a methodical, military- | industrial-complex style development that was decades in | the making. | | I think it's just the Zeitgeist. Social media has trained | us that a certain reasoning style is rewarded, quick | takes that don't dig into the first principles and | instead serve as shibboleths that you're not one of THOSE | types of unintellectual pseudo tech bros who bought NFTs | or whatever. | mgaunard wrote: | Not really convincing since Rust is 99% hype from people | who misunderstand C++ and are just happy to join an | "inclusive" cult | rocqua wrote: | Products better have sn answer to that question, and that | answer tends to be very informative. | aksss wrote: | Most people in tech are cynical about tech because they | intimately know the vision is waaay further out than | reality, they know the breed and sometimes the names of | the squirrels running in the wheels making it work, and | have gone through more figurative duct tape and baling | wire than most developing nations. | ForgotIdAgain wrote: | In my experience, the more someone has deep understanding | in tech, the more they are critical of it. Especially | true in my field of infosec. | whimsicalism wrote: | Yes, it's called counter-signaling. | Robotbeat wrote: | I think as people gain experience, they can start | substituting experience and cynicism for actual first | principles thinking and curiosity. | qayxc wrote: | > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians | and it's a not healthy. | | I don't know. Looking closely at the article reveals that the | researchers achieved 1.2x energy gain from the lasers, which | are about 1% efficient. Given the SOTA for such lasers is | closer to 20% efficiency, this means that they achieved about | 60% of break-even. But that's energy, no electricity. Even with | the best current methods, about 60% efficiency is the best we | can hope for in terms of getting actual electricity from this. | So in practical terms they achieved 30% of break-even. | | Is that good progress? I'd say so, for sure. Is this a | breakthrough? I don't know, especially since the article itself | says the data is still being analysed and the actual results | aren't published yet. 95% of the article is just fluff about | the potential and quoting 3rd parties who celebrate a result | that hasn't even been officially confirmed yet. | | So, no I don't think it's cynicism, I don't think it's | contrarianism, and I do think it's VERY healthy to approach | sensationalist headlines with a level-headed and down to Earth | attitude instead. | f38zf5vdt wrote: | How many times have you or literally anyone you know achieved | a state of the art breakthrough in the production of energy | from a nuclear fusion reactor? Is this just another Monday to | you? | scottLobster wrote: | For most people, yes it's just another Monday. Same way the | observation of the Higgs Boson was just another day. Maybe | worth an hour or two of curious investigation, but of no | immediate consequence. Question is, are we watching the | first Wright Brothers' flight, or are we watching one of | the marginal glider improvements in the 19th century that | would eventually contribute to the first Wright Brothers' | flight 40 years later? | whimsicalism wrote: | For the vast majority of people, the Wright Brothers' | flight was also "just another Monday [or whatever day it | happened to be]". | | It's a bad criterion for judging something noteworthy. | DesiLurker wrote: | > But that's energy, no electricity as far as fusion | viability is concerned net energy (over whats put in) is | enough. the whole electricity is moving the goal post because | there are plenty of other sources that primarily produce | heat. | | Now regarding efficiency of laser itself, sure they are | inefficient but from just nuclear fusion pov net energy gain | is a significant milestone in itself. lasers can get | incrementally more efficient, at least there was not | incentive to make them super efficient so far & there are no | known fundamental problems with making them efficient. | qayxc wrote: | > the whole electricity is moving the goal post because | there are plenty of other sources that primarily produce | heat. | | There's no industrial processes that make use of plasma in | the 10s of megakelvins. It's also not moving the goal post | at all, since generating electricity is the literal goal of | nuclear fusion. If it's just heat you're after, we've | solved that problem over 70 years ago. There's hundreds if | not thousands of thermonuclear fusion devices readily | available literally at the push of a button. But for some | odd reason we try hard not to use them and focus on | electricity instead... | anyfoo wrote: | The question is whether this is a breakthrough and a | significant milestone or not. It seems to me like your | comment suggests that we have hit the "significant | milestone" marker only when we have an actual | electricity-generating fusion reactor, which I think | diminishes the actual breakthrough that a positive net | energy gain represents (if correct). It was long sought | after, it has now been reached. | qayxc wrote: | Exactly! This is a very good question that requires some | context, preferably from within the field. What does it | actually mean? | | Sadly, however, the article doesn't seem interested in | answering that question and providing the necessary | context. Instead it quotes authors of books, who seem | ecstatic about the possibilities. | | You'd be correct in calling me a cynic when I say that | I've heard the "too cheap to meter"-slogan from back in | the 50s when nuclear fission was the future. | | But I try hard not to be that guy and genuinely want the | same question answered - is this an actual breakthrough | and a significant milestone in the big picture? Up to | this point it's been hit-and-miss and many so called | "breakthroughs" turned out to be small steps in the right | direction, but not exactly quantum leaps. | Robotbeat wrote: | Lasers can get over 50% efficient (although these are | specialized types). | | It's silly to blame a facility not designed for power | production for using inefficient lasers. | | This is an important and necessary step to getting | resources to go further. Imagine how dumb it would've been | to build a fusion power plant before we could even do 1.2x | energy gain. A complete waste of resources. | RobertRoberts wrote: | > ...I do think it's VERY healthy to approach sensationalist | headlines with a level-headed and down to Earth attitude | instead. | | My experience on HN is there is a bias for critical thinking. | If it's traditional nuclear power or climate change, the bias | is for it. If it's new battery tech or fusion power the bias | is against. | | Does it only feel "very healthy" to be critical because you | are being critical of the idea? | | I have been called "contrarian" to my face. I understand the | deep seated need to be "absolutely certain", but maybe there | _is_ something going here other than that? | qayxc wrote: | > Does it only feel "very healthy" to be critical because | you are being critical of the idea? | | Who's critical of the idea? I literally said it's good | progress. What 's not good, however, is exaggeration, | sensationalism that puts potential views and hype before | substance, and raising expectations for something that's | still essentially just basic research. | | This has nothing to do with bias of any kind. It's just | poor journalism, bad form, and misrepresentation of | genuinely great work. I simply expect better from a | publication like FT. If that's the level of reporting we | get from what I thought to be a somewhat reputable source, | why even bother taking any publication serious anymore? | It's not criticising the researchers or downplaying their | work. | | It's a critique of the media preventing the public from | actually getting a realistic picture. I'd like to be | educated and kept up-to-date, not mislead and hyped up. | donquixote25 wrote: | Many fusion new articles have this problem but i would | argue that this time, how FT categorized this is | appropriate. This is literally the first time the | scientific break-even (not engineering break-even) has | been achieved by any controlled experiment, including | MCF. How is that not a breakthrough? | stuckinhell wrote: | People have been burned time and time again by scientists over | hyping stuff in the last 10 years, then combine that with the | replication failures over nearly every single scientific field. | Then look at the extreme amount of business fraud in the last | 10 years with places like Theranos and FTX | | Hackernews is not infested with reflexive contrarians. | | Hackernews has healthy amounts of skepticism and doubt. | Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. | concordDance wrote: | Note that there's multiple bits of hype compounding on each | other. The scientists hype it up a bit, the University PR | guys do it a lot more and the popular press goes nuts. | | The scientists are like 10% to blame here. | yummypaint wrote: | When people use the word "reflexive," they're talking about | things like conflating business hype designed to attract | publicity and VC capital with a press release for a major | scientific paper from NIF. I don't think it's unreasonable | for HN to hold itself to an understanding of these things. If | you actually want to critically examine evidence then you | must necessarily read the paper before posting. | stuckinhell wrote: | "reflexive contrarians" in the context here was being used | a perojative rhetorical trick to broadly dismiss valid | doubts people have about this research. | whimsicalism wrote: | Bodied, and deservedly so. | | Bringing FTX into a discussion of nuclear fusion to justify | skepticism is parody-worthy. | gumboza wrote: | To an external non-technical observer, this is about as | exciting as me hitting a clean compile in the scale of things. | It really makes me happy but no one else cares until the | product arrives. | | I'm excited for both for reference. | intrasight wrote: | > The experiment actually created more energy than expected and | damaged the sensors. | | Who else in their minds eye see smoke and sparks in the | experimental facility and control room, and scientists and | engineer wooping with joy ;) | TheCondor wrote: | I think the cynicism is linked to the cycles of bubbles. | | When it was all on the upside, inflating the bubble, there was | a fair amount of hero worship here for Zuck and others. People | were talking about self driving cars being leased by the minute | and changing the world, all with a straight face. Google paid | an engineer over $110million because he was going to lead the | effort to build a fully autonomous self driving car... As an | industry, we've sort of failed on that one. AI/ML was going to | lead to mass layoffs of people as we "automated" everything, | there were companies just pouring money in to anything related | to it to avoid being left behind. I think I heard at a | conference over the summer that 90+% of all ML/AI project fail | to make it to production; that's brutal, like half I could see | but 9 of 10?!? Even if you're getting paid tons of money to do | that stuff, wouldn't you want to actually achieve some success? | Social media has sort of failed us too, the real media got | involved and sort of took it away and then the Russians and | Chinese have been using it to tamper with our elections and our | ability to practice democracy. The internet is "decentralized" | but just try to do that without Google or Facebook or Amazon or | other... Since everyone seems to be convinced a recession is | going to happen, it's going to take one to sort of get things | righted and start the next bubble cycle. Or maybe how the gig- | economy was going to change it all. Or everyone was going to | learn to cook gourmet meals from blue apron and all the carbon | used to move boxes of ingredients around was never going to be | a big deal... | | It's always based in hype. Every handful of years the geeks and | nerds think they're going to take over the world again, maybe | we'll do it next time. | | In the mean time, any and every break through with fusion is | awesome. I'm a geek/nerd so don't believe my hype, but when we | crack the fusion nut, we _will_ change the world. | alexndrTheGreat wrote: | twblalock wrote: | > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians | and it's a not healthy. | | The initial flood of comments is always like that, because they | are low-effort dismissals. The first 5 comments on every story | could probably be auto-flagged. | | The better stuff usually rises to the top eventually. | lazzlazzlazz wrote: | Hacker News is absolutely totally broken with cynicism. It has | been getting worse for years now. | underscore_ku wrote: | wolverine876 wrote: | What I encourage people to do, and what I was encouraged to do | by a professor, is to find the value in things. Yes the thing, | any thing, has great flaws, risks, is an imperfect match, etc. | That goes without saying, and is is in some respects pointless | to say - we can stay in place without going through the effort | of researching something. It's the value in things, and finding | that value, that moves us forward. | butterfi wrote: | I try to live my life this way. People think I'm an optimist, | but really I think the world is mostly BS and I try to | acknowledge the good things. It works for me. | mbgerring wrote: | People are cynical because the world is already feeling the | effects of climate change, the technology exists _today_ to | move the grid to zero emissions, and because the work required | to do that is a quotidian, slow-and-steady slog, it gets | ignored in terms of both funding and mindshare in favor of | things like nuclear fusion experiments. | themitigating wrote: | Are you claiming a key reason that low or zero emissions | technology hasn't been implemented is due to scientists | wasting time on nuclear fusion experiments? Not entire | political spectrum who doesn't believe global warming to be | real, overstated, or some sort of conspiracy. | NotYourLawyer wrote: | It's ok to be cynical about things that are massively | overhyped. This development is an important milestone, but it | is _nowhere near_ what it is being reported as. | eindiran wrote: | It's not reflexive-contrarianism as such; it's that the science | press has historically been _so_ , _so_ bad that cynicism is | the only healthy response. Think of the last 5 things you 've | seen in the science press: which ones were overemphasized? | Which ones were exaggerated to the point that they didn't | reflect anything meaningful about the actual result? And | thinking back on the press releases over the years, what | percentage of what you've read end up having an actual effect | on the world? Add to that the fact that this is about fusion | breakthroughs, something that has been wrought with complete | disinformation by the science press since the late 1940s. Of | course people here are going to be cynical about it. | gaucheries wrote: | > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians | | hey, at least all of them are highly educated and extremely | correct about things. read about it on their blogs. (sarcasm | enabled for this reply) | gaucheries wrote: | downvoters of this comment, be sure to leave a link to your | blog, too | scottLobster wrote: | My experience is that if scientists are exited about it then | it's probably not a big deal to non-scientists. It may be a | small piece of a big deal in a few decades. | | Don't get me wrong I respect all the effort it takes to do | something truly new, inventing technologies that previously | didn't exist with the height of what we can produce today, and | every step forward is a triumph. But is tomorrow's announcement | going to lead to a step-change in anyone's life before my | infant daughter goes to college? I doubt it, and I have work to | do. I'm happy to be proven wrong though! | VoodooJuJu wrote: | We're hackers, engineers. We poke around for problems before | there are problems and we pry open the black box to make sure | it's not just filled with Bullshit. If you want to | unquestioningly lap up everything that's offered to you, then | I've got some ocean-front property in Afghanistan I'd like to | sell you. | themitigating wrote: | So the two options are to believe everything unquestionably | or be suspicious/cynical about all new announcements. | kace91 wrote: | That's definitely how many people here see themselves, but | excessive scepticism can also be a problem, something which | is overlooked by this crowd. | | If you don't push and help the many small steps that come | before the big leap, many big leaps will never become | feasible. | scottLobster wrote: | Over-hyping the small steps as big leaps is the problem. If | the scientifically literate people here are sick of it, | imagine what the voting public thinks. | kace91 wrote: | "First time ind history fusion releases more energy that | is put in" is a big leap. The fact that it's still a | technology in its infancy and decades away from actual | use doesn't make it any less impressive. | root_axis wrote: | Reflexive contrarianism is far healthier than blind credulity. | Skepticism should be the default state, especially for claims | of amazing scientific breakthroughs. | kelnos wrote: | I agree, but what I'm seeing here down in the comments isn't | merely skepticism, but outright dismissal. | SllX wrote: | Neither is particularly healthy. Either staying level-headed | and analytical or simply admitting ignorance would be | healthier. Skeptical/Gullible are two ends of the same crutch | for when we are unable or unwilling to do either. | root_axis wrote: | I think skepticism is healthy, rational, and intellectually | economical, especially when we're talking about popular | media stories. The skeptic isn't harmed by dismissing | grandiose headlines about scientific breakthroughs which | are selling a false narrative 99.9% of the time (yes, real | science is happening, but the media's narrative about the | impact of research is pretty much always false), and in the | cases where someone is a little too dismissive, they might | end up looking like an idiot one day, but layperson | skepticism has no bearing on the validity of the claim, no | amount of skepticism can overcome the reality on the | ground, if it's real it doesn't matter what anyone | believes. | rogerkirkness wrote: | The older I get the more I think it's just counter signaling | that one is smarter than whoever did this work, which is | almost certainly not the case. | spoils19 wrote: | kelnos wrote: | That's a pretty arrogant take based on zero actual | evidence. When "in my experience" is "randoms on the | internet who I've never met and occasionally argue with | online", I don't think we can draw many conclusions. | govg wrote: | The average HN reader who is probably a generic software | engineer in their 20s/30s will know more about nuclear | fusion than scientists at LLNL? | Moissanite wrote: | Listen man, remembering the names of all these JavaScript | frameworks is hard! | JimtheCoder wrote: | They think they do, but don't...I think that's the point | that's trying to be made here | mardifoufs wrote: | Surely this is sarcasm? | TigeriusKirk wrote: | In my experience the average HN reader is slightly above | the general population average. | yummypaint wrote: | I know for a fact that many people who worked on this are | also on HN. You should know that scientists see posters | on this site mostly as representatives of the software | engineering world. Seeing this kind of sneering attitude | so frequently on display here is pretty embarrassing and | casts the whole profession in a poor light. | teawrecks wrote: | The average HN reader strikes me as someone who can talk | big, spout buzzwords, and play skeptic, but make them | actually solve something and they crumble instantly. | | Maybe the average HN reader is smarter than the average | reddit reader (very slightly if at all), but they're not | more useful than someone who actually did work and shared | it publicly. | bumby wrote: | > _The average HN reader strikes me as someone who can | talk big, spout buzzwords, and play skeptic, but make | them actually solve something and they crumble | instantly._ | | I'm sure many have experienced the phenomenon where they | read some HN comments that sound authoritative and give | them that level of credulity. And then they get into a | discussion on a topic they may literally be an expert in | and it's made glaring obvious the person they are in a | discussion with only has a superficial understanding, yet | takes the same authoritative tone. | panzagl wrote: | > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians | | No it's not. | chmod775 wrote: | This made me chuckle. | dwsjoquist wrote: | You just made my day... | jonathanoberg wrote: | Yes it is. | jonathanoberg wrote: | No, it isn't Yes, it is. You just contradicted me No, I | didn't Yes, you did No, no, no You did just then That's | ludicrous Oh, this is futile No, it isn't I came in here | for a good argument No, you didn't. You came in here for an | argument Well, argument isn't the same as contradiction Can | be | doctor_eval wrote: | "An argument is a connected series of statements intended | to form a proposition. Contradiction is merely the | automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says" | | "No it isn't!" | wiredfool wrote: | I've had enough of this. | dawkins wrote: | Argument - Monty Python | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDB5gbtaEQ | tomphoolery wrote: | Oh I'm sorry, this is abuse! Yes, you want arguments, | next door. | [deleted] | indymike wrote: | Comment of the year. | WheelsAtLarge wrote: | Part of it is that we read about "breakthroughs" in diverse | fields only to see nothing come of them. Past experience | creates valid doubt. Also, as exciting as this might be, we are | nowhere near a practical application. | | Overall, I'm glad there are still points of excitement and we | haven't come to a halt. | catach wrote: | I do not think I can meaningfully increase my levels of | credulity ( _nor_ my skepticism). I strive to communicate my | thoughts accurately. Given those two points, how is it not | healthy? | atty wrote: | I agree with the spirit of your comment, and I am extremely | excited by these results. However, I think the history of | fusion has showed us that the cynics have had a much better | track record than the fusion optimists, haha. | | My very uninformed opinion (nuclear physicist by training, but | not specialized in fusion, lasers, or plasma physics) is that | we're still 20 years (haha) away from fusion energy making its | way into the power grid. And that is assuming this result (or | other things, like the relative instability of global energy | markets lately) causes an increase in funding for the field so | that they can solve all the pesky engineering issues related to | efficiency, reactor lifespan, reliability, cycling speed, etc. | PicassoCTs wrote: | Also this assumes we get 20 years and the science budget will | not be eaten by emerging endless crisis and wars. | scottLobster wrote: | To be fair, fusion technology is a strategic imperative. | The first nation to master it will quickly enjoy defacto | Energy independence. Given that many of the crises will | likely be energy-eccentric, we may see more investment in | the space rather than less, especially if visible progress | is being made. | atty wrote: | I think I'd switch that from "quickly" to "eventually", | or "have a head start to" - we could get grid | independence "relatively" quickly if the government | subsidized it (I highly doubt first Gen fusion competes | with natural gas or solar cost-wise), but a large amount | of energy is used in transportation, home heating, etc.. | Until those become fully electrified you're still stuck | in the fossil fuel economy. | scottLobster wrote: | True, I meant "quickly" on a relative scale. One | advantage the 1st gen fusions would have is immunity to | the supply shocks of fossil fuels and the intermittency | of solar/wind. Plus we have workable electric vehicles | and every home that has fossil-fuel powered heat by | definition has a connection to the electric grid. | | It wouldn't happen overnight, but I can think of few | things that would kickstart the electrification of | everything better than functional fusion power plants. | dr_orpheus wrote: | I think there are a couple different types of cynicism and one | might be more justified than the other. | | The first one I see is along the lines of "This was only net | energy gain in the plasma and not overall so it shouldn't be | called a breakthrough". The net energy gain in the plasma is | still a huge step and rightfully called a breakthrough. | | The second one is along the lines of "These are just intial | results and the article says the data is still under review". | This one I totally get. Replication of scientific results and | accounting for all sources of errors is real big deal. The NIF | had an experiment last year where they we able to achieve an | ignition reaction but were unable to replicate it. | brudgers wrote: | I am skeptical, not cynical. | | When I read what USDOE announces, I hope to be less skeptical. | | The basis of my skepticism rests on having written a term paper | titled 'Nuclear Fusion, Infinite Energy for the Future' in | 1982, and after the semester sharing my 'it's only 20 years | away' enthusiasm with my father -a PhD scientist working for | the DoD. Hence it's forty years since I first heard 'fusion is | always 20 years away.' | | Of course I don't know any LLNL scientists but don't question | their or your sincerity or motivation. | | The difference between those and the incentives of financially | oriented news reporting, doesn't make me less skeptical. Their | mandate is to present potentially market moving ideas before | the market can move. | | And because I lived through Pons-Fleischman. Which is to say I | have forty years of experience with reports...I mean I see | excitement for Tokamaks and I wrote about them in 1982. | rukuu001 wrote: | Seeing headlines like this every year or so will do that to you | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | "Announcing a breakthrough" without replicated results is | exactly what made cold fusion a taboo subject in the first | place. | | We are not 'reflexive contrarians' for going "I don't believe | it until a lot of separate research groups show the same | results". The whole point of the scientific method is to not | believe somebody just because you personally know them or they | are "respected". Their work _has to be replicated_ for Science | to take it seriously. | jeffparsons wrote: | > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians | and it's a not healthy. | | What could be done about that aside from expecting people to | just... be better? I think the shape of these forums induces | those kinds of comments, even if the community and moderators | make a real effort to uphold higher standards. And I think if I | encountered the same people in a different kind of forum then I | might have a higher quality conversation. Heck, my own comments | would probably be a lot more constructive! | | Real world example of what I'm thinking: I have a neighbor over | one fence who has very different political views to mine. We | have perfectly civil conversations in which we're both actually | really engaged and trying to understand each others' | perspectives and experiences, and not just keeping the peace by | avoiding difficult topics. It feels like effort we put into the | conversation is rewarded. | | I can't shake the idea that there might be "one weird trick" | (okay, maybe a handful used together) that could make it more | rewarding to put more effort into online conversations on | forums like Hacker News or Reddit. One I've wanted to try for a | while is to recreate something along the lines of Slashdot's | moderation system, but with room for a meta-conversation to | take place in "moderation space" (in which all community | members could participate) and for there to be opportunities | for people to refine their comments in response to feedback -- | and for doing so to be the norm. | | Maybe it's not that simple. That's okay, too. But I've seen | different moderation strategies around the web produce very | different results, so it seems to me that there should be | plenty of room for experimentation, and a lot to learn from | doing so. | marincounty wrote: | inanutshellus wrote: | Your conversation with your neighbor has no meta-conversation | going on. | | Online discussions "between two people" merely mimic a | conversation so the audience (of potentially thousands+ of | people) can learn and be swayed. | | Online conversations are inherently broadcast so the stakes | are too high to acquiesce or make concessions for whomever's | willing to actually take the bait and engage on "important" | topics. | zbobet2012 wrote: | I'd say most of the problem here is that viewpoints are meted | out as simple pithy statements. Half of the comments on this | thread are one sentence statements saying the building has | 200x to go before it's truly net positive. | | You get more content out of a discussion with your neighbor | in 30s than that. Those comments are genuinely worthless, | they don't talk about things like: | | 1) What are the parts of an inertial confinement fusion based | system which are difficult and which are missing today and | would need serious investment | | 2) What is the likelyhood that the power output observed here | could double, or more with other scale factors? | | 3) What's the net system costs once a plant is made. Is the | fuel cheap or expensive? | | Etc. It's fine to be contrarian, but most of the contrariness | on this most internet forums is of the most basic, shallow | kind that is defeated in a moment by any serious thinking. | | The short answer to being better? Posts with more in depth | content. I seriously think HN should consider banning pithy | one or two sentence posts "they still would only get 1/4 the | power" you find all over the place. | honeybadger1 wrote: | It's mostly British folks in those comments as well. If you are | looking at real estate in Britain, now you know what you are | dealing with. | PaulHoule wrote: | Lotsa reasons. | | (1) We are used to the same "news" story being cycled again and | again. I think a year ago we heard about a previous | breakthrough in ignition. When I hear a story like this my | first instinct is that the old story has been recycled and I'm | not sure that there is any actual news. | | A few months back it was announced that scientists had | discovered a black hole that was nearest to the earth and it | still gets posted to HN which makes me wonder if they | discovered a closer one. | | (2) For a while there have been two parallel tracks, one of | very slow development efforts at LLNL and IETF which might | yield a power source in 50 years and another about firms from | Lockheed Martin to scrappy startups who are promising to build | a "Mr Fusion" tomorrow. There are still memories of the Pons & | Fleischman affair from the 1980s and a strange subculture of | LENR activists who claim they will sell you a fusion power | source today. One could easily assume "fusion is the new | blockchain" in this climate | | (3) Fusion research has proceeded with no direct line to a | practical power source for a long time, the sharpest critique | you hear is "the point of the NIF is to do subthreshold tests | of nuclear weapons, not develop a power source" | | (4) Fusion is really hard. They might have to get the energy | output up 100 times and increase the shot rate 500,000 times to | build a real power source, even if 1-3 aren't enough to make | you dismiss the whole thing. People will point out that | ignition is a big threshold and it might not be so hard to | increase the energy output from here out, but we have a long | ways to go. | latchkey wrote: | I'm just glad these scientists are working on something other | than nuclear bombs. | zargon wrote: | The entire point of LLNL is to study nuclear bombs. | PaulHoule wrote: | The _original_ point of LLNL was to develop nuclear | bombs. There is such as thing as "mission creep", also | the challenge of maintaining the ability to develop bombs | in the future if we need to. | zargon wrote: | Studying nuclear bombs is still the point. The press | releases about fusion "energy" are just for appearances | sake. The methods they employ are useless for energy | applications. They're just H-bomb simulations. | [deleted] | wpietri wrote: | > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians | and it's a not healthy. | | I think that's true. But I also think there is a lot in the way | of breathless PR around science topics both from university | press offices and lower-end science news outlets. Especially | around fusion, which has been 20 years away for a lifetime. So | I get why people are going to be particularly skeptical. | Exendroinient00 wrote: | Still not nearly enough money invested to energy research. | simiones wrote: | This is not energy research, it's weapons research. Inertial | containment fusion is only interesting because it replicates | some of the conditions inside a fusion bomb - there is no | plausible way to use it to generate electricity with anything | approaching cost efficiency. | bioemerl wrote: | Once you have a viable start the money will explode into the | sector. Manhattan project style. | nostromo wrote: | 2.1 megajoules of energy in lasers to make 2.5 megajoules of heat | energy. | | If you turned that heat energy into electricity (our ultimate | goal here) you'd have: | | (2.5 megajoules produced * 50% loss in conversion to electricity) | - 2.1 megajoules input = negative 0.85 megajoules generated | | This is still cool of course, but we're still way off from making | this anywhere near feasible. | dahfizz wrote: | This is science lab, not a power plant. The point is to create | and prove new technologies. | | They could easily buy a newer, more efficient laser for | example. That would increase the overall efficiency, but would | ultimately be a waste of money. It wouldn't change the science | at all, and the point is the science. | mach1ne wrote: | Didn't they claim this already in 2013? | https://gizmodo.com/breakthrough-the-worlds-first-net-positi... | [deleted] | lambdatronics wrote: | Last time, they got something like 80% return on the laser | energy input, now it's over 100% apparently. And, they had | trouble repeating that last record, so people were questioning | how meaningful it was if it couldn't be repeated. Now they've | been able to repeat it & improve on it. | coolspot wrote: | Anyone remembers Lockheed Martin container-sized fusion reactors | announced couple (edit: 8) years ago? | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458339 | pfdietz wrote: | They discovered that it actually had a power density 100x lower | than what they had said, if it could even work at all. Last I | heard the group there was disbanded in 2019. | jkelleyrtp wrote: | Very disappointed by the discourse in this HN thread. The same | old quips over and over. "NIF is just a nuclear stewardship | program", "it's not actually generating power", "fusion still 30 | years away". | | I think it's very clear, given the past year that NIF has had, | that they are _very_ rapidly approaching a point where we have | the tech to "solve" inertial fusion. | | https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/papers-presentations | | Getting fusion right is done a magnitude at a time. Right now NIF | is within 1 magnitude if they built it with modern laser tech. | Many fusion designs are 10 magnitudes away or more. | | Their most recent article has a ton of great data and next steps: | | https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/magnetized-targets-boost-nif-im... | | This includes | | - Cryo-cooling the main target | | - New alloys | | - Magnetic compression of targets | | The recent advancement that helped reach ignition (in the last | article) boosted performance 40%. | | The advancement between then and now: nearly 60%. | | Within the past 6 months, NIF has nearly doubled energy output of | the reaction. | | Plus, if you know anything about fusion research, you'd know that | energy outputs tend to scale non-linearly with energy input and | size. This tends to be on the order of the power 3 or 4. Hence | the existence of ITER. | | NIF has uncovered some new science, closed the magnitude gap, and | made it actually realistic for inertial confinement to be a | feasible tech for a power producing plant. | gjsman-1000 wrote: | Well... if Nuclear Fusion becomes actually possible in a cost- | effective manner, so much for the need to roll out solar and | wind-based electricity, which looks very much like a 1st- | generation modern green energy technology in retrospect. | | I'm not complaining. If we do crack the code on Nuclear Fusion, | if I was the government, my next step would be to figure out how | to build so many reactors that electricity costs go to basically | zero. If you can charge your electric car for pennies, even the | most diehard gas-car fans won't be able to resist. Offering a | better product attracts far more users than, say, trying to shame | people for CO2 usage (more flies with honey instead of vinegar). | sveme wrote: | Even with such a breakthrough, cost-effective fusion would | still probably be 50 years away. Why would you assume it to be | super cheap right out the house? | IMTDb wrote: | > even the most diehard gas-car fans won't be able to resist | | They just won't have a choice; if we can provide a real | alternative, we can just forbid gas car altogether. Just like | we banned CFC to save the ozone when better alternatives were | developed. | | The main issue is that our electricity grids and production | facilities aren't ready yet to sustain a mass shift to | electric, so we need to ease in the transition. But the moment | they are, there is no reason to delay any further. | gjsman-1000 wrote: | > They just won't have a choice; if we can provide a real | alternative, we can just forbid gas car altogether. Just like | we banned CFC to save the ozone when better alternatives were | developed. | | Banning gas cars outright, I think, would be a political | miscalculation. There is broad mistrust of _anything_ the | government does right now in the US (not wholly undeserved), | and it is likely to continue getting stronger, so not | tainting it with a political ban would be a better solution | in my view. Otherwise you risk polarization and failure, | because not everyone buys climate change, or banning | something because X is determined to be better now. It also | would breed widespread resentment from people who aren 't | ready to switch (because, let me tell you, outside of cities, | "reduces climate change" is something nobody cares about as a | selling point). Just let electric vehicles naturally become | better at everything and let gas cars slowly die naturally. | The "invisible hand" will take care of the rest - just like | it did with the horse and buggy. | bombcar wrote: | You don't even have to ban it outright; you just ban making | new ones (though even the CFC ban wasn't 1000% complete; | there's been evidence that some companies were 'faking | finding old supplies'). | | People who "really want to" will keep old ones working and | most people will slowly start using the new ones. | | After all you can still get a horse-drawn carriage if you | want to, and you can drive a Model T, but few people bother. | skrowl wrote: | Good news! FTL travel when? | carabiner wrote: | Right after the reusable fusion rockets. | rapsey wrote: | Even if fusion ends up producing more power than consuming in the | real world, it still has to compete on cost. People too | enthusiastic about fusion tend to ignore that it might not | actually be a cost effective source of power. | | Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and | there are lots of ways of making them. | barnabee wrote: | Most things don't start off cost effective, they become so due | to investment, demand, industrialisation, competition, etc. | | Maybe fusion will stay a small part of the energy mix for | decades even after the first commercial plants are built but be | part of what eventually enables us to use orders of magnitude | more energy than we do now... | ragebol wrote: | Not everything is expressed in cost, externalities like the | looks and intrusiveness of something do matter. | | 1 fusion plant has less NIMBYs to deal with than wind-on-land, | for example. | | But yes, could be that still it's too expensive by the time it | becomes available. By then I hope we can make a fusion plant so | small it fits on a space ship and power an Epstein drive :-) | neonsunset wrote: | Solar and wind are _bad_ and unsustainable due to mining of | rare earth minerals and photovoltaic cells degrading and | becoming a landfill liability. | | Cost effectiveness is also a myth perpetrated by the death of | nuclear executed through bureaucracy. | | The nuclear, however, is currently the true energy source to | use, technologically much simpler (than fusion) to execute with | decades of experience making it the safest out there. It is | _the_ zero-carbon environmentally friendly energy source. | VaxWithSex wrote: | Nonsense. Solar and wind are good and sustainable using | minimal rare-earth minerals. Photovoltaic cells hold on | decades and decades and can be easily recycled. Cost | effectiveness is true even though stupid things have been | done to get rid of the excess energy provided during the | night by nuclear which can't switch off. | | The nuclear, however, is currently the most expensive and | worst energy source, technologically too complicated to make | safe. It is the technology with the highest risk for | catastrophic failure as shown by Fukushima and Chornobyl. | neonsunset wrote: | What were the estimated damage and deaths caused by | Fukushima incident? When was the reactor site built, when | was the reactor designed? | | A few extra questions you may also be interested in: | lithium, cobalt mining, costs of nanolitography for high | efficiency photovoltaic cells. All that with tax breaks and | heavy govt incentives vs insane regulatory burden on | nuclear industry. Also nuclear scare in education that | makes the public treat opinions like yours as even remotely | realistic. | VaxWithSex wrote: | Why did people back then think it was save and then it | exploded? Were they wrong in their assessment back then? | Why were they wrong? Are you sure your assesment is | correct today? Why is it better than their assessment | back then? Are you sure you are not making the same | mistakes that they made back then? Oh look, I can ask | questions too, because I am a sealion. | VaxWithSex wrote: | extra questions you might be interested in: | | where is most of the uranium mined that is used in | european reactors? what environmental damages are done by | reprocessing uran? costs of the buildback of reactors? | who will pay for it when the costs for this are 10x what | the operators put aside for it? how much subsidies go | into nuclear? how do you prevent proliferation in rougue | nations that use nuclear for example iran? | coldpie wrote: | Unfortunately, energy storage is still an unsolved problem. | Research on batteries may get us there soon, but today they | aren't feasible. It's very much worth putting effort into both | approaches. IMO the best outcome is a wide variety of clean | energy sources and storage solutions, so the best solution can | be chosen for a given geographical/political/etc situation. | toomuchtodo wrote: | Solar and batteries are already cheaper than fossil fuels in | most markets. Nuclear isn't competing with renewables, it's | competing against batteries and almost free renewables that | charge them. | | Nuclear is still possibly a great fit for niche locales where | renewables aren't feasible at all. Not a nuclear hater by any | means (we need every innovation we can get), just show your | math. | | https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.365.6449.108 | melling wrote: | That's great! Because there are [ONLY] 8500 coal power | plants producing 20% of the CO2 emissions globally. | | Removing 20% of emissions will make a huge difference. | | ETA on this should be around 2030? | | What I don't get is since solar is cheaper, why are we | building so many coal power plants? | | https://www.newscientist.com/article/2317274-china-is- | buildi... | throitallaway wrote: | Solar generates electricity during the day. It would have | to be overprovisioned and paired with storage in order to | handle dark hours. There are some battery banks out there | (Tesla), but I don't think they're very common. | | Coal handles baseline load. We should be using nuclear | for baseline instead. | dahfizz wrote: | Construction still hasn't begun on that project, 3 years | later. When is the last time LA had a large construction | project come in under budget? | | I'll believe it when the batteries are actually installed | and the bill is paid. | | Also, the solar farm is planned for 800-MWh of storage. In | 2021, LA used over 65 TWh of electricity[1]. That's over 7 | GWh, per hour. So this storage would run the city for a few | minutes. Not exactly a replacement for base load | generation. | | [1] https://ecdms.energy.ca.gov/elecbycounty.aspx | toomuchtodo wrote: | See you in ten years at the earliest when any nuclear | generator you break ground on today generates its first | kWh of power (assuming it isn't wildly late or over | budget, as every one built since the 70s has been). | dahfizz wrote: | I'm not saying fusion is necessarily the answer. I'm just | tired of hearing "solar plus storage is the cheapest | option" when the sources always rely on projected costs | and a pathetically small amount of storage. | | We need a major breakthrough in storage tech to make | grid-scale storage a reality. Li-ion batteries are never | going to cut it. Who knows whether grid scale storage | will come along faster than fusion. | pfdietz wrote: | We don't need major breakthroughs, we just need to watch | technologies proceed down their experience curves. | vlovich123 wrote: | But at least we've built them and we know we can provide | the necessary capacity. | Matticus_Rex wrote: | "Places where sun availability makes solar inefficient" is | still a niche so massive that "niche" seems like a bad | descriptor. | Gwypaas wrote: | Keep in mind HVDC. 3300 KM north of the Sahara desert, | and you are relatively close to the Arctic circle. North | of that is still a "niche," but now we're talking about a | million people living hugely spread out. | | Most of those people living in Russia, Norway, and Sweden | with easy access to an abundance of hydro, to the level | that energy flows north to south in the Scandinavian | countries. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current | coldpie wrote: | Are solar + batteries feasible to heat every house in | Minnesota with electricity when it's below -20F (-30C) for | a week, we have <9 hours of daylight per day, and failing | power literally means death? I genuinely don't know. Like I | said, having a variety of solutions is the best outcome so | we can choose the right one & have backups. | | > just show your math. | | I admit I can't. It's mostly gut-feeling from various | science news sources I keep up with (e.g. Ars Technica; | Skeptic's Guide to the Universe). | jsight wrote: | To keep warm, I'm estimating 2,628 kwh for a month for a | home for a family of 3. In our magical Minnesota where | everyone lives in houses with 3 people and only electric | heat pumps, we'd have 1,900,000. This means, we'd need | 4,993,200,000 kwh in the coldest month (4.993 Twh). | | 500,000 kilowatt of panels would produce ~33 gwh in the | worst month (January). So, we'd need 151 times that many | to have a good chance of doing this with purely solar. | That'd mean 75,500,000 kw of solar panels. Assuming that | we could install these for $1.50/w, that'd cost | 113,250,000,000 and there's still a chance that we'd | freeze people to death. | | To mitigate that risk, we'd want to add ~500 gwh of | batteries (just guessing as to needed capacity here). At | a price of ~150/kwh, we'd be looking at ~75,000,000,000 | in energy storage prices. | | Feel free to check my math, as I did that pretty quickly. | The figures are absurdly high due to scaling for the | worst case type scenarios. Summer months would correlate | with lower demand and more than double the supply. | | Sensibly speaking, noone would try to do this. Its like | building an offgrid home. You can get 90% of the way | there and add a generator, or you can spend 10x more be | truly offgrid. Almost everyone chooses the former. Maybe | even 80%. Solar is great and very cost effective, but the | returns diminish the deeper one goes. | coldpie wrote: | Nice. I just looked up last February's bill for my | ~1700sqft detached SFH in Saint Paul. It was apparently | 6.8 therms/day (12 deg F average temp for the month). | That maths out to about 5916 kWh for the coldest month | (6.8 therms * 29 kwh/therm * 30 days), or a little more | than double your estimate. March was 5.9 therms/day and | Jan was 5.4 therms/day. So I think your costs are on the | conservative side of things... or possibly my home is | very inefficient :) | | E: Ah, it occurs to me that you're using electric heat | pumps, which are probably much more efficient than my NG | boiler. | jsight wrote: | Yes, I pulled the estimate for really efficient heat | pumps. To convert to all electric heat like that | estimate, we'd have to replace a lot of gas heat with | electric. Might as well go for the most efficient thing. | | Compared to the nearly $200B in infra investment that I | was estimating, that looks easy, lol. | foota wrote: | I realize this isn't relevant for a discussion about | future investment, but the current "value" of the whole | energy infrastructure for a state is probably in the | hundreds of billions of dollars, right? It's been built | out over decades, of course, so the actual costs per year | are much lower. | selimthegrim wrote: | I think UMN did a study with 4 hour storage plus solar on | the grid a few years back. | | https://energytransition.umn.edu/modernizing-minnesotas- | grid... | coldpie wrote: | Thanks, this was informative. It wasn't clear to me, but | I think the study does not account for switching heating | from burning NG in the dwelling to electricity. I don't | have numbers, but I'm pretty sure that's going to | introduce an enormous load on the system, and is my main | source of skepticism for wind/solar/storage as a solution | for all electricity generation in places like Minnesota. | rootusrootus wrote: | I wonder if we should seriously consider moving people | away from such cold climates and towards warmer ones. Air | conditioning is cheaper and coincidentally happens at | about the same time as maximum solar power. | finnh wrote: | We are doing that actually, but the other way: rather | than moving the people, we are moving the climate. | coldpie wrote: | This might work with post-Surak Vulcans, but it's not | gonna fly here on Earth with humans :) | megaman821 wrote: | Only if you limit yourself to using solar generated with | Minnesota's state borders. | | Solar, Wind, HVDC transmission lines, short-term battery | storage get us most of the way there, and is all on the | process of being built out now. Medium term storage is | still up in the air (flow batteries? compressed air?). | Long term storage looks like hydrogen or natural gas with | carbon capture. All these things seem more achievable | than fusion in the next few decades. | JumpCrisscross wrote: | > _if you limit yourself to using solar generated with | Minnesota 's state borders_ | | I live in a cold state. The idea of relying on out-of- | state power, regulated and controlled by people with zero | accountability to you, for life-and-death energy is a | tough sell. | megaman821 wrote: | Bad news then. You most assuredly rely on natural gas | from Texas traveling through a long underground pipeline | to heat your homes and businesses. Relying on solar | electricity from Texas or Arizona traveling through a | long wire isn't going to change the status quo much. | JumpCrisscross wrote: | > _most assuredly rely on natural gas from Texas | traveling through a long underground pipeline to heat | your homes and businesses_ | | Last I checked, we mine our own coal, pump our own oil | and put up our own wind farms [1]. Minnesota, for what | it's worth, runs on renewables, coal and nukes [2]. The | fifth of natural gas it does use comes from Canada, the | Dakotas and Iowa. | | These cold-state energy security concerns are a big part | of the political puzzle that gets missed in the national | discourse. | | [1] https://www.wsgs.wyo.gov/products/wsgs-2012-electrica | lgenera... | | [2] https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=MN | megaman821 wrote: | In northern states almost all residential energy use is | heating. The amount of electricity used is minimal, | therefore even modest amounts of electricity generation | can meet need. Wyoming is the only northern state that | has natural gas in notable amounts, all other states | import a lot of their energy (especially heating) needs. | | If most states stopped importing energy they would have | to go back to wood and coal-fired stoves. That would be a | huge quality of life reduction in terms of convenience | and home air quality. | JumpCrisscross wrote: | > _almost all residential energy use is heating. The | amount of electricity used is minimal_ | | Resistive heating. | | > _most states stopped importing energy they would have | to go back to wood and coal-fired stoves_ | | Most states don't have high-baseload, low-latency life- | or-death energy requirements. Those that do have the | options I outlined above. | toomuchtodo wrote: | Heat pumps should be paired with rooftop solar and | batteries whenever possible for resiliency. I admit the | use of natural gas will decline in my lifetime, but | probably won't be fully deprecated. | toomuchtodo wrote: | The state you live in has one of the highest potentials | for wind power in the country, easily backed by | transmission, batteries, and as a last resort, natural | gas. | | High level, the energy transition isn't simply a | fossil->renewables story, but also a | centralization->highly decentralized story. | JumpCrisscross wrote: | Totally agree, though I don't know how wind performs in | extended and deep subzero / heavy snow conditions. | Hydropower is the traditional baseload for the Midwest, | but it's tough to square the destruction to natural | beauty that entails in comparison with a remote nuclear | set-up. | | EDIT: It seems not too badly [1]. | | [1] https://empoweringmichigan.com/how-do-wind-turbines- | work-in-... | kelnos wrote: | What does the geothermal story look like? I expect it's | expensive to first set up, but after that, maybe it's | cost-effective and reliable? Asking because I genuinely | don't know, but haven't seen it mentioned in this | subthread. | toomuchtodo wrote: | https://www.nrel.gov/geothermal/resource-assessment- | mapping.... | | https://www.nrel.gov/geothermal/assets/images/resource- | asses... | hedora wrote: | In central California with ideal conditions, one day's | worth of storage roughly doubles the price of a solar | system that is correctly sized for net zero production in | November (assuming a wood stove is supplementing a heat | pump). | | I don't think storage will be feasible in places like | Minnesota. The following makes far more economic sense: | | - Double solar / wind production by buying 2x more panels | vs. "normal" states. | | - Go all electric (heat pump / induction) for appliances | and vehicles. | | - Buy 8-24h worth of house batteries. | | - Use a fossil fuel generator to top off batteries during | outages (this more than doubles the generator's end to | end efficiency) | | - Sell excess electricity to the grid, where it is used | for subsidized carbon capture. | | This should be completely resilient against storms and | power outages, and extremely carbon negative. It would | cost about 2x as much as best case renewables. | hadlock wrote: | I honestly wonder if large scale population of the | northern areas is feasible without carbon fuels. | Historically chopped wood was used to heat northern homes | and camps, later coal and oil and I guess now to some | extent electricity, but as you say, renewable energy | doesn't apply there. If places like Minnesota are a net | negative for green/renewable energy, their costs may be | much higher to offset generation in more favorable | climates. | Mistletoe wrote: | Cold can be mitigated a lot by enhanced R-value | insulation in a single application. Northern states have | higher levels of insulation. | | https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/identif | y_p... | | I don't really see a hot/cold stratification in this | chart- | | https://www.statista.com/chart/12098/the-us-states-with- | the-... | | And even then, the difference in costs seems quite small. | Alaska is $332 and Georgia is $310. | tacocataco wrote: | The birds fly south for the winter. Then again, the birds | dont have to worry about who owns the land wherever they | eventually land. | [deleted] | VaxWithSex wrote: | Minnesota can use wind, which is also cheaper. | gjsman-1000 wrote: | Minnesota has anticyclones, which are periods lasting | over a week with almost no wind. | rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: | Not are carbon fuels are carbon negative - biofuel pulls | down carbon from the atmosphere when it's created, so is | considered carbon neutral. | | I think it's highly likely we'll be burning a lot of | algae fuel in the coming decades in situations where the | energy density of carbon fuels is necessary. | pfdietz wrote: | We can look at how solar/wind/storage compete with | putative fusion. Fusion is a baseload source, so let's | see how they would do to provide "synthetic baseload". | | https://model.energy/ | | Selecting the state of Minnesota, 2011 weather data, and | 2030 cost assumptions, this would be about 70 Euro/MWh. | The cost optimized solution would involve 222 hours of | hydrogen storage, 5 hours of battery storage, 4.2x peak | power of solar and 2.4x peak power of wind. | elurg wrote: | Why do we need to cover the worst case with 100% | renewables? | | The goal is to reduce emissions so it would be great even | if we can just stop burning coal in the summer. | _ph_ wrote: | Eventually we have to get to zero net carbon emissions. | But the worst case is just to create carbon based fuels | from CO2 extracted from the atmosphere and use it in | places/for uses which cannot be covered by renewable | electricity directly (the far north, airplaines, ...) | Spivak wrote: | I think because it's the learned defensive reaction. What | ends up happening is that you have someone who _really_ | hates fossil fuels who is more than willing to back | policies that require a quality of life drop or a massive | cost shift onto individuals to achieve 100% renewables. | So whenever it comes up anything positive you say about | renewables has to be come with the explicit caveat that | it 's not yet a 1-1 replacement. | | It's one of those issues the overwhelming majority of | people are on the same page about what we should do but | at the ends you have "my livelihood depends on coal" on | one end and "my life is insulated against the downsides | of full-renewables so I'm privileged enough to have out | of touch opinions" on the other and that's who shows up | in comment sections. | jsight wrote: | We don't need to do that. But the media focuses on things | like that and turns everything into some sort of weird | argument that renewables are literally going to freeze | gramma to death. Its overwhelmingly about emotion. | | Its the same as what we see with EVs, tbh. Oh noes, what | if you get caught in a snowstorm!? Imagine if 80% of the | cars were EVs and they got stuck and there were... no | chargers! Picture yourself freezing to death because of | "those people". | | Real world performance and goals are not correlated well | with media hyperbole. | jsight wrote: | This site has changed a lot in the past year. Its been | strange to watch. | _ph_ wrote: | There are plenty of other renewables usable than solar. | Wind power would be the obvious one, as wind is often a | great complement to solar anyway. Then there are long- | distance transmission lines, water power, energy from | biomass. Finally, if everything else fails, create | hydrocarbons from CO2 in sunny places, ship those | "eFuels" to Minnesota. | rapsey wrote: | > Unfortunately, energy storage is still an unsolved problem. | | Mechanical, lithium based, flow, heat, compressed air, pumped | hydro are all types of batteries that are able to store quite | large amounts of power today or in the near future. Certainly | cheaper than fusion has any hope to be within 20 years. | conradev wrote: | CATL is working on sodium batteries as a lithium replacement | shipping in 2023 | | Form Energy is working on iron air batteries as a new class | of multi-day energy storage, launching its first test | installation in 2023 | | The US passed a tax credit for energy storage, to encourage | building more pumped storage capacity | | Congress is working on transmission line permitting reform | | There are some good reasons to be optimistic in the near term | HillRat wrote: | Yeah, the cost of capsules for NIF is something like 4 orders | of magnitude higher than it needs to be for commercialization, | though admittedly it's not like they've industrialized the | process yet. | | The other thing is that if LLNL is still using their own | definition of Q, it's not necessarily the case that they've | demonstrated net-energy breakeven; they like to compare direct | energy delivery to energy release, so when calculating Q they | basically pretend there aren't any energy losses from actually | running the huge laser facility itself. As a result, LLNL | assumes that laser technology will improve to the point that | real-life Q can catch up with their "scientific Q" metric. | (IIRC I think "Project LIFE" was supposed to develop some of | those technologies, but it never worked out, possibly since NIF | is so far behind their promised schedule.) | gjsman-1000 wrote: | > Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and | there are lots of ways of making them. | | Right now they are, but they often rely on materials from | politically unstable regions (particularly Africa), or | potential political rivals (China). Also, many solar panels | require polysilicon from China, which is almost certainly | produced with forced labor. | | https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-industr... | | https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/clean-energy-china-xinj... | | https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/evidence... | | And it's not just a China problem. | | "On batteries, there were major issues with the mining of | between 15% and 30% of the world's cobalt in the Democratic | Republic of the Congo. Amnesty International found that | children, some as young as seven, were working in artisanal | cobalt mines, often for less than $2 a day. Mining conditions | were reportedly hazardous, and workers often did not have | adequate protective equipment and were exposed to toxic dust | that contributed to hard metal lung disease." | | The US is trying to crack down but Europe is lagging behind on | it. However, if the report's claim (which I see no reason to | doubt) that China has 82% of the global polysilicon market is | true, with most of their polysilicon production being in the | Xinjiang region, calling solar panels (or batteries) "cheap" is | fairly distasteful considering their sources. | rapsey wrote: | Mechanical, flow, heat, compressed air, pumped hydro are all | types of batteries. All capable of storing MW to GW of power. | It is not all lithium and cobalt. | automatic6131 wrote: | Once again, I am reminding HackerNews that the technology | to build a battery capable of storing enough renewable | electrical energy for the (world|nation) for even half a | day *does not exist* at any reasonable cost. | | And if you want to store multiple days for a northerly | nation with very cold winters, frequent high pressure | anticyclones (so, no wind) that can last about a week, and | you want to switch everyone to zero carbon heating, then | the technology doubly doesn't exist. | | And the only retort to the above will be mumbling "yeah, | but exponential improvement in batteries plus didn't | someone say something about hydrogen?" which is | essentially, wishful thinking. When you can build a zero | carbon grid out of nuclear fission plants - and we've known | how to do so since the 60s. | rapsey wrote: | > Once again, I am reminding HackerNews that the | technology to build a battery capable of storing enough | renewable electrical energy for the (world|nation) for | even half a day _does not exist_ at any reasonable cost. | | But it is almost certainly closer to existence than | fusion. | gjsman-1000 wrote: | Almost certainly not. The US _alone_ generates 4,095 | billion kWh yearly. For a half a day, you would need to | store 5,600,000,000 kWh. Tesla Megapack can store 3916 | kWh fully loaded. This means you would need 1,430,000 | Megapacks to power the US for half a day. With Tesla only | being capable of producing roughly 40,000,000 kWh of | Megapacks annually, it would take 140 years to produce | all the batteries. If Tesla created 100 times the factory | capacity they have now (which, could the supply of raw | materials even withstand the smallest fraction of that?), | it would take 14 years, for batteries that have a | warranty of 15 years. These are lithium-ion batteries | which are the most space-efficient, unless you don 't | mind clearing hundreds of square miles of space for this | project. Did I mention it costs about $1 million per | Megapack right now, so this project would cost _$1.4 | TRILLION_ assuming all Lithium+Cobalt+Supplies+Labor cost | the same as they do now despite demand being increased | 100x, and ignoring all engineering costs, and factory | scaling costs, which could multiply the cost | exponentially. All to power the US for just half a day. | Now consider how to add Europe, Asia, Africa, South | America, the rest of North America... | | We're not close, and it's basically completely | unfeasible. Fusion will be closer in 100 years than such | a project. | rapsey wrote: | I have listed 5 different types of batteries than Tesla | makes. A number more are much farther than the | fundamental science stage of Fusion. Tesla primarily | makes batteries for cars, grid storage is actually way | more flexible in the type of battery that can be used. | You are missing the forest for the trees. | pfdietz wrote: | Almost certainly yes. | | Consider pumped thermal energy storage. Use a thermal | cycle to generate hot and cold (say, by compressing a | gas, probably argon, extracting the heat, then | reexpanding, and then storing the resulting "cold"), then | reversing that cycle to generate power. | | This scales embarrassingly well. It can be made entirely | from cheap materials available in essentially infinite | supply. No component operates at a temperature above the | creep limit of ordinary steel. Round trip efficiency | could reasonably be 75%. This requires no technological | breakthroughs -- it's 19th century technology. | VaxWithSex wrote: | Sure it exists, it is called compressed air. Even better | with CO2. | | Close to me is the oldest one, built in 1972 and still | operational today: | https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Huntorf | megaman821 wrote: | I agree. There is no breakthrough on the horizon that is going | to make a fusion plant have the complexity closer to a natural | gas plant than a nuclear fission plant. Therefore the costs | will remain high. | | It could still be a useful technology, especially in space. I | could see a moon or mars base powered by fusion. | DennisP wrote: | Gas has low capital cost but relatively high fuel cost, | especially outside the US. For most fusion designs (possibly | excluding NIF), the fuel cost is insignificant. | | Also of course we might want to consider the carbon emissions | of gas plants. | megaman821 wrote: | That is what I mean. Some people are imagining the capital | costs of a natural gas plant with the fuel and | environmental costs being almost nothing. There is | absolutely nothing to suggest that a fusion plant would | cost anything less than a fission plant at this point. | BeefWellington wrote: | Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build | because they're already taking advantage of economies of scale | and aren't in the R&D phase still. | | The viability of fusion has been centered for a long time | around getting more power out than you put in and once that | marker is met it's viewed as the last giant hurdle in the way. | There's still plenty more R&D that needs to be done before it | can easily / readily scale though. | | It's where nuclear was in the 60s basically. Even if it only | ever gets to be comparable to nuclear in terms of costing but | with none of the hazardous byproduct, it will come out ahead. | When you consider the environmental factors involved in battery | production it is pretty clear that fusion at least has the | potential to be the cleanest sources of energy. Whether it | ultimately gets there is another question. | rapsey wrote: | > It's where nuclear was in the 60s basically. | | Plants built in the 70s are still operating. It is nowhere | near a decade away. | BeefWellington wrote: | Fair, my statement had an implied "if they cleared this | hurdle" attached but I probably should have made it | explicit. | | I do think it'll be a decade or so to go from net gain -> | commercial fusion reactors coming online. | gabesullice wrote: | Pessimists were saying solar panels and batteries were too | expensive too, not so long ago. If we discover fusion power to | be viable in our lifetime, it will be a breathtaking | accomplishment to witness. It's a fork in the timeline with | repercussions that will reverberate for millenia, across | trillions of human lives. | codealot wrote: | Beautifully stated. I teared up. This and watching us settle | on the moon and Mars would be incredible. And achieving more | breakthroughs in AI and medicine and everything else. I am an | optimist and really excited by everything on the horizon. | pfdietz wrote: | They laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the | Clown. | | Most skepticism is ratified by subsequent events. | | DT fusion doesn't appear to have much to recommend it, since | it still requires a thermal cycle like fission or coal, and | that keeps its cost high. From an engineering point of view | it involves large monolithic plants with very complex and | stressed equipment. This seems the opposite of good | engineering. | rgmerk wrote: | This. | | If you have to build a steam turbine to convert the energy | from your fusion reactor into electricity, it's never going | to compete with solar and wind power in most of the world. | | Doesn't mean that there won't be applications (if you can | make all those lasers compact enough, submarines, ships, | and ultimately spacecraft come to mind), but grid | electricity is doubtful. | gabesullice wrote: | My impression is that the research efforts have been | focused on "can we do it?" Then, if the answer is yes, | they'll focus on "how do we do it efficiently?" Where | efficiency can mean anything from capital efficient, to | resource efficient, to energy conversion efficiency. | Limiting one's focus on the next blocker in the critical | path and not increasing scope beyond it sounds like | perfectly good engineering to me. | pfdietz wrote: | It seems like terrible myopic project management to me. | You want to avoid first steps that you know are very | likely going to lead to dead ends down the line. | | We're constantly being told to take the long term view. | Are we only to do that when it's favorable to the | technological optimist's case or budget? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-12 23:00 UTC)