[HN Gopher] US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
___________________________________________________________________
US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
Author : novateg
Score : 1446 points
Date : 2022-12-13 16:44 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.energy.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.energy.gov)
| already wrote:
| It's a big deal, it will change the way people live. Hopefully it
| also help to eliminate wars, the war for the natural resources
| and land.
| amelius wrote:
| There will probably still be wars over other natural resources.
| standardUser wrote:
| Currently, there are a couple dozen authoritarian regimes, most
| heavily armed, that are almost entirely funded by fossil fuel
| exports. That makes me fear things will get worse before they
| get better.
| Arubis wrote:
| True; however, this was already the direction things were
| headed for said regimes as much of the world has begun to
| focus on energy security. On the upside, perhaps the lowered
| long-term demand for fossil fuels will reduce the risk of
| additional resource discoveries leading to more despotic
| regimes.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Maybe. Fusion energy might be more expensive than current forms
| or has undesirable yet to be known side effects.
|
| People said the same of nuclear and here we are.
| eastbound wrote:
| The negative effect of nuclear were known in 1927 (Hermann
| Joseph Meller). It would be surprising if we discovered
| another form of radiation, given calculations lead us far
| further without showing new forms of radiations.
| seandoe wrote:
| And had we continued to develop and improve upon fission we'd
| probably be in a better place.
| dal wrote:
| You mean like tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time
| and opening a hell portal to another dimension?
| jrootabega wrote:
| That only happened ONCE.
| sh1mmer wrote:
| People also said the same thing about wind and solar, and
| those still have some downsides but they are also rapidly
| becoming the cheapest current form of peak energy, or with
| cheaper grid storage, energy period.
|
| Sci-if authors have been talking about both solar and fusion
| for years, and now solar has been industrialized why wouldn't
| we be excited to see progression in fusion?
| puttycat wrote:
| 2022, not ordered by importance: Dall.E 2, Chat-GPT, Fusion
| Ignition. Can't wait for 2023.
| freediver wrote:
| Putting these in the same basket is hardly justified.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| True. AI will have a much bigger impact on humanity in the
| next two decades than fusion will.
| hoten wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Someone with no context can read your
| comment either way.
| zhrvoj wrote:
| No, first two will use third. Nikola Tesla dreamed of free
| energy for the world. I don't think they dream the same... So
| entropy will go down now?
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| AI can be quite useful in real-time computation for magnetic
| confinement. But sure, that's beyond GPT-3's current
| capability.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| And at some time point in the future, the fusion generated
| energy will be used for training the power-hungry AI to
| improve the efficiency of fusion.
| megaman821 wrote:
| If ignition was achieved, why would they have to keep on shooting
| more fuel pellets? Shouldn't they just ignite one fuel pellet and
| feed in more fuel?
| jeffbee wrote:
| That's not really how NIF works. It's really a tiny bomb. It
| destroys the apparatus every time. It even wrecks the optics in
| the laser primary, which they have to regularly replace.
| frellus wrote:
| I hate to ask this, but have to ... is there any danger of these
| discoveries being weaponized easily by hostile countries? i.e.
| does this make unconventional weapons more accessible to
| countries who otherwise have embargoes on technology and material
| to make atomic weapons?
| frellus wrote:
| Oops, answered my own question I guess:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_fusion_weapon
|
| That ain't good. Although fusion is clearly the future of
| energy, we have to get our sh*t together on earth so we don't
| kill ourselves off or devolve with endless wars. Or give up and
| use fusion to leave the planet efficiently.
| mbauman wrote:
| > That ain't good.
|
| Your takeaway does not match that article. The article
| details how "no measurable success was ever achieved" and
| that the large amount of energy required to start fusion is
| hugely prohibitive.
|
| I don't see how the NIF's success here changes that.
| jameshart wrote:
| From your wiki source:
|
| > The power densities needed to ignite a fusion reaction
| still seem attainable only with the aid of a fission
| explosion, or with large apparatus such as powerful lasers
| like those at the National Ignition Facility, the Sandia
| Z-pinch machine, or various magnetic tokamaks. Regardless of
| any claimed advantages of pure fusion weapons, building those
| weapons does not appear to be feasible using currently
| available technologies
|
| Nothing about this result from NIF seems to suggest that
| igniting fusion is any easier than previously suspected.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| I don't see how this is any different to mutually assured
| destruction via nuclear weapons.
| tinco wrote:
| So.. we attack our enemies by building large fusion power
| plants in their countries, and then blowing them up? Why not
| just build a traditional nuclear fission power plant and blow
| that up? It seems that would be a lot cheaper.
| kimbernator wrote:
| We already have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons spread
| across the planet, with only two ever actually being aimed at
| anyone. Lots of problems but the threat of weapons at this
| scale are a well-feared thing already.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _is there any danger of these discoveries being weaponized_
|
| Any advance in energy production or propulsion has a weapons
| counterpart.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Fusion bombs (H bombs) have existed for a long time.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Fusion bombs (H bombs) have existed for a long time.
|
| and their yield can be made arbitrarily large with designs
| perfected in the 50s. I don't see this tech contributing to
| weapons. ...well maybe the lasers i guess but not the fusion
| at least.
| saul_goodman wrote:
| You have to remember that all of the classified details about
| US hydrogen bomb designs we have were leaked from leaked from
| Russia after the Soviet Union broke apart. And yet only two
| countries have managed to become nuclear states since then
| (Pakistan and North Korea).
|
| It's the engineering that makes nuclear weapons hard to do, not
| the knowledge.
| jameshart wrote:
| A process which has been finally accomplished at one of the
| most advanced research facilities in the world after decades of
| effort, and which requires as an energy input almost as much
| energy as the process produces, is not _easily weaponized_ ,
| no.
|
| Fusion reactions are hard to start. To use one as a weapon
| would require you to deliver the fusion fuel together with a
| source of enough energy to start the fusion reaction off. So
| the most effective way to do so has historically been to
| trigger them with a nuclear fission reaction from an atomic
| bomb - which results in a Hydrogen bomb.
|
| In other words, weaponizing fusion generally requires you to
| already have an extremely powerful weapon.
|
| Weaponizing this laser based inertial confinement fusion
| approach requires you to deliver a facility the size of the
| Lawrence Livermore lab plus the electricity generating capacity
| of a significant part of the west coast of America onto your
| target.
| tinco wrote:
| There are much simpler ways to generate fissile material for
| dirty bombs. This technology doesn't seem to be weaponisable in
| any other way that I can tell.
| Steuard wrote:
| I'm not an expert (I'm a physics prof who once took a seminar
| on nuclear arms control back in college), but what they're
| trying to do here is much, much harder than making an atomic
| bomb. If you want nuclear weapons, this work on carefully
| controlled and contained fusion is close to the opposite of
| what you'd need to do. (Fusion power is in general much cleaner
| than fission, at least where lasting radioactivity and waste
| are concerned.)
| alfor wrote:
| Fusion bombs (H-bombs) were functional in 1952
| anfilt wrote:
| Like a fusion reactor can be used as a neutron source to
| effectively make a breeder reactor.
|
| However, most countries can dig up rocks out of the ground with
| radioactive isotopes that can act as a neutron source. However,
| this has legitimate uses as well from research to medical
| imagining. Also any power generating reactor is gonna want to
| use those neutrons to make Tritium otherwise it would quickly
| run out fuel so not something you just want use on something
| unrelated to running the fusion reactor.
| scarier wrote:
| The short answer is no.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| from my layman understanding I believe fusion reactions are
| unlike fission reactions in that if they escape the confines of
| their environment they fizzle out as opposed to runaway like a
| nuclear explosion.
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Nuclear-fusion lab achieves 'ignition': what does it mean?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971953 - Dec 2022 (82
| comments)
|
| Two threads from before the announcement:
|
| _Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945863 - Dec 2022 (755
| comments)
|
| _Secretary Granholm to announce major scientific breakthrough by
| DOE [video]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33968357 -
| Dec 2022 (160 comments)
| citilife wrote:
| Given the resulting output was "2x higher than expected", I'll
| wait patiently for any peer reviewed work on the subject and a
| replication (or improvement) of the results.
|
| In the presentation they mentioned they couldn't reproduce the
| results immediately due to the containment imperfections -- at
| least that was my understanding.
| phtrivier wrote:
| Since I absolutely decided to take this in the worst possible way
| (get the downvotes ready)
|
| What is the timeframe for those lasers to light a bulb somewhere,
| vs the timeframe of those lasers killing someone on a battlefield
| ? (As in, how much of is applicable for the military?)
| adventured wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're talking about. What is it you think
| you took in the worst possible way?
|
| The lasers in question are mediocre for battlefield use. The
| consequences for the military are trivial, unless you're
| talking about 70 years from now when the US military is using
| fusion to power some of its military bases, subs or carriers.
| phtrivier wrote:
| I decided to take this "fusion breakthrough" with a massive
| dose of salt additionned with twice it's weight in pepper and
| bile.
|
| At least the Nature article had a good ratio of actual
| information about the experiment, its limitations and
| prospect, as opposed to massive hyperbole from other
| commenters already popping the champagne as if the energy
| crisis was over.
|
| This made sound grumpy, which, truth be written, I am.
|
| (And, jealous, too, of course. I wouldn't mind a bit of
| actual success, once in a while.)
|
| Or maybe the grunts working on the experiment know better,
| and are _also_ grinding their teeths at the PR effort ? Maybe
| _they_ also feel unsatisfied because they still haven't met
| their own goal ? I suppose nuclear fusion physicists must
| have imposter syndrome, too ? Who knows.
| [deleted]
| leephillips wrote:
| Old news: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13008
| johnthuss wrote:
| "NIF, the world's largest and most energetic laser
| system...-located at LLNL in Livermore, Calif.--is the size of a
| sports stadium"
|
| That's an important piece of information - the thing is gigantic!
| valine wrote:
| Even if it doesn't get smaller (unlikely), we as a society
| build stadiums all the time. Large construction projects are a
| small price to pay for abundant clean energy.
| [deleted]
| aidenn0 wrote:
| So for my entire lifetime Fusion has been 30-50 years away. Now
| it's 29-49 years away?
| jackspratts wrote:
| correct. about as long as a typical academic research career,
| with an extra margin thrown in for emeritus positions to be on
| the safe side. get the boffins' grand kids through college etc.
| anyway, there won't be grids in 50 years. or if for some
| sentimental reason there still are 95% of us will be off the
| failure prone things while making, storing and using our own
| uninterruptible power safely at home. much sooner really. i
| can't even imagine being on the grid in 10 years let alone 49.
| no way then to distribute the staggering costs for what will be
| the planet's most expensive and complex power plants.
|
| - js.
| over_bridge wrote:
| Are there any thoughts on how this will become a power plant yet?
| It's awesome to see it filled up, reacted and then reset as a
| proof of concept, but can it ever be a continuous flow through
| the chamber without losing that ignition temp? Or will it be more
| like a 4 cylinder engine where each reactor is at a different
| stage of being filled, heated, reacting and emptying, with the
| net result being continuous?
| brofallon wrote:
| I'm still a little unclear on the benefits that fusion offers
| compared to things like wind and solar. I understand that we need
| to develop better storage technologies for the energy produced by
| wind and solar, but that seems so much easier than the challenges
| currently facing fusion. Wind and solar just seem so far ahead of
| fusion already - they're pretty cheap and very widely deployed on
| a global scale. In comparison fusion seems very expensive and
| unproven and even when we get everything to work it might not be
| much better than a solar farm with a big battery pack. But maybe
| I'm missing something important about the economics?
| anon291 wrote:
| Solar and wind have massive environmental impacts. Fusion's
| foot print is much smaller for the same output. Batteries are
| rather dangerous. Fusion is -- as far as I understand it --
| much less likely to escape a reactor due to how difficult it is
| to sustain the reaction. Moreover, it's more dependable.
|
| So in sum, the advantages are (1) dependability, (2) safety,
| and (3) small footprint.
| josho wrote:
| > Solar and wind have massive environmental impacts
|
| Got a source for this? The only time I've seen this has been
| political talking points that had no backing.
| anon291 wrote:
| My source is the fact that solar panels cause shade on the
| ground and squander energy that would normally be going
| towards developing biomass into developing energy instead.
| It just doesn't seem healthy for the animals and
| environment that live there. Especially with the talk of in
| ground installation, which basically destroys entire
| environments and soils and covers it with impermeable
| membranes. That's not great for soil health.
| xzlzx wrote:
| Consistent baseline grid load is the difference.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Apart from the safety improvements and environmental benefits,
| it's a way to produce a ton of energy. I believe it's about 4
| times as much energy from fusion compared to fission with the
| same amount of fuel. I'm a fan of solar and wind, but it's
| going to be way easier to power the entire world sustainably if
| you've got fusion in the mix.
| ridgeguy wrote:
| I think when comparing PV/wind to nuclear (fusion or fission)
| generation, we should include the cost of storage for
| renewables in the comparison.
|
| Renewable generation + storage gives a system that's capable of
| meeting base load needs, just as nuclear generation does. Cost
| comparisons among base load-capable technologies is a better
| way to evaluate the economics, IMHO.
| abecedarius wrote:
| High power density. Start and stop on demand. Abundant fuel is
| another advantage, but in our neighborhood sunlight is also
| abundant. Fission also has good power density, but not so good
| on the start/stop flexibility.
| bitcurious wrote:
| Wind and solar have a max theoretical output that is
| constrained by physical space and competition for its use, in
| addition to weather patterns, etc.
|
| Fusion energy has a theoretical max that's orders of magnitude
| higher.
|
| Wind+solar is the path to decarbonization and sustaining our
| current world.
|
| Fusion is the path to post scarcity. If/when we get scalable
| commercial fusion, it'll be like the transition to oil -
| society will radically change, in ways we can't predict.
| thehappypm wrote:
| It's potentially just a much better version of fission.
|
| Fusion won't cause a runaway reaction -- in fact it's brutally
| difficult to get it to react at all, hence why this is an
| achievement.
|
| It also doesn't use materials that can be used for a bomb,
| again unlike fission.
|
| As a result it has the potential to be cheaper to implement,
| cheaper to fuel, with no meltdown risk.
| dharmab wrote:
| Isn't tritium used in fusion and a potential weapons
| material?
| devmor wrote:
| It's a fission yield booster. It's as much of a weapons
| material as charcoal is.
| mlyle wrote:
| It's not controlled. It does help boost some fission
| weapons. But it's not the hard part or critical piece of
| producing a nuclear weapon, and you can get by without it.
|
| To illustrate how little it's controlled-- I have a little
| bit on my keychain as an alpha source with a phosphor so my
| keyring always glows.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Depending on the scale and reactor design, we have really
| good examples of run away fusion reactions. Run away
| reactions are easy, controlled ones are hard.
|
| And whilst I won't doubt that if fusion ever becomes
| commercially viable the reactors would be walk away safe it
| doesn't mean that you don't need to account for that in your
| design.
| [deleted]
| willis936 wrote:
| What is an example of a run away fusion reaction?
| dogma1138 wrote:
| The US strategic arsenal.
| blamestross wrote:
| A Hydrogen Bomb. It is basically using a nuke (fission)
| to trigger fusion instead of lasers.
| willis936 wrote:
| That is a run away fission reaction that ignites a short
| lived fusion reaction. We don't even talk about neutron
| populations or k factors in fusion because there is no
| avalanche effect possible.
| valine wrote:
| Also don't forget the biggest benefit over solar/wind: it
| keeps on generating power on cold windless nights.
| jszymborski wrote:
| No need to worry about Cold Dunkelflaut!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo
| zardo wrote:
| > But maybe I'm missing something important about the
| economics?
|
| I think you've understood it.
|
| Imo fusion is never going to be able to compete with
| renewables+storage with the energy being captured from
| neutrons. Maybe reactions that release energy in charged
| particles or photons could, but they're even harder to do.
| Analog24 wrote:
| Could you elaborate on your point a bit more? If you're
| talking about utilizing the weak force vs. the residual
| strong force then I'm not sure this argument holds up.
|
| Also, when comparing to renewable+storage you have to
| consider how much land has to be dedicated to energy use in
| these scenarios. Wind and solar require orders of magnitude
| more than a potential fusion reactor (or an existing fission
| reactor).
| zardo wrote:
| Just referring to what particles the released energy is
| carried in.
|
| The easiest fusion reactions to make happen release most
| energy as neutrons. But neutrons are, from a practical
| standpoint, a huge pain in the ass to deal with. They just
| fly off until they hit another atomic nucleus.
|
| They irradiate the structure of reactor, making it
| radioactive and weakening it, neccesating periodic
| replacement. This means handling radioactive materials,
| which as the existing nuclear power industry demonstrates,
| is hard to make cheap.
|
| Reactions that release excess energy as charged particles,
| though all harder to actually do, leave you with charged
| particles that can be directed by electric or magnetic
| fields and can be used for direct enerergy conversion.
|
| Yes solar requires a lot of surface area, but fusion power
| is just not looking like it will be anywhere near cheap
| enough for the real estate savings to matter.
| UltraViolence wrote:
| Much more compact, less use of land or sea real estate, more
| power produced per volume and throttleable.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| If we get an order of magnitude more energy, we can do an order
| of magnitude more things; fossil fuels gave us the Industrial
| Revolution, and nuclear fusion may unlock something similar.
| dark-star wrote:
| Wind and solar only provide power during wind / during the day.
| Fusion can provide 24/7 power. Battery packs can only store so
| much energy, and Lithium is a contested resource as most of the
| Lithium produced is required by the automotive industry these
| days, and the largest deposits are in regions where you maybe
| don't want to get your Lithium from (child labor, unsafe
| conditions, politically unstable countries, etc.)
|
| But yeah, future energy will be a mix of available
| technologies, not a single technology alone. So you need e.g.
| fusion (or fission) for "baseline" power and wind/solar for
| peaks
| ragebol wrote:
| Fusion brings the power of the stars directly to us, without it
| capturing the energy millions of miles later. It unlocks a Star
| Trek, post-scarcity future that PV and wind cannot bring due to
| their space requirements.
|
| Also, you could eventually put one on a spaceship or other
| planet. For that Star Trek future.
| galuano1 wrote:
| Predictable and abundant supply of fuel, and hopefully greener
| to produce the powerplant itself.
| vfclists wrote:
| Industry does not run on solar and wind and sad to say it,
| current storage energy is not green.
|
| The cleanest energy available now is nuclear fission, but there
| is no money in it for the energy industry. It is too plentiful
| and cheap if implemented properly and capitalism does not like
| plentiful and cheap.
|
| France has had cheap electricity for decades and it seems it
| has been so cheap that they don't want it anymore.
|
| This is all capitalist boondoggles.
| trhr wrote:
| I have an idea. Why don't we just take all the nuclear weapons
| we've accumulated around the planet and explode them in the South
| China Sea?
| rcgorton wrote:
| MrFoof wrote:
| I'm glad we might see fission power plants in my lifetime (next
| 30-50 years). My father still finds it novel that he basically
| gets to wear Dick Tracy's watch.
|
| Yet I'm concerned that shortly thereafter, the giant robotic
| laser death spiders will destroy entire cities. This might also
| be be before we've built the arcologies to launch into outer
| space to escape the giant robot laser death spiders.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > fission power
|
| you probably meant "fusion"
|
| > My father still finds it novel that he basically gets to wear
| Dick Tracy's watch.
|
| Well, except for the front-facing camera, but that's trivial to
| add at this point. And as a 50 year old, I agree. I feel like
| being incarnated in '72 has gotten me ethereal tickets to the
| greatest technological expansion/brouhaha in all of human
| history, and I don't know what my soul did to deserve this
| pleasure. Everything I've been into as a kid "before it was
| cool" has absolutely exploded: Computers, electronic music,
| gaming, telecom, AI, green energy/electric cars... but also
| science, medicine, etc. are making tremendous progress (I'm
| down 35 lbs thanks to Mounjaro, a brand new drug). Hell, even
| that weird side interest in UFO's (one of the first sections of
| the library I discovered as a kid) has paid dividends with the
| USG finally admitting they're real. BRB, I have to pinch
| myself. Unironic "what a time to be alive"!
|
| > giant robot laser death spiders
|
| you should probably worry more about the silent airborne drone
| army suicide bombers first. (What was the movie that actually
| featured a scene with those, btw? I think it had Morgan
| Freeman? EDIT: Found it, thanks to those other technological
| wonders, Google and YouTube:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40JFxhhJEYk)
|
| There will always be dangers with progress. Two steps forward,
| one step back. But I leave you with this. I asked ChatGPT to
| summarize this article as a sarcastic poem
| https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/everything-sam-bankman-f...
| and here's what it gave me, and I'm still chuckling about how
| awesome this is:
|
| Sam Bankman-Fried talks a lot
|
| But it's all just hot air
|
| He tries to seem transparent
|
| But he's just trying to repair
|
| His reputation, once so grand
|
| Is now as tarnished as can be
|
| He's just a fraud, don't be fooled
|
| By his attempts at publicity.
| MrFoof wrote:
| Yes, fusion. I 1000% blame mobile autocorrect.
|
| > What was the movie that actually featured a scene with
| those, btw? I think it had Morgan Freeman
|
| It was specifically a SimCity 2000 reference.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| The original Dick Tracy Watch introduced in 1946 didn't have
| a camera. A newer model featuring a camera came out in a 1964
| comic.
|
| I haven't read Dick Tracy in a long time, but if it's still
| being made I bet Tracy's watch has been upgraded with a bunch
| of new features the Apple Watch lacks.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I did not know that!
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| > LLNL's experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering
| 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15
| MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a
| most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE)
|
| Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but
| now we're working with 3.15:2.05.
|
| With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100%
| efficiency through direct-energy-capture.
|
| The jumps to get here included
|
| - 40% with the new targets
|
| - 60% with magnetic confinement
|
| - 35% with crycooling of the target
|
| The recent NIF experiments have jumped up in power. The first
| shot that started this new chain of research was about 1.7 MJ of
| energy delivered. Now, 2.15 MJ. However, the output has jumped
| non-linearly, demonstrating the scaling laws at work.
|
| > I've helped to secure the highest ever authorization of over
| $624 million this year in the National Defense Authorization Act
| for the ICF program to build on this amazing breakthrough."
|
| It's nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding
| it still rather small.
| rsync wrote:
| "Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio,
| but now we're working with 3.15:2.05."
|
| What is the difference between todays announcement and
| yesterdays ?
|
| I thought we were just getting re-submitted headlines, but
| apparently this news is different than yesterday ?
| highwaylights wrote:
| Speculation.
|
| People believed that X:Y was 2.2:2.0, but it's now 3.15:2.05.
|
| The 10% EROI apparently wasn't impressive enough, it's now
| 54% EROI on paper (assuming less because of capture
| inefficiencies).
|
| I'm no expert, but theoretically my understanding is that
| this ratio should scale along this same pattern for higher
| values of Y.
| yk wrote:
| Yesterdays news was that this result was leaked to the FT
| with apparently preliminary numbers. And today there was a
| press conference that had somewhat better looking numbers.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| The official announcement (with the real info) was this
| morning.
|
| Before that, the only official word was that an announcement
| was coming, and all the info was unofficial leaks and rumors.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I keep getting lost in the numbers here. What was the net
| gain/loss for the entire system? Without the "lasers are 1%
| efficient at 20% energy loss with 40% energy transfer loss" and
| all that.
| joosters wrote:
| They needed roughly 500MJ of energy to power the lasers and
| produce the 2.5MJ of energy, so the net loss was... about
| 500MJ.
| zbobet2012 wrote:
| The net gain of the entire system at NIF doesn't matter,
| because the system at NIF was never designed to make a net
| gain.
|
| People are estimating how this result moves the equation for
| an overall system that is designed for power production. Most
| numbers I have seen still leave a theoretically optimal power
| plant producing around a 30% loss in power with this number.
| nine_k wrote:
| _AFAICT:_ There 's a large net gain compared to the energy
| emitted by the lasers. There is still a considerable loss
| compared to the energy consumed by the lasers.
|
| While at it: I don't think the NIF approach will ever be
| applicable to commercial power generation on Earth. But I
| hope it will be one day applicable to a fusion-based rocket
| engine.
| jackmott wrote:
| w0mbat wrote:
| Their total power draw from the grid was 300 megajoules and
| they got back about 3 megajoules, so don't start celebrating
| yet. Source: New York Times.
| poopbutt6 wrote:
| I agree! These results are NO cause for celebration. To do so
| would be deliberately misleading, and potentially devalue
| celebrations in general.
| cheriot wrote:
| I think the "With modern lasers" part is addressing that.
| makestuff wrote:
| > It's nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the
| funding it still rather small.
|
| Just wait until the DoD figures out they can use this for some
| military application and it will get 100x funding overnight.
| davedx wrote:
| We've had thermonuclear weapons (h-bombs) for a long time
| already.
|
| Harnessing the energy in a _controlled and sustainable
| fashion_ is what 's hard.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| H-bombs use the hydrogen to produce more neutrons which
| boosts the fission process. It still is a fission bomb.
| Analog24 wrote:
| You have it backwards. The fission component is just the
| "trigger" for the fusion element, which produces the vast
| majority of the energy release.
| yk wrote:
| No, you can have a fusion booster, like in the "Sloika"
| [0] design, but for a Teller-Ulam design, that is a
| H-bomb, you use a nuclear primer to ignite a fusion
| reaction and by far the most energy comes from the fusion
| part. [1]
|
| [0] https://www.atomicarchive.com/history/hydrogen-
| bomb/page-11....
|
| [1] https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Teller.html
| davedx wrote:
| Nope...
|
| "thermonuclear bomb, also called hydrogen bomb, or
| H-bomb, weapon whose enormous explosive power results
| from an uncontrolled self-sustaining chain reaction in
| which isotopes of hydrogen combine under extremely high
| temperatures to form helium in a process known as nuclear
| fusion."
| p_j_w wrote:
| This is already used for nuclear weapons research, which is
| why it's under Dept. of Energy.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Not really. I mean, yes, nuclear weapons are a thing, but
| Dept. of Energy supports many many directions not related
| to nuclear weapons. Physics research is mostly funded by
| DOE Office of Science or the National Science Foundation.
| saboot wrote:
| It's an explicit goal of the NIF to better understand the
| physics of fusion for weapons research. Not the main one
| but it's pretty important!
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| My point was: NIF would be funded via DOE whether or not
| it's relevant for weapon research. Sorry for not have
| been clearer.
| zizee wrote:
| I'm no expert, but I think you have it backwards. My
| understanding is NIF raison d'etre is weapons research,
| with a power generation being a secondary concern. It got
| funded because of weapons research regardless of whether
| it was relevant to fusion power generation.
|
| It may surprise people, but the DOE is the government
| body that is responsible for nuclear weapons research in
| the US.
| saboot wrote:
| If it was already decided to be funded, yes it would have
| been under DoE. Though I believe the weapons aspect had a
| very major contribution in deciding for it to be funded
| at all. It was proposed shortly after the nuclear testing
| ban and has been a big part in fulfilling that area.
|
| I'm not trying to correct you, but adding context for the
| weapons aspect.
| kortilla wrote:
| That doesn't follow. The DOE covers a bunch of energy
| research that has no relationship to nuclear weapons (e.g.
| solar).
| jameshart wrote:
| Cheap and abundant energy has a multitude of military
| applications.
|
| Peaceful ones too, probably.
| saboot wrote:
| The appropriate analogy for this technology would be that it
| may be possible to initiate a thermonuclear weapon without
| relying on fission at all. Currently we use a fission nuclear
| bomb just to generate the temperature and pressure needed to
| start the fusion reaction, same as the one on today's
| announcement.
|
| So far it hasn't proven to be viable, but time will tell.
| tgflynn wrote:
| I wonder if it might be possible to gain not percentages but
| orders of magnitude more or less just by making the targets
| bigger. Is it conceivable that the same basic approach and a
| comparable amount of input energy could be used to ignite a 100
| MJ or even 1 GJ target ? Of course that would present some
| containment challenges but perhaps not insurmountable ones.
|
| I'm also a bit concerned that this type of research may
| encounter national security related obstacles. Obviously a pure
| fusion bomb would be a game changer for nuclear
| (non-)proliferation.
| jocaal wrote:
| I don't think a pure fusion bomb will have any form of
| advantage compared to the current hydro-bombs. They wouldn't
| produce more energy, but will need more gear to reach
| ignition.
| tgflynn wrote:
| The advantage would be that you wouldn't need tightly
| controlled and hard to make materials like U-235 or Pu to
| make one.
|
| I'm not in any way saying that using lasers would be a
| plausible route to such a weapon, since the NIF facility is
| huge, but if it turns out that the research needs to focus
| on how to get more output per shot, which I think it
| inevitably would since a typical conventional or nuclear
| power plant generates on the order of 1 GW thermal power
| (To match that with a 1 Hz repetition rate, likely a
| stretch for a MJ class laser, you would need to generate 1
| GJ per shot, comparable to the energy in a ton of TNT.), it
| would probably be touching on areas that are highly
| classified.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Shiiiit... here I was thinking how cool it would be if
| they could miniaturize this, having somehow forgotten
| that my pet solution to the Fermi paradox is that a nigh-
| inevitable wrung on the ladder to interstellar presence
| involves discovering One Weird Trick to release a whole
| bunch of energy pretty easily, even on a DIY basis.
| Instant end of civilization. Even ant-like societies
| might have mutated members who'd go rogue and misuse the
| tech, and it wouldn't take many to ruin everything.
|
| Basically it's a twist on the ice-9 solution to the
| paradox.
| sterlind wrote:
| any sufficiently speedy spacecraft makes for a deadly
| kinetic kill vehicle, unfortunately.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| A pure fusion bomb would produce less (not zero) fallout.
| Neutron activation would still produce some fallout, but
| you wouldn't have the fission byproducts like caesium-137,
| iodine-129 or strontium-90.
|
| This is probably a bad thing; politicians might decide the
| bombs are clean enough to use.
| sterlind wrote:
| even without actual radioactivity, pure fusion bombs
| would still be politically radioactive. look at the
| fallout (so to speak!) from the Hafnium controversy. they
| nixed all the research and stopped looking, after
| realizing that nuclear isomers would do little for energy
| storage (due to emitting energy as gamma radiation) but
| lots for bypassing restrictions on fissile materials.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| To be clear, pure fusion bombs would still emit massive
| amounts of radiation. Gamma rays, x-rays, thermal
| radiation, all off that EM radiation would be emitted
| just like a regular fission bomb. Neutron radiation too.
| You'd have less (not zero) contamination of the earth
| itself afterwards, but everybody in the area would still
| be very badly irradiated.
|
| I don't know enough about the Hafnium controversy to
| comment on it.
| spullara wrote:
| I mean almost all of the power in a nuclear bomb comes from
| fusion. The fission part of it is just like the detonator for
| the real explosion.
| dgacmu wrote:
| This is actually backwards. Fusion weapons are
| substantially higher yield because they result in more
| fission, partly by preventing the fission primary from
| blowing itself up before it has finished.
|
| Wikipedia: "Fast fission of the tamper and radiation case
| is the main contribution to the total yield and is the
| dominant process that produces radioactive fission product
| fallout."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
| Retric wrote:
| It varies quite a bit by design, apparently the USSR's
| initial design was only 15-20% fusion while US designs
| where closer to 50% which is still apparently the most
| efficient option in terms of warhead size.
|
| However it's possible to have higher fusion ratios at the
| expense of a larger device for the same yield. Most
| notably in the case of the Tsar Bomba's which reduced the
| contribution of fission and too massively reduce the
| amount of fallout produced.
| phasetransition wrote:
| Almost all nuclear weapons rely heavily on fission of the
| tamper for yield.
|
| Suggest "Ripple: An Investigation of the World's Most
| Advanced High-Yield Thermonuclear Weapon Design" from the
| Journal of Cold War studies to read about a predominantly
| fusion device family.
| AlanSE wrote:
| This seems to say to me that D-T reactions produce
| neutrons, and that the kinetic energy of the neutrons is
| smaller than what you get by hitting U with that neutron.
| You already have the energy from the neutron (which will
| land somewhere in the system eventually), and you might
| as well get a multiplier by putting a blanket of U-238 in
| front of it.
|
| That could be carbon-copied to a fusion power plant, and
| indeed, there are many proposals of hybrid fusion-fission
| plants in the literature that only require Q values
| marginally greater than 1. But if you go that route, you
| have radiation just like a fission plant, and one starts
| to question why you don't just build a fission plant
| (indeed, why don't we?).
|
| My personal pet theory of the future is that, one day,
| we'll progress so far in fusion research that we get
| economic energy. But at the same time, the line blurs
| between both fission and weapons technology, so people
| are unhappy with the result. This doesn't feel
| particularly contrarian but no one ever seems to bring it
| up.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| Since you asked: We don't build fission plants because
| they cost more than every other energy source. Fusion
| plants, if they could ever be made to work at all, would
| cost a lot more. So, there won't be any.
| metal_am wrote:
| This particular research is literally built off of weapons
| research (National Ignition Facility).
| pfdietz wrote:
| The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000, not because of
| energy breakeven, but to produce enough energy that the shot is
| financially positive. The amount of fusion energy produced in
| this shot is worth a penny or two.
|
| (And even then, it's dubious a laser fusion scheme will be
| competitive with other energy sources.)
| echelon wrote:
| It will get there. It's just a matter of time and resources.
|
| The destination will be a milestone for humanity, so we
| should not give up.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Why should I agree with this article of faith? The
| obstacles appear quite grave to me. Moreover, even reaching
| that Q doesn't mean we're there. That's a necessary, not
| sufficient, condition.
|
| A large, complex machine that explodes the equivalent of
| 500 lb. bombs to generate heat to drive a turbine sounds
| like an engineering nightmare.
| m4rtink wrote:
| I wonder how much energy each stroke in the largest
| diesel ship engines has when compared to the energy
| released by individual bombs/high explosives.
| Quarrel wrote:
| While I'm sure that you're correct, the obstacles are
| large and there is a lot of overcome still, I can't help
| but think of James Watt & (my ancestor) Richard
| Trevithick - the inventor/pioneer of the compact steam
| engine.
|
| Watt went around telling everyone that Trevithick and his
| compact (ie high pressure) steam engines were too
| dangerous and would never work.
|
| Yes, some exploded. But then we got steam trains and even
| today almost all power generation on the planet is high
| pressure steam-electric power plants.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| An answer matched in tenor and tone to the question, but
| nonetheless entirely serious,
|
| is that because while the obstacles are grave, the
| consequences of failing to overcome them are much graver
| still,
|
| and to the best of our collective knowledge,
|
| industrial scale fusion would be the least bad answer to
| our energy demands for the next epoch.
|
| That is true but also does not obviate the need for other
| parallel efforts and other technologies whose challenges
| are also very grave, e.g. the need for very near term
| very large scale carbon sequestration, for a modern
| electrical grid with deep redundancy and resilience, the
| need for effective safe scalable stores for energy from
| whatever source, etc.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > the consequences of failing to overcome them are much
| graver still,
|
| Why is that? Fusion is not needed, although if it turned
| out to be cheap that would be nice.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Because sustainable positive energy out has never been
| achieved before in 60 years of research. This is
| gigantic. It's potential to decarbonize the world is
| massive, and now it became a whole lot less theoretical.
|
| It's an incredible milestone, not a solved problem.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's a circular argument. It's big because the people
| doing it call it big. Why should I, an outsider, care
| about their internal goals, their egoes, or their status
| in their field? What does it do or imply for me?
| azinman2 wrote:
| To achieve fusion for power production, you need more
| output than input. For 60+ years this hasn't been
| achieved in a replicated fashion. Now it has, and it's
| 50% more power rather than 0.1% more power as was
| sometimes shown for 2 nanoseconds before. So now we know
| fusion for power is possible. If it can be scaled
| successfully (now likely not an if anymore, but a
| function of time), then we have the ability to have clean
| and safe energy 24/7. That would help mitigate the worst
| of climate change, and if cheap, turbocharge the entire
| economy.
|
| What's the circle or not big milestone here?
| pfdietz wrote:
| I'm asking why this somewhat arbitrary line being crossed
| is something I should care about. It doesn't imply fusion
| will reach a state of practical application. Why is this
| more exciting that achieving a ratio of .1, or .5, or 2,
| or 10? It seems entirely arbirary to me, and smells of an
| argument that somehow this has made the end goal
| significantly more attainable.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Because until now contained ignition has never produced
| anything meaningful. We've had failed experiment after
| failed experiment. Now we finally have an experiment with
| a meaningful more amount of energy out than in.
|
| Is this the right approach? Who knows. There are many
| fusion designs in the works, and those may ultimately be
| the right call. Or some yet-to-be-created design. That's
| even probable. The NIF is for simulating nuclear weapons,
| not creating energy. None of that takes away from this
| breakthrough - we've never had meaningfully more output
| than input on a repeatable basis. It's proof that
| contained fusion for energy isn't just hypothetical,
| which will also mean funding & interest will generally
| increase from this point on.
|
| I think you're setting too high a bar. It's like saying
| no milestone should be celebrated until we have a working
| metropolitan-size plant running that's cheaper than
| anything else. Punch cards in the 1950s are insignificant
| compared to modern SSDs, yet they were an important step
| even though we don't use anything like it now.
| Breakthroughs are breakthroughs.
| floxy wrote:
| >why this somewhat arbitrary line being crossed is
| something I should care about.
|
| That is something personal and unique to each individual.
| In 1903 when the Wright brothers flew a heavier-than-air
| machine for 59 seconds, 99.99999% of the people on the
| planet wouldn't have cared. The airplanes you've flown on
| are vastly far removed from that original one. Same story
| for the point contact transistor in 1947. None of that
| solid state physics is used for modern transistors. Some
| people like to be early adopters for new ideas and
| things. Some don't. And that is OK.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| It's a common joke that fusion power is always 50 years
| away. With this milestone, is it finally less than 50
| years away?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > A large, complex machine that explodes the equivalent
| of 500 lb. bombs to generate heat to drive a turbine
| sounds like an engineering nightmare.
|
| And using actual bombs and explosives to dig kilometers
| down and mine coal is not an engineering nightmare? Dying
| of gas in the mines, fires on oil wells, oil spills,
| these things are 'engineering simple'?
| pfdietz wrote:
| We don't place precision optics in those blast zones. We
| don't put structures there that are repeatedly exposed to
| blast. Over the life of a inertial DT fusion reactor
| there will be about a BILLION such explosions in the
| reactor core.
| pelorat wrote:
| It will get there, but it won't be from NIF or via any
| technology developed for this experiment. What they are
| doing is not viable for a rector, won't ever be viable for
| a reactor, and won't even be considered a starting point
| for any future rector.
|
| It's a fusion plasma research experiment. It's not a
| program that is being run with the goal of creating a
| usable fusion energy power plant.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000
|
| Is there any calculation to this? What's the cost of shot? Is
| there any limetime limit of the laser?
| VLM wrote:
| Its worth pointing out that per unit energy a lot of money is
| made making economically unviable cargo ship power, submarine
| and other military naval power, space ship power sources,
| diesel-electric locomotives ...
|
| True if you want to replace base load of a civilization size
| network it needs to be economically viable, but we generate
| "a lot" of power at higher than market minima. Ironically,
| "good batteries" are the natural enemy of fusion research.
|
| One fun thing about laser fusion is it theoretically can
| scale down very low and has a trivial "off" switch making it
| a good resource for engineering tokamak reactor materials or
| sensors or similar tasks.
|
| The inner lining of a production fusion reactor is hard to
| make, so a laser facility would be ideal for research. Which
| is why we have one...
| pfdietz wrote:
| DT fusion reactors would be terrible for mobile
| applications, since there are so much larger than fission
| reactors of the same capacity. In space or mass constrained
| applications they would be ruinously inferior to fission.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Offset the financial viability with the cost of freedom from
| energy reliance and the need (more like craving) for military
| interventions
| pfdietz wrote:
| That would be a valid argument if the only alternative to
| fusion was petroleum.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I'm confused by this. Does the US have the productive
| forces and resources to replace petrolium with solar
| panels (and the required energy storage)? Does it have
| the nuclear fuel to replace petrolium with fission
| reactors?
|
| What alternatives to petrolium does the US have that it
| does not rely on others for?
| pfdietz wrote:
| What scheme do you imagine that fusion could be used to
| replace petroleum that would not also work when powered
| by solar? Production of synfuels using hydrogen, for
| example, would also deal with solar's intermittency,
| leaving the energy sources to compete on the basis of
| levelized cost. The levelized cost of solar has become
| quite low, and it's very difficult to see how any fusion
| scheme, and DT fusion in particular, will ever compete.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I specifically asked about the _production_ of solar
| panels. Are you assuming that we already have all the
| panels we need to replace petrolium sitting in a
| warehouse? What good is solar in an energy independence
| plan if we can 't build our own panels?
| pfdietz wrote:
| What? Production of solar panels is just a matter of
| building and running more factories. There's no
| significant limit to this.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Nuclear fuel actually isn't that expensive or rare
|
| Those crazy sci-fi stories from the 30s and 50s where
| everyone used nuclear power (and it was so cheap they
| didn't bother to meter it) were all completely accurate
| from a non-political viewpoint
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Oh, interesting. I read/heard a few places that most fuel
| used for fission was controlled by a few countries. I was
| unaware it was abundant.
| vel0city wrote:
| The stuff is kind of all over the place, but it's not
| high purity. The engineering to refine the material is
| highly controlled.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Exactly. Beyond power generation, humanity still uses
| petroleum products in their chemical industry. Which is
| why the shutoff of Russian natural gas hurts Germany much
| more than other countries, they now have a starving
| chemical sector.
| ajuc wrote:
| Solar panels (+ synthetic fossil fuel generation if you
| need unlimited energy storage) would be orders of magnitude
| cheaper way to achieve that.
| baq wrote:
| Military interventions to blow up other people's under
| construction fusion reactors will still be a thing, worry
| not
| colechristensen wrote:
| Foreign energy reliance is finished and has been for some
| time. North America can produce more petroleum energy than
| it uses. In both 2020 and 2021 the US was a net petroleum
| exporter.
| floxy wrote:
| >The Q needs to be something like 500 to 1000
|
| Why wouldn't a final Q of 50 be economically viable? Interest
| on capital costs? Other?
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Inertial confinement fusion requires fairly expensive
| targets to collapse. To make it economically viable they
| have to produce a lot more energy per target destroyed.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > fairly expensive targets
|
| The targets are only expensive because they aren't
| produced at scale yet.
|
| They are the exact kind of thing a machine could churn
| millions of per day out, and then use them at the same
| rate.
|
| Even if the targets were made of expensive materials (eg.
| platinum), most of that platinum could later be recovered
| from the reactor wall, so it still wouldn't be very
| expensive.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "most of that platinum could later be recovered from the
| reactor wall, so it still wouldn't be very expensive. "
|
| And recovering comes for free?
|
| Every step costs energy (or money).
|
| There is no working design yet. It is waay too early to
| make any predictions about how scaling could reduce
| costs. Scaling can even increase costs, if it depletes
| limited resources like tritium.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Capital cost, cost of individual targets.
| andruc wrote:
| If you've done the math to determine the threshold, you
| may as well show it already
| pfdietz wrote:
| I'm repeating what I've heard. Personally, I suspect even
| that wouldn't reach the goal of being competitive.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Q is irrelevant, you need throughput. If your Q is one
| million, but you are processing one tiny capsule per second,
| you are producing too little money to pay for the facility.
|
| If you can process a tanker worth of hydrogen per second, Q
| can be just above break even and you will still make money.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| This tweet claims that 500MJ of energy was required:
| https://twitter.com/latzenpratz/status/1602686252486217728
|
| > "had to put 500 megajoules of energy into the lasers to then
| send 1.8 megajoules to the target - so even though they got 2.5
| megajoules out, that's still far less than the energy they
| originally needed for the lasers," says Tony Roulstone of the
| University of Cambridge.
|
| But it's good to finally see progress. Very few technologies
| can transform the world the way a practical fusion reactor
| could.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| That's only because they're using old school flash pumped
| lasers, not the new solid state lasers you'd use today if you
| wanted to make a power plant demo.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Can solid state lasers produce the high energy needed here?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_
| Energy#M...
| px43 wrote:
| I'm not really seeing any convincing numbers there.
| Mercury lasers seem to only be 10% efficient. I get that
| this is better than the lasers that were just used at
| NIF, but that still seems pretty far from useful.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It just seems a little strange to take credit for a
| milestone when the milestone everyone cares about is yet to
| be reached. (More energy out than in.)
|
| Good to hear that there's a laser design that might achieve
| that.
| ganbatekudasai wrote:
| Don't take it too personally, but you, and many others
| here, need to rethink their approach. You see a short
| tweet without context about a topic you clearly know
| nothing about (which is totally, fully okay, it's a
| complex topic), and think you are now able to criticize
| milestones in this impossibly complex topic.
|
| Not even ask questions, not something like "hey, I saw
| this tweet, I know it's just a tweet, but can someone
| help me understand context?", no, you actually go ahead
| and criticize work that you know nothing about, and when
| confronted, you _double down_.
|
| On some level, you must know yourself that it might be
| better to ask as many unloaded questions as you want, but
| otherwise sit this one out in terms of assessment.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| No thanks.
|
| I get that people are emotional about this, but it's
| important to treat science with a critical eye.
|
| The claim is that more energy came out than was put in.
| This is false.
|
| It's not just me saying it.
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRVP5Pmg/
|
| There is no "context" to understand. Yes, it's an
| impressive feat. Yes, other laser designs might fix the
| huge ignition costs. But _that hasn't happened yet_ , and
| until it does, it's completely fair to point that out.
|
| Will it win me any friends? Probably not. It's like
| showing up to a party and saying the reason for the party
| is mistaken. Very few people care.
|
| But scientists should, and I am one. Doubly so for
| incorrect reporting to laymen. We have a responsibility
| to convey what was actually achieved, not what we wish
| was achieved.
| boc wrote:
| "...what was actually achieved"
|
| Honest feedback? You're coming across as an edgy 17 year
| old. Dismissing criticism as others simply "getting
| emotional" and then missing the point of this experiment
| so hard that I'm honestly not sure if you're trolling is
| not a good look.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Your "honest feedback" is nothing more than naked
| insults.
|
| Sillysaurusx is right. The "impossibly complex" matter is
| actually quite simple, Q=1 is little more than a
| psychological milestone, not some sort of technical
| tipping point where further progress becomes easier. And
| they haven't even gotten to Q=1 unless you buy into the
| justifications they give for dodgy accounting of the
| energy they put into it. The "impossibly complex" matter
| of commercial fusion is actually quite simple, it needs
| to put out _a lot_ more energy than you put into it after
| you _fully_ account for all the energy you put in. They
| aren 't even close to this.
| geysersam wrote:
| You are entirely correct. I'll just add that it's not
| only about the energy put in, but ultimately about the
| cost. Net positive energy output is the absolute basic
| requirement. We're not there, we're not close, and even
| if we were, the hurdle would be to make it economically
| viable.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| Just as a note, since I made the same mistake initially,
| the person you're replying to didn't make the post from
| which you are quoting "impossibly complex".
|
| It seems, to me, that boc was criticizing the
| unnecessarily dour tone of sillysaurusx's previous
| comment and not the technical aspect of the achievement.
|
| The whole thing seems to come down to whether one
| interprets the announcement as an attempt to deceive the
| public at large or simply a celebration of a milestone
| that many in the fusion research community have been
| trying to achieve for a long time. I can understand it
| being interpreted both ways, but I think the more
| charitable interpretation is that science reporting, in
| general, doesn't usually properly explain the levels of
| nuance of various achievements and, as such, something
| that is genuinely exciting for those in the community is
| not necessarily as exciting for those outside of it -
| which comes across as deceptive.
| boc wrote:
| When a baseball batter hits a ball at a record 120mph,
| you calculate the impulse of force ([?]p) they put into
| the swing to cause that result, not the total calories
| the player consumed during the past year in order to
| build their muscles.
|
| You're arguing that the process of charging some
| inefficient lasers (aka eating food throughout the year)
| is invalidating this entire result. That was never part
| of the experiment, nor is it relevant to this test.
|
| I understand exactly what you wrote above, and I'm
| telling you that it's not relevant to this discovery.
| You're arguing a non-sequitur in the classic definition.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Which criticism am I dismissing?
|
| People do seem to be getting emotional about fusion, and
| pointing that out is hardly edgy.
|
| Once fusion achieves more output than input, I'll be
| celebrating right there with you. But until then,
| ignoring the Doberman in the room is a worse look, from a
| scientific standpoint.
|
| I even cited a source from someone with a phd in
| mathematical physics, who is likely far more qualified to
| be talking about this than most of us here. So in terms
| of dismissing criticism, the stack seems to be in the
| other direction.
|
| Scientific reporting matters. Reporting something false
| is generally a bad idea. Saying "we got more energy out
| than we put in" is false. Which link in this chain of
| reasoning is invalid?
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| > It just seems a little strange to take credit for a
| milestone when the milestone everyone cares about is yet
| to be reached. (More energy out than in.)
|
| That comment/criticism is a little strange in and of
| itself. I would say it's the oddness or seeming petulance
| of the above comment that brought on boc's comment.
|
| A silly, but illustrative analogy: Kid:
| Dad, look! I scored a home-run! Father: Who
| cares? Have you won the game yet? Stop celebrating until
| you do something that everyone cares about!
| simplicio wrote:
| I think the confusion here is at least partially due to
| most articles obscuring the primary purpose of the NIF.
| Its not supposed to support commercial energy
| development, its supposed to support nuclear weapons
| development under the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, where
| testing bombs via setting them off is banned.
|
| So the NIF is supposed to give a testbed to study
| implosion created fusion reactions that produce enough
| energy to "ignite", that is, propegate the reaction to
| the rest of a hypothetical bomb. In that case, the amount
| of energy needed for the infrastructure to produce the
| initial implosion doesn't matter, what matters is that
| the energy coming out is more then the actual energy that
| triggered the reaction, so that the hypothetical bomb
| would blow up and not fizzle.
| nilsbunger wrote:
| It's a significant milestone because demonstrating you
| can get net energy from the reaction removes a lot of
| uncertainty of whether it's possible in the real world.
| It starts to turn inertial fusion into an engineering
| problem of how you increase the efficiency of each stage.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Worth noting that the milestone achieved was positive
| Q_plasma (more energy out of the plasma than in).
|
| They are using inefficient lasers because they are
| cheaper to buy/maintain/modify for research purposes.
|
| Determining the conditions for positive Q_plasma is
| largely a matter of science/research so the external
| system doesn't matter as long as the variables are
| controlled and results are reproducible.
|
| Once positive Q_plasma is well understood/reproducible,
| achieving positive Q_total (more energy produced than
| spent running the infrastructure) is just a matter of
| engineering and potentially waiting for the SOTA for
| components (like lasers or materials) to catch up.
|
| TLDR: This is the scientists proving the theory. Now it's
| the scientists' job to refine the theory. Then the
| engineers get to put it into production.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| The theory was proven to everybody's satisfaction in
| 1950.
|
| There will be no production, except of new, smaller
| thermonuclear warheads. That is their legislated remit.
| kelnos wrote:
| It _is_ a milestone, and I do think the researchers
| deserve credit for that. Getting more energy out of the
| reaction than was delivered to it by the lasers _is_
| actually important.
|
| No one (except perhaps poor science "reporters") is
| claiming that this means we now have free and cheap
| fusion power. Of course the energy put in to operate the
| lasers themselves needs to be accounted for -- and it is!
| -- but that doesn't make what they've achieved useless.
| It's also useful to remember that the researchers
| involved are not the people writing press releases and
| articles; let's not minimize their achievement just
| because of sloppy, sensationalist reporting.
|
| I like the analogy downthread of a kid being excited
| about scoring a home run in baseball, but the dad
| chastising the kid for celebrating before actually
| winning the game. That's what it feels like is happening
| here.
|
| This is a huge step in the right direction, and it should
| be celebrated as such.
| worik wrote:
| Why are they using these "flash pumped" lasers if more
| efficient ones are available?
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's a very old lab, and replacing them isn't cheap/easy.
|
| You don't need to use efficient lasers to get the
| scientific results they're after - other people have
| already very accurately measured the properties of modern
| lasers, so we can predict how they would perform without
| having to actually use them.
| jcarreiro wrote:
| Because they are researching inertial confinement fusion,
| not trying to build a working power plant. The efficiency
| of the lasers doesn't matter, since it doesn't affect
| their research.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Is energy on the order of 300MJ so cheap? You'd think
| that cutting it down to 150MJ would allow them to do more
| experiments.
| nrki wrote:
| 300MJ ~= 83kWh which is like, $2000 in CA
| beowulfey wrote:
| It's a proof of concept. Upgrading lasers that already
| work is not necessarily the best use of limited funds.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| They could get higher power out of more efficient lasers,
| enabling research at higher energies or bigger targets
| 988747 wrote:
| Not to mention the money they would save on electricity
| bills.
| kelnos wrote:
| That's not the purpose of the research, though. They are
| solely focusing on the energy transfer between the lasers
| themselves, and the output from the reaction. It's not
| clear that higher energies or bigger targets will teach
| us anything new.
|
| Upgrading the lasers would slow the project down as new
| hardware is installed and issues are worked out. Not to
| mention I doubt the new hardware is cheap, and may be
| more expensive than burning excess energy using old laser
| tech in the meantime.
|
| Other research groups work on laser efficiency, and the
| "final product" using this method (if it ever proves
| viable) would put together all the best pieces to get the
| best efficiencies.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| It was discussed a lot in the threads about this yesterday,
| but apparently the lab had relatively inefficient lasers.
| Newer ones are an order of magnitude more efficient
| petilon wrote:
| This is what I captured from the press conference:
|
| 300 megajoules was used to generate the laser (this is also
| captured in [1]). They also mentioned that newer lasers
| have 20% wall plug efficiency. If so, they need to improve
| the energy output by 5x in order to break even relative to
| wall plug energy consumption.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/world-record-fusion-
| experi...
| LarryMullins wrote:
| That's just the lasers, the rest of the plant needs power
| too. Big water pumps are big power hogs, as is the rest
| of the supporting equipment that any power plant requires
| to operate. _Far_ over "wall plug" break even is
| required for commercial viability.
| jameshart wrote:
| "Wall plug energy consumption"
|
| I don't know why but this caused me to picture Alec from
| Tech Connections in a few years time, showing off his
| fusion laser plugged in to a kill-a--watt, while he
| explains carefully, through the magic of buying two of
| them, why you can get more power out than you put in, and
| why these old inertial confinement fusors were pretty
| neat actually.
| hackernewds wrote:
| The funding does seem miniscule given we spend 100x more on
| funding military excursions in the name of energy security
| azinman2 wrote:
| Is the bottleneck for fusion money though?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| There are like 20 designs of various fusion reactors on the
| drawing board that need to be built and tested.
|
| Scientists also don't work for free. They arent mushrooms
| that grow by themselves
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| One of the things that I think I noticed from the press
| conference, is that funding is going to be the bare
| minimum to meet some goal for a design they select.
|
| This seems like a gross mistake.
|
| If we are going to avert a climate catastrophe we will
| need TW of power to "unburn" the carbon we put into the
| environment (ocean and atmosphere). Instead of barely
| hitting this target, we should over deliver since we are
| running out of wall-clock time.
|
| Every project that meets a bar for feasibility,
| organizational/operational capabilities (if they dont
| have it, either fix it, or transfer design to capable
| team) should be given funding (50-100M). We should be
| dropping BILLIONS on this, if we can drop 50B+ on
| semiconductors we can do the same for fusion.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Dump trillions of dollars into fusion energy today and it
| will still be decades before the first fusion power plant
| is connected to the grid. You'd be better off funding the
| construction of fission power plants. Those are very
| expensive and take years to build, but they're still a
| hell of a lot cheaper and faster than funding fusion to
| the degree you're suggesting.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| Each dollar diverted to chase nuke wills-o'-th'-wisp
| brings climate catastrophe nearer.
|
| Money is fungible. Dropping $billions on this means _not_
| dropping those $billions on something that works already,
| works fantastically well, and would work even better with
| more money. We already know how to prevent (more) climate
| catastrophe. We just need to do more of it.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| money is always the bottleneck in some sense. There are
| diminishing returns but in general more money will make it
| happen faster.
| fullshark wrote:
| The laws of physics also a limiting factor
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You might be right -- we threw enough money and put
| humans on the Moon. The Manhattan Project was well funded
| and produced results as well.
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| I believe the Manhattan project (where we basically built
| an entire new city, and entire new manufacturing process
| from scratch: mining operations, refineries, enrichment,
| milling, etc.) cost less in constant dollars than the
| stealth fighter.
| ErrantX wrote:
| They also had a strong ideological element too.
| [deleted]
| maria2 wrote:
| This is like saying thread count is always the bottle
| neck in computation. More money allows more parallelism
| as you can pay for more people and more equipment for
| more research. As in computing, there are diminishing
| marginal returns and surely a version of Amdahl's Law for
| human endeavors.
| xattt wrote:
| > thread count is always the bottle neck in computation
|
| The softer the bed linen, the more rested the computer
| scientists will be and the more likely they are to come
| up with novel solutions that lead to faster computing.
| [deleted]
| BuckRogers wrote:
| I would have to agree. The "in general" though is
| carrying an enormous amount of weight in that statement.
|
| I think what other commentors may be getting at is that
| in many cases the simple analogy of asking how 9 women
| can have a baby in 1 month is instructive here. You could
| throw trillions at that problem, a need to have a baby in
| 1 month. Sometimes there are hard limits that money has a
| hard time addressing.
|
| A case could be made that with enough money put towards
| advanced technology, like gene therapy to force a fetus
| to maturity in 1 month vs 9, it could be done with
| horrendous side effects.
|
| So to your point money does solve all problems, but I
| think diminishing returns is putting it very lightly.
| z3phyr wrote:
| More money attracts more eyes, hands, grey matter which
| they would otherwise focus on something with more money.
| But it is a long process.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| yes. fusion funding has been sliding downwards for decades
| which is a large reason why it takes so long to do
| anything.
|
| It's largely the same reason why NASA takes so long to do
| anything.
|
| 1. Shortage of funding
|
| 2. failure can result in loss/exhaustion of funding
|
| 3. extremely low risk tolerance
|
| 4. physical experiments needing new HW only happen when the
| likelihood of success is extremely high
|
| 5. projects are over engineered to reduce chance of failure
|
| 6. projects are over budget and over schedule
|
| 7. projects only make minor incremental progress
|
| 8. lack of fast/exciting progress drives decrease in
| funding
|
| 9. GOTO 1
| kortilla wrote:
| It has nothing to do with funding. SpaceX had far less
| than NASA.
|
| For another example from a different angle, the military
| has limitless supplies of funding but innovates even less
| than NASA.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| You are comparing company that makes trucks with a
| company that makes precision scientific instrumers, and
| you are declaring that truck companu is more efficient
| per kilo of produce. this is stupid.
|
| Nasa develops nuclear reactors, landed on titan and has
| reached pluto. Spacex vehicle has never left the Earth-
| moon system.
| kortilla wrote:
| Lol "spacex makes trucks". Way to throw on the anti-Musk
| blinders and completely ignore the back-half of the
| comment and misunderstand the first half.
|
| Also, spacex has launched outside of the earth-moon
| system. It was a roadster
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| SpaceX is not Tesla. It's disingenuous to call SpaceX a
| "company that makes trucks". Just like NASA, they also
| make precision scientific instruments. They're the first
| privately funded mission to the ISS and run a massive
| satellite constellation.
|
| They may not have the same accomplishments as NASA, but
| they're _far_ from a "company that makes trucks".
| ftlio wrote:
| The analogy is apt in at least defining a separation
| between the overall complexity of what SpaceX produces
| compared to NASA, to say something of how the two
| different models of R&D work, but maybe off in degrees as
| you discussed.
|
| "NASA makes precision scientific instruments and SpaceX
| makes precision scientific instruments that have lower
| tolerances with a higher focus on throughput, and there
| are rapidly diminishing returns in how much funding can
| be used to close the gap" is probably the right take if
| not as fun.
| zaroth wrote:
| I can't agree that _funding_ is "largely the reason" why
| NASA takes so long to do anything. I doubt funding is a
| top 3 reason.
|
| NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots"
| anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't
| allow it, never mind the office politics.
|
| NASA will get back to the moon using easily an order of
| magnitude more funding than it should have taken, with a
| launch system that costs an order of magnitude more money
| for each launch than it should. (almost two?)
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > I can't agree that funding is "largely the reason"
|
| > NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward
| "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political
| environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office
| politics.
|
| Why doesn't the political environment allow for it. What
| could happen. What could regulatory bodies do to NASA for
| taking a risk and failing. What sort of constricting
| change could political bodies do in such a situation.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _Why doesn 't the political environment allow for it.
| What could happen._
|
| Three astronauts were incinerated alive. That was when
| they started to take safety more seriously. Subsequent
| accidents have only reinforced this.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| The funding senator became the administrator of the
| current moon attempt. The funding insist on using the old
| technology in the funding. All these sounded bad. If nasa
| has more freehand. But then the fund will not get back to
| the states ...
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Have to +1 this. A lot (most?) of NASA's funding is
| directed toward keeping people employed and skilled, as
| opposed to accomplishing goals, as with a lot of
| government money. NASA could do a LOT more with the
| funding they already have, if they were willing to divest
| from older technologies and vendors, but the politics of
| its funding doesn't allow that.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > A lot (most?) of NASA's funding is directed toward
| keeping people employed and skilled, as opposed to
| accomplishing goals
|
| This is so hilarious wrong I don't even know where to
| start.
|
| > but the politics of its funding doesn't allow that.
|
| The post _that you are agreeing with_ says that
| "funding" is not the reason for their plan.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > This is so hilarious wrong I don't even know where to
| start.
|
| Anywhere at all would be better than nowhere. I worked
| for a defense contractor for a few years, so I'm basing
| my comment on my experience there.
|
| > The post that you are agreeing with says that "funding"
| is not the reason for their plan.
|
| Not sure what you are saying here.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| I agree however that culture was caused by a lack of
| funding.
|
| You can't be swift and lean when you are given very
| limited, budgeted funding. You can't take risks or you
| risk putting people out of a job and killing the program.
|
| That leads to an overly conservative culture that
| restricts any risk taking and over-engineers everything
| to the point failure is effectively impossible.
|
| This slow movement, overly conservative, design by
| committee approach helps limit risk but it absolutely
| balloons costs in the long run and horrifically delays
| progress. Of course if they were a company they'd
| eventually run out of money but that's not really an
| option for gov orgs so when the overly conservative,
| limited run designs end up encountering production
| issues, the projects explode in cost with nearly no upper
| limit.
|
| TLDR: The political climate is a direct consequence of
| the lack of budget and continued restriction of that
| budget only worsens the problem.
| ufmace wrote:
| "Funding" isn't really a good answer IMO. I don't know a
| ton about Fusion research specifically, but NASA is
| horrifically inefficient with money compared to private
| competitors. Giving them more money won't magically make
| them more efficient. Reasons why include:
|
| - Their incentive is to optimize for political approval,
| which means spreading facilities among as many
| congressional districts as possible, which creates a ton
| of inefficiency from poor communication and the need to
| constantly ship things around
|
| - Public approval is the goal and failure is the worst
| possible option, so things tend to be optimized to take
| as few engineering risks as possible and have huge
| amounts of bureaucracy to spread the blame for any
| possible failure
|
| There's a reason why SpaceX started landing rockets with
| a fraction of the money that NASA spent on building
| ridiculous boondoggles.
| geysersam wrote:
| Also, SpaceX did it 60 years later.
| nabla9 wrote:
| 3.15 Mj = 0.875 kWh
| moffkalast wrote:
| > demonstrating the scaling laws at work
|
| One would think that one look at the sky would be enough to say
| that "hey this fusion thing scales pretty well".
| zardo wrote:
| The targets are really the secret sauce right? If there were a
| civil ICF for power program, would NIF designs and data even be
| available to help, or is it all classified?
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| There are pictures of CAD and experimental setups for the
| targets. They're also pretty open with the setup numbers, so
| in theory, you could make your own NIF setup and try to get
| their target designs working.
|
| From what I understand, a lot of the work from the past years
| has been trying to piece together geometries, pulse timing,
| stability, and quality of targets.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| This is a stupid question but I don't know anything about
| fusion:
|
| How is it possible for X energy to create X+Y energy in output?
| Doesn't that violate some fundamental law of physics?
| garfieldnate wrote:
| I think it's more like a release of potential energy; kind of
| like how you can lightly nudge a large object teetering on
| the edge of a cliff and it'll make a huge splash at the
| bottom. It took a lot of energy to create the big splash, but
| you didn't need much to trigger it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| You're using X energy to release Y energy _from the fuel_
| (the pellet, containing deuterium and tritium). It was there
| already, just not in a usable form.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| sometimes, when two small particles fuse, they become a
| single larger particle, but the larger particle's mass is
| slightly less than the sum of the masses of the two smaller
| particles. The slight difference becomes energy released, and
| the amount of energy released, roughly speaking, is E = mc^2.
| simiones wrote:
| The energy is "released" from the binding energy of the
| nuclei. It's similar to how throwing a bottle of
| nitroglycerine can generate a huge explosion, even though you
| use a tiny amount of energy to throw it.
| spullara wrote:
| If you look at the mass before of their fuel, 1 deuterium
| atom + 1 tritium atom: 2.01410177811 u +
| 3.01604928 u = 5.03015105811 u
|
| vs the mass of the fusion products of 1 helium atom and 1
| neutron: 4.002602 u + 1.008 u = 5.010602 u
|
| You'll notice that even though we started with 5 neutrons and
| 2 protons and ended up with the same number there was some
| additional binding energy that is unaccounted for in the new
| configuration. This is the energy released by the fusion
| reaction via E = mc^2. Here we see the mass difference is:
| 5.03015105811 u - 5.010602 u = 0.01954905811 u
|
| Converting that to energy you find that is 17.6 MeV. As you
| go up the periodic table fusing nuclei you will get less and
| less marginal energy until you get to iron where at that
| point fusion become net negative and fission is then takes
| over where breaking nuclei apart gains energy, marginally
| more as you go up the periodic table. That's why you want to
| fuse light particles and fission very heavy particles. It is
| also why there is so much iron as it is kind of the base
| state of both of these reactions.
| eklitzke wrote:
| Tangentially related, but I think this is an interesting
| fact, all the atoms in our universe/galaxy/solar system
| with a mass up to that of iron are formed in the core of
| stars in stellar fusion. Hydrogen fuses into helium, and as
| a star nears the end of its lifetime you get heavier
| elements like lithium, carbon, and so on. Under normal
| stellar fusion no elements heavier than iron will be
| produced, and iron is only element number 25. If you just
| looked at nucleosynthesis through the lens of stellar
| fusion, it isn't obvious that there should be any heaver-
| than-iron atoms at all in the universe.
|
| These heaver-than-iron elements are created in a very
| interesting and exotic process. When a large enough star
| dies it explodes in a supernova, and a _huge_ amount of
| energy and neutrons are released in a very short period of
| time. This supernova generates enough energy and neutron
| material that small amounts of heavier elements like gold,
| platinum, etc. are created through exotic nuclear fusion
| reactions, even though these heavy fusion reactions are
| energy-absorbing.
|
| It's interesting to think when you're wearing jewelry made
| from gold or platinum, all of those atoms in your jewelry
| were created during the death of a star.
| jmartrican wrote:
| So that means that for life to form, we probably need a
| star to die so that the heavier atoms used in complicated
| life forming chemical reactions (correct me if i am wrong
| here as what I'm about to say depends on it), hence it
| could be the case that if the universe is 13.5 billion
| years old, then we humans are appearing in the universe
| at the earliest possible time.
|
| 13.5 billion years seems like the time required to create
| a star, have the star die and blow up, have all that
| material settle and create a new star, then the planets
| are formed, than enough time on one of those planets
| needs to pass for life to form, then complicated life.
| marcyb5st wrote:
| Not necessarily. First generation stars were,
| theoretically, enormous both due to low metallicity of
| the collapsed medium and a higher average concentration
| of said medium. These stars lifespans were extremely
| short, shorter that blue giants we see today. So novas
| due to the death of these stars happened fairly early in
| the lifespan of the universe (talking about few million
| years after the big bang).
|
| Therefore, life could have developed in a few tens to few
| hundreds of millions of years after the big bang. That's
| still true even if we assume that heavier elements are
| created mainly when neutron stars collide and not by
| super/hypernovas as we theorized before LIGO/Virgo
| observatories.
|
| Consequently, we likely are not a "progenitor"
| civilization in the universe if we only consider planets
| formation. We might not see anyone out there either
| because there's a great filter for intelligent life to
| emerge (so the bottleneck is in our past) or because
| few/no civilizations get to have an impact on their host
| stars (the filter is in our future) that would allow us
| to see them.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Basic life (single-celled?) requiring the elements above
| lead might have a chance at that time, but complex life
| like us wouldn't do so well if there were still
| supernovas going off left and right. There's a theory
| with decent evidence that at least one of the mass
| extinctions was caused by a supernova:
| https://www.space.com/supernova-caused-earth-mass-
| extinction...
|
| That being said, I wasn't aware of how LIGO changed the
| understanding of how heavier elements are usually formed,
| guessing it changed the expected neutron star prevalence?
| Do you have any additional reading on that?
| maxbaines wrote:
| Very much a laymen also, however funnily enough I was
| listening to a bbc program called in our time, a couple
| of nights ago, where a similar topic was discussed one
| comment was that life is carbon based and for carbon to
| exist a star has to die, so yes therefore we are in the
| early stages. Will try to fin the episode....
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _13.5 billion years seems like the time required to
| create a star, have the star die and blow up, have all
| that material settle and create a new star, then the
| planets are formed, than enough time on one of those
| planets needs to pass for life to form, then complicated
| life._
|
| Maybe for a main sequence star, but there other processes
| that involve nucleosynthesis.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I'm just a layman but I believe by the time our sun has
| formed, we've gone through multiple star cycles. The
| early stars were very pure - made basically purely of
| hydrogen (maybe some helium?). They were huge, burned
| very bright and died comparatively quickly. Each time
| stars died, more heavy elements (and heavier elements
| than before) were produced. Over time the heavy element
| content (called metallicity) has increased in all stars.
| I believe there are also theories of white dwarf mergers
| undergoing runaway fusion and a lot of heavy elements
| being generated during the explosion.
|
| You raise an interesting question though: what is the
| earlier point of time where the heavy elements were
| abundant enough for life (as we know it) to form? Just
| because we started existing at +13.5 billion years, it
| doesn't mean carbon based life couldn't have formed much
| earlier.
| matt-attack wrote:
| I have zero ability to answer your question but I would
| love to know about about this. If life (like we know it)
| requires the explosion of aged stars, what is the
| earliest it would take. What is the minimum time needed
| to form, grow and explode a single star? Has there been
| time for this to occur 10s, 100s of times since the Big
| Bang? (obviously they can happen in parallel, but I'm
| thinking about how many in series).
| b33j0r wrote:
| It's funny that alchemy was kinda onto something, but
| underestimated the energy requirements by orders of
| magnitude of orders of magnitude
| hgsgm wrote:
| BizarroLand wrote:
| True, all you need to turn lead into gold is a moderately
| powerful collider and some hydrogen.
|
| The conversion is also very slow. And expensive. To make
| it this way it would cost a Quadrillion dollars an ounce.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-
| fiction-l...
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Quadrillion now, but costs will drive down and once is
| turned to gold, it stays gold. In the far future where
| all gold was mined this will be the only process left to
| get more. Or explode stars and capture gold from them.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| _we are all made of star stuff_
| pishpash wrote:
| Star stuff sounds like some German element.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Exactly what I thought! I checked with google translate.
|
| star stuff = sternzeug. stern stoff = star fabric
| hibbelig wrote:
| Stoff had more than one translation into English. One is
| cloth. Another refers to substances. Eg hydrogen is
| called Wasserstoff in German: water-stuff
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| or as I like to say to encourage myself that small things
| matter
|
| "Stars are made of quarks"
| rhacker wrote:
| What are quarks made of?
|
| https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/d/d9
| /Qu...
| ajross wrote:
| Actually current modeling has supernovae as being only a
| small contributor to the measured abundance of heavy
| nucleii. These guys tend to come from a more exotic
| source still: material thrown off as a _neutron star is
| tidally disrupted during a merger event with another
| neutron star or black hole_.
|
| The wikipedia page is pretty good, as always:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis
|
| Almost everything with mass of 90 or above comes
| predominantly from neutron star mergers, basically.
| MayeulC wrote:
| After all, is there anything better to create new
| elements than a hot, dense neutron soup?
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I'm always fascinated by the sheer and unfathomable
| amounts of energy that is thrown around in these events.
| Just thinking about the fact that a single spoonful of
| neutron star matter contains more mass than Mount Everest
| fills me with wonder about the world we live in.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| What happens whena tablespoon of neutron soup gets thrown
| out of the well of a neutron star? Does it suddenly
| expand to the size of everest? Where do the electrons
| come from?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I'd imagine some of the energy and degenerate matter
| consisting of neutrons would convert to protons and
| electrons, and nucleosynthesis would take place to form
| elements.
|
| I have no idea, though, but I'm pretty sure I watched a
| video about this.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Good Lord the universe is old. To think of how rare all
| that must be and how it had to have time to somehow get
| here to our planet.
| clavalle wrote:
| If they weren't here, we wouldn't be able to talk about
| it.
|
| I'd be interested to know if we're in an element rich
| vein of the wider universe or if all the good stuff is
| more or less evenly distributed?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I'm not sure but this has some interesting info such as-
|
| >Some whole galaxies have average metallicities only 1/10
| of the Sun's. Some new stars in our galaxy have more
| metals in them than the original solar nebula that
| birthed the Sun and the planets did. So the amount of
| "metals" like oxygen and carbon can vary by a few orders
| of magnitude from star to star, depending upon it's age
| and history.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9tujxn/are_t
| he_...
| stock_toaster wrote:
| "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our
| teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in
| our apple pies were made in the interiors of
| collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff".
| - Carl Sagan
| [deleted]
| steam_raven wrote:
| We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins,
| carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains.
| 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames,
| we are all just stars that have people names"
| Nikita Gill
| tomdekan wrote:
| I find this poem inaccurate.
| andrepd wrote:
| ?
| gretch wrote:
| I understand this is a poem that is focused on artistic
| expression and not scientific accuracy, but I find the
| line about "carbon in our souls" to be out of place. I
| guess the rest of the poem is incidentally correct (when
| not abstract)
| guelo wrote:
| You could define soul as the fuel engine for life, which
| is basically burning carbon. As long as that furnace is
| functioning you're alive == you have a soul.
| ok_dad wrote:
| One who is a materialist could argue that your "soul"
| comes from the stuff you're made out of, so your "soul"
| probably has carbon it somewhere.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Sure, the word "soul" comes from the proto Germanic
| "saiwiz" (for sea or ocean).
|
| But not because "you are like a drop in the ocean," but
| because "you are like an ocean in a drop."
|
| The idea of soul can be objectionable when it is based on
| an immortal being or on a vitalist life-force (like
| "anima" of the Latin). But it seems fine when it is based
| on the psyche (like the "Psuche" of the Greek).
|
| I embrace taboo words like soul because they 1. are
| common 2. are useful for referring to things that seem
| pretty important (like avoiding soulless companies or
| products or buildings) and 3. are challenging to my
| normal (scientific) understanding of the world.
|
| Still, I'd be more comfortable if the poem referred to
| the "carbon of our souls" rather than "carbon in our
| souls." Hmm...
| hgsgm wrote:
| SiVal wrote:
| Iron is always spoken of as the dividing line, but I'd
| like to know whether iron is _exactly_ on the line, on
| one side (which?), or it depends. IOW, does fusion of
| iron atoms release energy (hydrogen side of the line),
| absorb energy (uranium side of the line), neither, or
| either (depending on conditions)?
| kennend3 wrote:
| My son has a masters in nuclear physics and i've always
| been curious as to why iron causes stars to explode.
|
| He does an excellent job explaining things and put it to
| me like this.
|
| Elements to the Left of Iron can undergo fusion and
| release energy, Elements to the right can undergo fission
| and release energy.
|
| Iron IS the line because it needs energy to do either of
| these.
|
| All elements want to find stability, and Iron is that
| Element because it needs energy for either fission or
| fusion.
|
| So yes, Iron is the dividing line and this is what makes
| it so stable.
|
| Edit: forgot to link the chart when referencing left or
| right..
|
| http://www.splung.com/content/sid/5/page/benergy
| eropple wrote:
| As I understand it, iron is the first element that
| absorbs energy under fusion, and therefore won't fuse
| further. Could be wrong, though.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It is also interesting that the Milky Way will collide
| with Andromeda and then we will be invaded by zerg.
| joe-collins wrote:
| And on a total tangent, this fact played a part in
| worldbuilding done by the author L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
|
| > When I initially decided to write _The Magic of Recluce_
| in the late 1980s, I 'd been writing science fiction
| exclusively... I conveyed a certain dismay about the lack
| of concern about economic, political, and technological
| infrastructures in various fantasies then being written and
| published in the field...
|
| > I faced the very real problem of creating a magic system
| that was logical... Most fantasy epics have magic systems.
| Unfortunately, many of them, particularly those designed by
| beginning authors, aren't well thought out, or they're
| lifted whole from either traditional folklore or gaming
| systems and may not exactly apply to what the author has in
| mind.
|
| > I began by thinking about some of the features and tropes
| of traditional fantasy. One aspect of both legend and
| folklore that stuck out was the use of "cold iron" to break
| faerie magic, even to burn the creatures of faerie, or to
| stand against sorcery. Why iron? Why not gold or silver or
| copper? Not surprisingly, I didn't find any answers in
| traditional folklore or even contemporary fantasy. Oh,
| there were more than a few examples, but no real
| explanations except the traditional ones along the lines of
| "that's just the way it works."
|
| > For some reason, my mind went back to astronomy and
| astrophysics and the role that nuclear fusion has in
| creating a nova... Each of these fusion reactions creates a
| heavier element and releases energy... The proton-proton
| reaction that produces iron, however, is different, because
| it is an endothermic reaction...
|
| > At the same time, the fact that metals such as copper or
| silver conducted heat and electrical energy suggested that
| they were certainly less than ideal for containing
| electrical energy. Gold and lead, while far heavier than
| iron, do not have iron's strength, and other metals are too
| rare and too hard to work, particularly in a low-tech
| society.
|
| > At this point, I had a starting point for my magic
| system. I couldn't say exactly what spurred this
| revelation, but to me it certainly made sense. Iron can
| absorb a great amount of heat. If you don't think so, stand
| on an iron plate barefoot in the blazing sun or in the
| chill of winter. Heat is a form of energy. In fantasy,
| magic is a form of energy. Therefore, iron can absorb magic
| and, by doing so, bind it.
|
| https://www.lemodesittjr.com/the-books/saga-
| recluce/recluce-...
| aaroninsf wrote:
| This is an A+ comment--helpful, well-formatted, concise,
| with bonus interesting additional detail.
|
| Thank you.
| qorrect wrote:
| Yes well done .
| spullara wrote:
| Thanks, finally got to use my physics masters degree.
| zaroth wrote:
| First time for everything!!
| subsubzero wrote:
| Do we know how much tritium is needed for a city's energy
| generation? What about a state etc? Reason I ask is the
| only uses I have seen for tritium is on old watch dials
| made in the pre-90's. Curious how much of this resource is
| out there.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| TLDR is there isn't nearly enough tritium, but fusion
| reactors can make more (while still generating energy)
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Can you collect them easily in the reactor ?
| yonaguska wrote:
| Tritium is very popular on gun sights as well- as it's a
| glow in the dark sight that doesn't need to be charged.
| I'm now questioning the practice of appendix carrying
| with tritium sights.
| ars wrote:
| Tritium decays by beta-decay (an electron). The electron
| can not travel very far in air (1/4 inch), and is stopped
| by even the thinnest piece of metal. It's even stopped by
| the dead outer layer of your skin.
|
| i.e. it's completely harmless unless you eat it.
| XorNot wrote:
| Not quite: beta decay will penetrate the skin enough to
| damage living tissue - beta burns are what caused the
| fatalities of the Chernobyl first responder fire
| fighters.
|
| They spent a few hours covered in dust on their coats,
| and did a bunch of subsurface skin damage which
| manifested as third degree burns. Sepsis, not radiation
| poisoning, generally killed them.
| dublin wrote:
| Well, it lasts for several years, but considerably less
| than even a human lifetime: Tritium's half-life is only
| about 11 years, so gun sights, dark-proof glow-in-the-
| dark signage (usually reserved for critical industrial
| plants, ships and offshore platforms due to expense),
| etc, will become seriously degraded in just a few years.
| (Since the glow is directly proportional to the remaining
| low-level beta radioactivity, which can barely penetrate
| the glass envelope in the first place - you'd get more
| radiation (from radium) living in a brick house than
| carrying 24-7.)
|
| FWIW, tritium and a phosphor granule encapsulated in
| glass microspheres have been developed for self-
| illuminating runway paint, but again, no one really uses
| it because tritium is stupid expensive, and again, it'
| loses half its brightness in only a decade.
|
| On the other hand, I've been told that Trijicon will
| replace their tritium gun sights for the lifetime of the
| original owner. I plan to live long enough to cost them
| money...
| S04dKHzrKT wrote:
| Real Engineering recently made a video that covers fuel
| needs.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzK0ydOF0oU
| phtrivier wrote:
| And the (otherwise excellent) channel is supposed to soon
| post an adv... I mean informer... I mean "exclusive
| documentary" about "repeat after me we're totally not a
| scam - we just play one on YouTube" fusion startup
| Helion.
|
| Which I'm going to watch, because even though everything
| I hear about this company gives me insane Theranos
| vibes... Well, if they pull it off... They might light a
| bulb with fusion in my lifetime.
| twic wrote:
| Take spullara's numbers:
|
| 2.01410177811 u = 3.34449439340696e-24 g deuterium
|
| 3.01604928 u = 5.008267217094e-24 g tritium
|
| 17.6 MeV = 7.832863e-19 kWh energy
|
| Divide through, and you will see that you need 4.27
| ug/kWh of deuterium, and 6.39 ug/kWh of tritium.
|
| A random source [1] says that New York will use 50.6 TWh
| per year by 2027. That would require ~216 kg/yr of
| deuterium and ~323/yr kg of tritium.
|
| This is all assuming 100% efficiency. A quick read
| suggests 50% efficiency might be practical, so double
| those quantities.
|
| Also, i could easily have messed up that calculation
| somewhere, so please do check it!
|
| [1] https://www.buildingcongress.com/advocacy-and-
| reports/report...
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| I wonder if that is much or not. I have no idea how hard
| this is to produce. Do you have an idea about that?
| mbauman wrote:
| Oooof, looks like the primary way of creating it is
| through... fission reactors.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Production
|
| And there's not much of it:
|
| > According to a 1996 report from Institute for Energy
| and Environmental Research on the US Department of
| Energy, only 225 kg (496 lb) of tritium had been produced
| in the United States from 1955 to 1996.[a] Since it
| continually decays into helium-3, the total amount
| remaining was about 75 kg (165 lb) at the time of the
| report.
| davidklemke wrote:
| The concentration of deuterium in the ocean is about
| 150-160 parts per million and with 1233.91 quintillion
| liters covering the earth we have approximately
| 8.2260667e+12kg worth of it to extract, so we've got a
| bit to work through!
|
| Tritium however is far more rare with only trace amounts
| of it being available within nature and barely more than
| a kg produced per year. Producing the 100s of kgs
| required per year still seems to be an unsolved problem,
| although my quick searching shows there's a couple viable
| solutions for it.
| mlyle wrote:
| The solution is that fusion power plants can breed
| tritium and become net producers of it...
|
| Though in practice enough will be lost that probably
| they'll still be somewhat net consumers-- just not nearly
| to the extent predicted by a simple thermodynamic model.
|
| Still, even if fusion becomes a net producer of tritium,
| the whole tritium-is-hard-to-get problem will likely be a
| constraint that we'll be fighting as we ramp up use of
| fusion power in the future.
| w0mbat wrote:
| Tritium is also used in gun sights.
| riemannzeta wrote:
| Great comment. But you meant 2 helium atoms and 1 neutron
| in the second equation, correct?
| spullara wrote:
| Nope. Helium has 2 protons and 2 neutrons. Here is an
| image that shows the reaction:
|
| https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_ar
| tic...
| benevol wrote:
| [deleted]
| nkrisc wrote:
| Mass and energy are equivalent. You're using X energy to
| reduce the mass of your fuel and converting that mass into Y
| energy. When X < Y you have useful energy production at the
| cost of the mass of your fuel. Energy is conserved.
|
| The reason nuclear fusion is such a desirable goal is because
| it only takes a relatively small amount of mass to convert
| into a relatively large amount of useful energy, and the mass
| (the fuel) is relatively easy to obtain.
|
| Like all energy generation, it's converting one type of
| energy into another, more convenient type, to do useful work.
| Like a hydroelectric dam converting the potential energy of
| water into more useful electrical energy. Energy is conserved
| when water spins a turbine, it's just that electrical energy
| is more _useful for work_ than the potential energy of the
| water. Of course you can still use the potential (or kinetic)
| energy of the water directly, such as with a water mill. But
| the energy to work ratio is worse in that form (especially if
| the work to be done is far away from the watermill).
|
| Whenever you build a fire you need to input some amount of
| energy to begin the chemical reaction that releases energy.
| In this instance we get not electrical energy, but energy in
| the form of infrared and visible light, to heat our home and
| light our way. Yet the total energy released by the fire far
| surpasses the energy you used to start the reaction, but
| because the wood's mass is consumed, energy is ultimately
| conserved. You have converted wood (not useful for heating
| your home) into infrared light (useful for heating your
| home).
| lr1970 wrote:
| > Mass and energy are equivalent.
|
| Mass is energy at rest, hence equivalence with exception of
| massless particles like photons that have zero mass and
| non-zero energy. Also, photons travel with the speed of
| light in vacuum and cannot be found at rest in any frame of
| reference. Modern physics is fun, isn't it?
|
| P.S. Neutrinos were thought to have zero mass as well, but
| according to the Standard model they have mass.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Yeah, my explanation is very much simplified.
| jperras wrote:
| Energy is released when two atomic nuclei combine to form a
| larger atomic nuclei.
|
| There's a threshold of energy required to attain this fusion
| reaction (otherwise there would be no light nuclei in the
| universe), and once the nuclei combine there's energy that is
| released, similar to how some chemical reactions can be
| exothermic in nature.
| delaaxe wrote:
| Latest xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2710/
| tekla wrote:
| You have a piece of wood. You ignite it with a match. This
| causes a self sustaining reaction in the form of fire that
| releases far more energy than the match could ever create.
|
| This is effectively what is happening with any energy
| generator.
| [deleted]
| syngrog66 wrote:
| E = mc^2
|
| the "extra" comes from the mass
| karpierz wrote:
| You take a lighter and light gasoline on fire, using X
| energy. Then once the gasoline catches on fire, it'll burn on
| its own, releasing Y energy.
|
| Same principle, different means.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| You know how when you burn something you release the energy
| in the chemical bonds?
|
| Fusion and fission are like that but for atoms instead of
| molecules.
| jameshart wrote:
| Except... chemical bonds don't 'store' energy. Molecules
| are a _low energy configuration_. It takes energy to rip
| them apart!
|
| But, O2 molecules, with their double bond, don't take much
| energy to break apart. If they do, and then pair up with
| say a bunch of Hydrogen and Carbon atoms that were nearby
| in some long chain or something, they form bonds that are
| stronger - that take more energy to break - and you end up
| with some leftover energy. Water and CO2 molecules are an
| even lower energy configuration.
|
| but the extra energy you get wasn't exactly 'in' the oxygen
| bond though - any more than when you have a ball at the top
| of a hill it has potential energy 'in' it.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| There's a fundamental tradeoff between technical
| precision and explaining things in a way that's relatable
| to simpler stuff. Deal. With. It.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Not if the original description is exactly the opposite
| of what happens. You get energy out by making stronger
| bonds.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| equally confusing is the BBC article which mentions the
| energy used for the reaction does not include the energy
| needed to power the lasers, which renders it a net loss
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Nothing is being actually "created", just converted.
| a-priori wrote:
| It's not "creating" energy, it's _releasing_ energy.
|
| The original atoms (exactly which atoms depends on the
| reactor, but let's assume it's deuterium and tritium) have a
| certain starting energy. When you fuse them together the
| resulting atom (helium-4, if you start with deuterium and
| tritium) moves it into a _lower_ energy state.
|
| Since the fused atom has lower energy than the input atoms,
| the fusion reaction releases the difference in energy, which
| you can then capture.
| dpacmittal wrote:
| Same way you use spark plug to get the engine going in an ICE
| car
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I think you should think of it as "this lumber only needs 1
| match to light it on fire while that lumber requires 10
| matches to get started."
| steve76 wrote:
| paxys wrote:
| The input energy X is used to create the conditions of high
| temperature and pressure that are needed for fusion to take
| place.
|
| When fusion happens, two hydrogen atoms fuse together into
| one, losing a bit of mass in the process. The mass difference
| is converted into energy Y (using E=mc2).
|
| In this case, Y was greater than X, so there was a net gain
| in useful energy.
| emmelaich wrote:
| The answers you got are excellent but a short response might
| just say you don't start with just X energy.
|
| In a sense it's no more mysterious (conservation of energy-
| wise) than adding the energy of a spark results in the energy
| of the wood fire.
|
| i.e. energy is transformed, not created as you quite
| accurately write.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| A daily life parallel: You can use a lighter to put a small
| amount of energy into a bunch of wood to extract more energy
| than you put it. In the case of fusion, this energy is coming
| from fusing hydrogen atoms, rather than a chemical reaction.
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Y is the energy that was holding some hydrogen atoms together
| which you have liberated (while destroying the atoms in
| question but that's OK cause it's abundant).
| Sporktacular wrote:
| The Y comes from the mass of matter converted in to energy.
| The mass of the material before the reaction is greater than
| the mass of its products.
|
| The law you're referring to might be the conservation of
| energy, but that applies to non-nuclear reactions and is more
| accurately called the law of conservation of mass-energy. In
| this case the energy in times the mass at the start is still
| equal to the energy out times the mass at the end. For the
| energy to increase, the mass must decrease to produce the Y
| in your equation.
| jackmott wrote:
| sergiotapia wrote:
| The future just got a whole lot brighter for my children. This is
| going to save our planet, not funky wind farms.
| loeg wrote:
| This a commercially viable power source ain't.
| adamvalve wrote:
| No need to pit them against each other. This achievement wasn't
| certain. Multiple paths towards a more sustainable future is
| better for everyone.
| lostmsu wrote:
| > Multiple paths towards a more sustainable future is better
| for everyone.
|
| That is debatable.
| einpoklum wrote:
| US DOE: Excessive uncritical media hype achieved.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Huge!
|
| So much left to do. Capture that output energy. Streamline the
| machinery that produced the result. Do it at scale and
| efficiently.
|
| But that's just engineering, as they say. Which is one thing we
| are pretty good at!!
| e1g wrote:
| Recently discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945863
| [740 comments]
| trilobyte wrote:
| Am I reading it correctly that they achieved a ~53% output of
| energy over input?
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| 2.05 MJ in, 3.15 MJ out.
|
| That's amazing.
| eastbound wrote:
| Minus the laser power supply, is it correct?
| maria2 wrote:
| Yes. The lasers are supplied with 400 megajoules, but it's
| a start.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Press release states: "meaning it produced more energy from
| fusion than the laser energy used to drive it."
|
| The 2.05 MJ put into the reaction includes the laser power
| supply then, it would seem, unless they are bad at press
| releases. But 2.05 MJ is not a lot of power.
| prewett wrote:
| If I remember from the article/discussion from yesterday,
| "laser energy" is the energy in the laser beam, but
| creating that 2 MJ laser beam required 200 MJ.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _creating that 2 MJ laser beam required 200 MJ_
|
| NIF uses notoriously inefficient lasers. They lase fine.
| Just not efficiently. From what I've seen, that 200 MJ
| would be closer to 20 MJ with modern equipment.
|
| Still a gap! And there is still making the fuel, making
| and replacing the reactor as well as collection losses.
| But we're within two orders of magnitude of system break
| even, which is closer than we've ever been.
| sidibe wrote:
| 2.05 MJ is what made it into the system from the laser.
| It took a lot more to power the laser.
| trilobyte wrote:
| That's what I was trying to figure out. So is it still a
| net-negative overall?
| anfilt wrote:
| Yea very curious as well would need to dig a little
| deeper. If it's the beam energy it means we need more
| efficient lasers or to scale larger to overcome the
| energy losses from making a laser beam.
|
| Still even if it's just the beam we are at an energy
| positive which is still great news because it mean the
| fundamentals are working.
|
| Still other issues though, the biggest in my opinion are
| an effective way to produce Tritium and energy
| extraction.
| trilobyte wrote:
| Looks like the Nature article
| (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7) is
| more clear about it still being a net loss. Still an
| important step forward, but it's important to
| contextualize it.
| pelorat wrote:
| It's a net negative with a factor of 400 or so. This
| breakthrough is not really a breakthrough, it's just
| marketed as such because NIF needs to justify their
| funding. Compressing pellets of fusion fuel using lasers
| has no chance of ever forming the basis of a nuclear
| reactor.
|
| It's scientifically interesting because a self-sustaining
| reaction (until the fuel was consumed that is) was
| achieved in a lab setting (as opposed to in a hydrogen
| bomb). There might be fusion plasma data in there that
| are of importance to more serious attempts at actually
| building fusion reactors.
| trynewideas wrote:
| If it was net-positive today they'd already be plugging
| it into the grid.
| [deleted]
| phkahler wrote:
| >>:Am I reading it correctly that they achieved a ~53% output
| of energy over input?
|
| Let's add some words. The output energy is electromagnetic
| radiation and heat. When they do make a conversion to usable
| energy (electricity) there will be conversion losses.
|
| On the input side, they are measuring laser energy. The lasers
| are not very efficient so this overlooks a bunch of losses on
| the input side as well.
|
| They are probably 100x away from real energy gain, and the
| facility isn't even designed to be used that way.
|
| Never the less, it is a milestone along the way.
| Kukumber wrote:
| Every breakthroughs starts from government (people) funded
| initiatives, congrats to everyone involved, a future without the
| need to generate selfish profit is at reach!
| coliveira wrote:
| Well, they'll clearly give the government-backed science to
| some "visionary" who will promptly monopolize the tech and hail
| himself as super-genius who brought energy to the masses!
| hardnose wrote:
| Every breakthrough starts from government funded initiatives?
| Wilbur and Orville Wright disagree.
| Kukumber wrote:
| Without the accessibility of their public library, and public
| workers to guide them, they would have never been able to
| acquire the required knowledge in aeronautics
| hardnose wrote:
| Isn't that a bit like saying that every innovation depends
| upon milk? I guess, technically, every innovation does
| begin with a baby drinking milk, but it seems like a
| stretch to attribute the innovation to the milk, rather
| than to the mind of the individual who may or may not have
| been fueled by milk?
| Kukumber wrote:
| > it seems like a stretch to attribute the innovation to
| the milk, rather than to the mind of the individual who
| may or may not have been fueled by milk?
|
| What ever it been fueled with, knowledge wasn't created
| at an individual's birth, it's an accumulation of a
| collective and shared effort
|
| The point i was trying to make in my post is; it always
| starts from the people, for the people to continue, for
| the people to achieve a civilizational ascension
|
| If we build the means to generate infinite energy for
| free, then we'll have to ask ourselves if giving that
| much power to the individual a safe endeavor, or if we
| should make sure the prospect is for the collective to
| ascend
|
| Thanks to this achievement, many will learn from it and
| acquire knowledge to pursue that goal, would it be the
| case if it was a solo for profit effort? i doubt it
| greatly
|
| The open source tech industry thrives because it's a
| collective and shared effort, funding issue persists but
| that's due to us, individuals, living civilization's
| transition, it'll be a solved problem shortly
| stonogo wrote:
| I don't think they do, since they started with research done
| by the Smithsonian Institution.
| hardnose wrote:
| Do you have any source information for this? As far as I
| understood, the Wright brothers started out by building
| hobbyist gliders in consultation with fellow aviation
| pioneer Octave Chanute.
|
| I checked the Wikipedia entry, but the only reference it
| maintains for the Smithsonian having helped the Wright
| brothers is that they apparently gave Wilbur an award in
| 1910, after having tried unsuccessfully _to steal credit
| from him for building the first heavier than air flyer_.
| Somehow I doubt that 's the kind of government contribution
| to innovation to which the previous poster intended to
| refer.
| stonogo wrote:
| https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/wright-
| brothers/onlin...
|
| Wilbur Wright asked for the Smithsonian's aeronautical
| research. They still have the letter. The very Wikipedia
| article you're referencing, in the exact paragraph you're
| talking about, contains the words "Orville Wright, whose
| brother had received help from the Smithsonian when
| beginning his own quest for flight." https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Smithsonian_fe...
|
| Sure, the Smithsonian people were assholes about it. That
| doesn't negate their contribution to the Wright brother's
| work. Incedentally, in modern timesif you visit the Air
| and Space Museum you can see the exhibit where they own
| up to the shabby attempt to promote their late leader
| over the Wrights. They cover the feud pretty thoroughly
| -- including having both aircraft.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| How much of the funded research is actually a breakthrough?
| ralusek wrote:
| Some breakthroughs.
| xyst wrote:
| One more step towards getting away from dirty fossil fuels.
|
| I just hope we have enough time to see it implemented at scale
| (ie, powering entire states/cities/towns/municipalities, swapping
| infra in place).
|
| I also hope the O&G industry doesn't attempt to block this with
| fake science (ie, decades of climate denial, greenwashing via
| "recycling" campaigns).
| daxfohl wrote:
| My pessimistic self feels like the short-term effect is that it
| sets a deadline by which oil companies know they have to extract
| and sell all the existing oil on the planet, and a doubling down
| on increased emissions now because fusion will solve it
| eventually.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There are hundreds of years worth of oil deposits (possibly
| more) even at current usage rates. "Selling all the oil" isn't
| in the realm of possibility.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Still, as much as possible before the party is over.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| As much as necessary, sure. Oil it turns out is pretty
| useful in many different industries and contributes to
| higher standards of living for the vast majority of the
| world. It isn't some inherently evil technology or
| resource. Still, it's going to take decades to transition
| to electric regardless of any breakthroughs in the
| meantime.
| panosfilianos wrote:
| I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations on what this
| means in regards to energy costs being saved, because I couldn't
| find a direct source (maybe GPT could help actually).
|
| Anyway, based on ITER [1] to equate the energy production of a
| 1000MW coal plant you would need 2.7t of coal for that plant or
| 250kg of deuterium and tritium for the fusion reactor (split
| equally). Based on [2] deuetrium costs about ~$15k a kg. But
| tritium is ridiculously expensive, at $30k per gram (!) [3].
|
| This leads to a calculation of ~$700M for the coal plant and
| ~$3.75B for the fusion plant (of which only ~$1.5M is deuterium)
|
| I have a few questions and I wonder if any can help:
|
| 1. Is the above fusion fuel correct?
|
| 2. What measures are expected to bring these prices down to price
| efficiency?
|
| Of course, I am not calculating the cost it would take for the
| reactor, storage, delivery etc.
|
| Nevertheless, this is an absolutely incredible development and
| the people working for this progress should be definitely proud
| of their work. My generation and the ones following will hail
| this as a breakthrough moment. Thanks!
|
| [1]: https://www.iter.org/sci/FusionFuels
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prices_of_chemical_elements
|
| [3]: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-
| run...
| gene-h wrote:
| [0] provides economic analysis for this type of power plant.
| They conclude it would not be unreasonable to get levelized
| cost of energy could get as low as $25/MWh. For this one really
| needs a high gain of 1000, although gains of 400 are a bit more
| reasonable, and a gain of around 100 may be economically
| competitive in some cases.
|
| While the gain NIF achieved was about 1.5, there is good reason
| to expect it can be scaled up. Ignition is a runaway process,
| so small changes in the input can result in large changes in
| the output. Hydrogen bombs, which also use a burning plasma as
| was demonstrated here, also suggest that the gain and yield may
| be scaled up.
|
| [0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.005
| ...
| cpleppert wrote:
| >> Ignition is a runaway process, so small changes in the
| input can result in large changes in the output. Hydrogen
| bombs, which also use a burning plasma as was demonstrated
| here, also suggest that the gain and yield may be scaled up.
|
| Hydrogen bombs are driven by indirect implosion by a nuclear
| primary. It isn't a runaway process; the yield of a secondary
| is limited by the implosion achieved by the primary. Most
| hypothetical designs for an inertial fusion power plant
| achieve similar energy gains.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I think capital costs & construction times are going to be
| _extremely_ important.
|
| I think the biggest reason nuclear energy stopped being built
| is it takes too long to get political wins.
|
| NuScale and other SMNRs might be able to help with that.
|
| However, the capital costs & construction time for Fusion
| Energy should theoretically be much lower than nuclear
| reactors.
|
| But are we too far away from it being a reality that anyone
| is predicting how much?
| gene-h wrote:
| It will be quite difficult to make fusion cheaper than
| present day fission. Fusion reactors are new so significant
| research work will need to be done. There are difficult
| engineering challenges related to breeding fuel, which
| involves moving hot, radioactive, and water reactive molten
| lithium around. Fusion reactors need to be built to high
| tolerances and will need to be refurbished occasionally due
| to radiation/heat and in the case of NIF style fusion,
| explosion damage.
|
| And one still has to deal with many of the same radiation
| challenges fission plants must deal with. A large quantity
| or radioactive tritium must be kept on site and neutrons
| from the fusion reaction will make the reactor radioactive.
| In fact, fusion produces more neutrons than fission per
| unit energy. Even so called 'aneutronic' fusion would have
| side reactions which would produce quite a lot of neutrons.
|
| Fusion is a lot more complicated than using special rocks
| to boil water.
|
| The main advantage of fusion is a political one. It
| politically nigh impossible to build a fission reactor in a
| suburban industrial park, but Commonwealth Fusion Systems
| is doing exactly that with a fusion reactor[0]. And there
| is also the slim possibility this type of reactor could
| explode. Said reactor uses superconducting magnets which
| store a lot of energy and if something goes wrong, it would
| be possible for them to release that energy fast.
|
| But, the NRC hasn't made laws for regulating fusion power
| yet, so they are able to do this.
|
| [0]https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-
| system...
| panick21_ wrote:
| > However, the capital costs & construction time for Fusion
| Energy should theoretically be much lower than nuclear
| reactors.
|
| Maybe then current Gen3+ reactors.
|
| But there is no way they will win economically against
| GenIV Fission reactors. That are already solving most of
| the issues with Gen3+ reactors.
|
| They already are much smaller, and therefore much lower
| CapX. Fuel cost are even cheaper because of better
| utilization of the fuel. Modern plants operating cost are
| also less because they are even more automated and need to
| be refueled less.
|
| There is no practical way fusion can compete in my opinion.
| panosfilianos wrote:
| Thanks a ton for that! $25/MWh is great but not the 10x
| economic impact I expected. Especially since [1] we see PV at
| $50/MWh currently.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
| devmor wrote:
| The economic impact doesn't just come from the fuel to
| energy ratio. One of the biggest differences is also in the
| space required. Nuclear fusion reactors could eventually
| end up being very small - like smaller than an SUV.
|
| Imagine the cost savings in miniaturizing electrical grids.
| panosfilianos wrote:
| This seems interesting but not especially impactful.
|
| For me, the question here is: can we get our energy to
| cost 90% less than it did?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I recognise that this is still a huge
| win (especially environmentally) and that it can have
| huge runway effects (eg. much more effective
| decentralization etc.) but it's quite interesting on how
| we can get these billions of people out of poverty first
| (or during).
| nebolo wrote:
| While not 90%, transmission and distribution are around
| 40% of the cost of retail electricity, so lowering those
| substantially would go a long way.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Yeah but are you beating fission, something like:
|
| https://www.moltexflex.com/flex-reactor/
|
| A small fission reactor can do almost everything a fusion
| reactor can. Fusion fuel is higher density, but fission
| density is already not an issue.
|
| Fusion still needs to heat water, that's where much of
| the cost comes from.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| if they can be that small then they might find unexpected
| use in long range spacecrafts or lunar colonies. you'd
| still have to build and lift the reactor out of earths
| gravity well.
| devmor wrote:
| Here on earth we could see them used to power container
| ships as well, which are some of the biggest contributors
| to greenhouse emissions as far as vehicles go.
| jboy55 wrote:
| This isn't for power plants, this is to model the efficiency of
| the second stage of a stored h-bomb in place of periodically
| exploding them, which we can't do anymore due to the test-ban
| treaty.
| pohl wrote:
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _tritium is ridiculously expensive, at $30k per gram_
|
| D-T fusion almost always breeds tritium in the blanket.
| panosfilianos wrote:
| Would that mean that you wouldn't need titium to start with?
| Or that tritium deposits would replenish?
|
| How would it affect the rough calculations above?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Would that mean that you wouldn 't need titium to start
| with?_
|
| Tritium decays in a decade. To start, you'd need the
| expensive stuff harvested from the heavy water of spent
| fuel pools. After that, you'd let your neutrons breed it in
| lithium (or boron, if you're fancy).
| panosfilianos wrote:
| So, the approach here would be that it would just be a
| much more efficient process.
| wernercd wrote:
| I would also wonder if Titium is that expensive... and it
| generates titium... would that be part of the "break even"
| equation? Creating something rare to sell?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Current demand is a couple hundred grams per year. We
| just don't need that much of it. The cost per gram would
| go down a lot if we needed to mass-produce it.
| panosfilianos wrote:
| I think what I'm alluding to is, how much can the cost go
| down. In the case of fossil fuels there value is strongly
| based on their physical scarcity and cost of
| extraction/delivery etc.
|
| How much do these things ring true in this case and what
| are ideas of improvement?
| Kubuxu wrote:
| It is so rare because tritium is not found in nature in
| any significant quantity. The amount on the market comes
| from water recovered from water pools used for spent
| nuclear material storage.
|
| There also is no enormous market for tritium. So in
| short, fusion reactors exist on both sides of the tritium
| market, by becoming the primary producers and consumers
| of it, which should lead to significant drop in price of
| tritium.
| creato wrote:
| Your calculations don't mention energy (J), only power (MW
| in your post). Fuel supply and cost correlate with energy
| produced, not power.
|
| Parent post suggests that tritium is a fixed cost, more
| like a construction cost than a fuel cost. We can't answer
| this question without a lot more information. We'd need to
| know how much tritium is needed to reach the point the
| reactor breeds more than it consumes, if at all.
| trillic wrote:
| I'd imagine commodity tritium breeders would be a part of the
| infrastructure build out and that it will be a highly
| competitive space as fusion-to-the-home nears reality.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| What is fusion-to-the-home?
| LegitShady wrote:
| probably one of those mr fusion units from back to the
| future.
| aliqot wrote:
| Power derived from a fusion power plant delivered through
| conventional powerlines leading to the consumer.
| sbussard wrote:
| Scientists spend their whole lives researching a particular
| topic, but as soon as there's a breakthrough the politicians take
| credit. Unbelievable!!
|
| Excellent milestone for humanity nonetheless
| spencerchubb wrote:
| The most surprising thing I've learned from this is we're only
| allocating $624 million / year to this program. We really need
| better mechanisms for deciding how to allocate taxes.
| jboy55 wrote:
| Its actually pretty good, since this is primarily weapons
| testing. The real money is being spent in the EU, where there
| is at least a chance of getting a sustainable fusion reaction.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| It's, depending what calculation you believe, around 20
| billion for ITER. Started in 2013, first plasma in 2025,
| first full fusion in 2035. So about a billion per year. Of
| course, costs are calculated differently, and I'm not sure on
| what time scale the 600 million are, but it's not that
| drastically different.
|
| Research wise, it's a pretty big chunk of money. But yeah,
| more money in research would be nice. (Disclaimer: I am a
| scientist with grants.)
| jboy55 wrote:
| Yes, I think more research towards eventual power
| generation, rather than weapon testing, would be better.
| ZeKK14 wrote:
| ITER is built in France, but is financed by many countries
| outside of EU, including the USA. It's not a huge cost per-
| country.
|
| > the ITER Members China, the European Union, India, Japan,
| Korea, Russia and the United States
|
| See https://www.iter.org/proj/Countries
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Not really. IIRC the NIF needs to _pretend_ that it 's about
| nuclear weapons to secure DoE funding; they (like us) know
| that it's really about developing fusion as an energy source.
| yrgulation wrote:
| Would you rather the us takes second place in researching space
| and energy tech?
| twarge wrote:
| Remarkable. It's still nuclear energy, and the sobering part for
| me is that fusion neutrons are an order of magnitude more
| energetic than fission neutrons. Add the fact that fusion plants
| are an order of magnitude larger, and you get orders of magnitude
| more nuclear waste with order of magnitude higher
| activation/radioactivity.
|
| If you don't like nuclear for these reasons, you'll probably hate
| fusion.
| fastneutron wrote:
| Activation products are of a different nature than the fission
| products and minor actinides you get in fission reactors, and
| are not necessarily as fearsome to handle, nor is the total
| activity comparable at all to what you get in spent fuel.
|
| However, those high energy neutrons do a ridiculous amount of
| damage to the structural materials, and if there are constant
| outages to swap and repair components, I don't see an easy way
| of making energy economically.
| floxy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
| kahrl wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
| twarge wrote:
| I have a PhD plasma physics, I think I am qualified to make
| these statements without this sort of dismissal!
| [deleted]
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Furthermore, fusion does not produce highly radioactive, long
| lived nuclear waste. "Fusion produces only low level
| radioactive waste -- more than fission does -- but this low
| level waste does not pose any serious danger," said Gonzalez de
| Vicente. Contaminated items, such as protective clothing,
| cleaning supplies and even medical tubes or swabs, are short
| lived, low level radioactive waste that can be safely handled
| with basic precautions.
|
| From https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/safety-in-fusion
| twarge wrote:
| Perhaps Dr. dr Vicente is talking about ITER, but surely not
| a real fusion reactor.
|
| Here's something talking about an actual fusion reactor:
|
| "While the radioactivity level per kilogram of waste would be
| much smaller than for fission-reactor wastes, the volume and
| mass of wastes would be many times larger."
|
| and
|
| "To reduce the radiation exposure of plant workers,
| biological shielding is needed even when the reactor is not
| operating. In the intensely radioactive environment, remote
| handling equipment and robots would be required for all
| maintenance work on reactor components as well as for their
| replacement because of radiation damage, particle erosion, or
| melting."
|
| https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-
| the...
| bookingtrolley6 wrote:
| busyant wrote:
| I'm sure this has been considered, but I haven't ready anything
| about the "geo-political" effects of virtually unlimited energy
| from fusion.
|
| I imagine that power dynamics would change drastically, but I
| have no clue, really.
|
| I understand that's still far away, but are there any
| articles/discussions on how large scale fusion-generated energy
| would change the world?
| josho wrote:
| Oh it will be interesting. Assuming it is possible to
| commercialize this at scale then relatively overnight we'll
| some some of the following:
|
| * The middle-east no longer becomes a strategic region. Wealthy
| regimes see their income disappear. The US has supported Israel
| as a strategic check in the region, but with oil losing its
| value the US no longer needs to fund Israeli security. We are
| likely to see skirmishes if not major wars, but this time it's
| over empires in decline, rather than empires with strategic
| resources.
|
| * Texas' GDP declines substantially creating significant
| unemployment. Will government scape goat immigration and create
| further social problems, or invest in leading the transition
| creating a new wave of energy industries.
|
| * Developing countries swiftly raise their standard of living
| as cheap energy is brought online. No idea what this
| ramification would be.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Is that a different approach than the Tokamak, some piece to make
| it works, or some other relationship? What does it mean for
| existing projects such as ITER?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
| readams wrote:
| This works in a totally different way, by heating a tiny target
| fuel pellet with a laser to cause it to collapse and trigger
| fusion through basically heating and squeezing: more like how a
| bomb works. It's not easy to see a direct path from this
| approach to a power plant, but it might involve lining up a
| steady stream of fuel targets and doing this in a sort of
| pulsed mode.
|
| Other approaches attempt to create a continuous plasma where
| fusion can occur confined in a powerful magnetic field, and
| heated by radio waves to get it going. So there's always fusion
| happening rather than in short bursts.
| lostmsu wrote:
| In principle inertial confinement is not much different from
| internal combustion engines where piston compresses the mix,
| and the explosion energy is harvested. Here lasers compress
| the mix, and the explosion energy is not yet harvested (but
| measured).
|
| Tokamaks (the other approach) are more like jet engines in
| that they sustain burning. But currently the burning in
| tokamaks requires more energy than it generates.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Could it be argued that we should invest more in ICF and
| less in tokamaks, given this result? I don't know enough
| about the field to say.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| For the Fusion the particles need to get close - but not to
| close. So the particles in the Tokamak get heated up to reach
| that. Also it's designed to run continuously but the challenge
| is the magnetic field so the particles won't hit the wall. (And
| cool down very quickly)
|
| The Inertia based fusion works by providing the heat/energy
| with lasers, so the fuel would have to be replaced
| continuously.
| teeray wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 why this is significant over previous fusion
| experiments?
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Previous Fusion experiments, even though we could get Fusion
| reactions to occur, required more energy to start and sustain
| the reaction than was generated from it. For the first time,
| more was generated from the reaction than put in.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Note that while this is important progress, it's a bit of
| specific accounting. The entire system still requires more
| energy input than output, but this isolated piece can now
| output a little more than input.
|
| > This is indeed a promising and exciting result, but we need
| to remember that this does not take into account the energy
| required to run the lasers that confine the reaction and
| other inefficiencies and losses.
|
| https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-
| fusion...
|
| It's still entirely possible that we will not see a fusion
| reactor in production within our lifetimes.
| sigmar wrote:
| Their goal was to produce a fusion reaction not to improve
| laser efficiency. That's a bit like complaining they didn't
| account for the energy used to structure the fuel. I don't
| think it's 'specific accounting' when (output/input)>1 was
| their goal from the start
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The goal in the eyes of the layman is to produce a stable
| fusion reaction that outputs more than input.
|
| While this is great progress, I feel that it's important
| to have the full picture. There's a lot of "fusion
| reaction breakthrough fatigue" stemming from the
| misunderstanding that fusion power isn't a technology
| that requires a singular breakthrough.
|
| There are many breakthroughs required to get to fusion
| powered energy, and this is an important one (worth
| celebrating) on a long road ahead.
| supergirl wrote:
| yeah but why is that a worthy goal? does anyone know how
| to make the lasers 100x more efficient? or did we shift
| the problem from one impossibility (efficient fusion) to
| another (efficient lasers)
| govg wrote:
| Because their mandate is to study a different part of the
| puzzle from what the laser researchers do. The NIF uses
| really old laser tech, and in parallel the world has
| moved onto 20x more efficient lasers. The NIF just wanted
| to prove they could get a laser (bad one) to hit a pellet
| and the pellet would send out more energy than the laser
| put on it. Improving the laser, improving the pellet
| materials, improving transfer from pellet to usable
| energy are all different problems being solved by
| different people.
| prvc wrote:
| Since there will necessarily be overhead in any kind of
| finished design, this "threshold" is an arbitrary one to
| pass, no more significant that 90% or 125%, or any other
| round number.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Sort of.
|
| We don't have a commercially viable technology here yet,
| but we've proven that it's at least viable for the part
| that needs to produce energy _actually can_ produce
| energy.
|
| As I understand it, now we start down the road of
| improving the ratio and optimizing the process.
|
| FWIW, from my lay perspective it seems like the research
| NIF is doing is significantly smaller scale than the work
| being done elsewhere. That's a _good_ thing in this case,
| because the output:input ration - the Q - seems to
| increase exponentially relative to input power.
| supergirl wrote:
| sounds more like someone tells you "hey, I finally found
| how to do fusion, I just need one more thing, a super
| efficient laser that no one has built before"
| malfist wrote:
| No other fusion experiment has achieve greater outputs than
| inputs.
|
| So this is the first time that a fusion reactor has been net
| positive for energy production
| leephillips wrote:
| Neither did this one. This is not a net positive. That's what
| they told journalists to start the current cycle of hype, but
| note that announcements direct from DOE don't use that
| language.
| wnevets wrote:
| I know this is from the DOE but is this real real or this is
| wormhole "real"?
| aetherson wrote:
| It's not like the "wormhole" thing where what was produced
| isn't really what can plausibly be described as a wormhole. In
| this case, fusion really did happen, and the amount of energy
| produced by the fusion reaction was about half again what the
| energy put into the fusion reaction was.
|
| That said, there are two pretty important caveats about how big
| a deal it is macroscopically:
|
| 1. In order to have useful fusion power, we'd need at least
| another order-of-magnitude or so energy out compared to energy
| in. Maybe, depending on how optimistic you are about the
| ability to capture that energy and efficiently feed energy in,
| closer to two orders of magnitude.
|
| 2. This is from an inertial confinement approach to fusion.
| Unlike the magnetic confinement approaches that we often hear
| about, this approach doesn't really create a continuously hot,
| spatially constrained bit of plasma that can then be used to
| heat things up -- it produces more like a small but intense
| explosion. There are real doubts about whether you can, even
| with very favorable energy-out ratios, industrialize that into
| an actual power plant. It's more challenging to harvest energy
| from an explosion than it is to harvest energy from a bunch of
| plasma flowing in a circle.
| wnevets wrote:
| > 2. This is from an inertial confinement approach to fusion.
| Unlike the magnetic confinement approaches that we often hear
| about, this approach doesn't really create a continuously
| hot, spatially constrained bit of plasma that can then be
| used to heat things up -- it produces more like a small but
| intense explosion. There are real doubts about whether you
| can, even with very favorable energy-out ratios,
| industrialize that into an actual power plant. It's more
| challenging to harvest energy from an explosion than it is to
| harvest energy from a bunch of plasma flowing in a circle.
|
| Thank you, that is the kind of caveat I was expecting.
| lostmsu wrote:
| > Thank you, that is the kind of caveat I was expecting.
|
| The caveat on caveat is that historically explosions
| (piston internal combustion engines) were developed before
| continuous burning (jet turbines).
| leephillips wrote:
| More real than the wormhole. Real enough to get Chuck Shumer to
| increase next year's budget, which is why you're hearing about
| this at all.
| UltraViolence wrote:
| I thought we had passed this mark a long time ago, but only
| during short stints.
|
| However, the way they're realizing it by shooting a fuel pellet
| with lasers is unsustainable and impractical IMHO.
| simiones wrote:
| If only they were shooting a fuel pellet: they are instead
| shooting a hohlraum, a precision-engineered piece of gold and
| that, in turn, shoots the fuel pellet with X-Rays, acting as a
| kind of aiming/synchronization device. The hohlraum is
| destroyed in the process, and currently costs millions of
| dollars to build a new one.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _The hohlraum is destroyed in the process, and currently
| costs millions of dollars to build a new one._
|
| Hohlraums are expensive but not millions of dollars. This
| 2004 report puts the cost at about $2500 each (still far too
| expensive for a power plant of course) while examining ways
| to get them under $1 each.
|
| "Cost-Effective Target Fabrication For Inertial Fusion
| Energy"
|
| https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/828518
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| TL:DR please, how big of a deal is this and when can we
| approximately expect cheap or costless energy? And is it sort of
| like perpetual energy generator? And if yes, doesn't that break
| law of physics? And if not, why not?
|
| So many questions. Pardon my ignorance.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| I don't know about everyone else, but I'm taking this particular
| moment just to swell with pride and excitement for this
| achievement by science and forget about the details of how much
| more needs to be done to create the first power plant. I'm
| remembering when I first learned about fusion energy development,
| how distant and unfeasible it seemed, and regardless of how long
| the road ahead still is it's incredible how far we've come.
|
| Happy Ignition Day everyone. I can hardly believe we really made
| it here.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| What about this:
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/2333346-ignition-confir...
|
| Allegedly ignition was achieved a year ago. How is this
| different?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7
|
| > In August 2021, NIF scientists announced that they had used
| their high-powered laser device to achieve a record reaction
| that crossed a critical threshold on the path to ignition,
| but efforts to replicate that experiment, or shot, in the
| following months fell short.
|
| Fluke or measurement error, it seems.
| ericmay wrote:
| A better question to ask yourself is if this isn't any
| different, why are the entire scientific community, the
| Lawrence Livermore lab, the DOE, and others so excited about
| it?
|
| If these are the same thing, why didn't they make a big deal
| about it before? What's the material difference?
| moloch-hai wrote:
| The hype machine is fully engaged, and may lead to an
| influx of budget, something of deadly seriousness to DoE.
| They have had trouble getting funding increases for this
| kind of weapons work when it was represented as weapons
| work. Pretend it's not, and people fall all over themselves
| to praise it.
|
| But it is weapons work, first, last, and always.
| [deleted]
| jbverschoor wrote:
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The B-21 isn't unmanned, the nuclear-capable B-2 already
| existed, and we've had fusion bombs since the 1950s.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The B-21 is stated to be capable of uncrewed operation.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's capable of _maybe_ later on being _made_ uncrewed.
|
| https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/12/03/air-force-
| rev...
|
| > The service has not fully delivered on, or explained
| what, that unmanned concept or capability would look
| like. Defense experts told Military.com prior to the
| rollout that it is unlikely we'd see a fully autonomous
| bomber anywhere in the near future.
|
| They also canceled the drone wingman:
|
| > In 2021, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall publicly
| discussed the idea of having a drone counterpart to the
| B-21 that would essentially act as a wingman alongside
| the bomber. But Kendall later backtracked, telling
| Breaking Defense in July that the concept was not as
| "cost-effective" and "less attractive" than previously
| thought.
| p1esk wrote:
| I thought they said it could fly unmanned.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They've said it might, someday, be modified to do so. The
| current iteration of it requires a manned crew.
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| Russia has pretty conclusively shown that they aren't even
| close to the same league as the US in terms of warfare.
|
| Like comparing an amateur pickup basketball team to the
| Chicago Bulls.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Uh what US warfare have you been watching? Your analogy
| only works if it's the like the 2000-200 Bulls (15-67).
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Uh what US warfare have you been watching?
|
| Russia is struggling with _Ukraine_ and the NATO weaponry
| they 've been gifted. 100 mile supply lines proved too
| much, and they failed entirely to achieve air
| superiority.
|
| There's zero reason to think they'd do _better_ against
| the US more directly.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Let's take a step back and remember something: If Russia
| and the USA had a "war" it would consist of reducing each
| other to the Stone Age in a couple of hours, then
| struggling not to starve to death
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| Let's check our assumptions. The bulletin of atomic
| scientists first published in 2017 [0] that they felt the
| modernized US nuclear arsenal is likely sufficient to
| execute a devastatingly successful first-strike against
| the Russian arsenal and nuclear command and control,
| because the new 'super-fuze' in the submarine arsenal
| significantly upgrades the hard-target kill capability of
| the warheads. The risk they communicate in this article
| is that Russia will misinterpret a false positive from
| their early warning system (which offers only half the
| warning time of the US') and launch a "retaliatory"
| strike against the US on a false alarm, because they do
| not expect to have that capability after a US strike. The
| modernization program has continued since 2017 and
| extended to the minuteman arsenal.
|
| [0] https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-
| moderni...
|
| >the United States would be able to target huge portions
| of its nuclear force against non-hardened targets, the
| destruction of which would be crucial to a "successful"
| first strike...The garrisons and their support facilities
| would probably be destroyed quickly, and some of the
| dispersed road-mobile launchers would also be quickly
| destroyed as they were in the process of dispersing. To
| destroy or expose the remaining launchers...Just 125 US
| Minuteman III warheads could set fire to some 8,000
| square miles of forest area where the road-mobile
| missiles are most likely to be deployed. This would be
| the equivalent of a circular area with a diameter of 100
| miles.
|
| >Many of the nearly 300 remaining deployed W76 warheads
| could be used to attack all command posts associated with
| Russian ICBMs.
| eitland wrote:
| Why do you think a country that isn't capable of properly
| maintaining tanks is capable of maintaining nukes? I
| mean, ICBMs are literally rocket science with nuclear
| physics on top of them.
|
| How can a country that cannot even prevent theft of
| electronics from their "doomsday plane" in front of the
| 9th of May parade keep a fleet of ICBMs operative?
|
| In a normal year Russia has a total military budget that
| is smaller than the part of the US military budged
| allocated to nuke maintenance. How do you think they keep
| their nukes ready?
|
| All this is before we start talking about corruption.
| There is a reason why some Russian military leaders have
| yachts and/or palaces and US military leaders doesn't
| have them.
|
| In all fairness, maybe most of the yachts are made of
| missing winter uniforms (I recently saw Russians wearing
| Tyvek suits as "winter uniforms"). But if they steal so
| openly from things that was supposed to be used - why
| wouldn't they steal even more from things that were never
| meant to be used?
|
| Before I round up, some hearsay: Some journalist that
| claimed he traveled throught the former Soviet Union
| shortly after the collapse (I have forgotten the name and
| I am in no position to verify it anyway) said that he saw
| missile silos full of rainwater. And when he asked people
| said it had already been like that for a few years before
| the collapse in 1991.
|
| Do I think we don't have to care? Absolutely not. They
| might very well have a few functional nukes, maintained
| by enthusiastic crews, sailing around on subs somewhere I
| don't know (I don't follow the space to closely).
|
| But I am not worried that they will send US back to the
| stone age at all.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A nuclear arsenal where only 100 of the 6,000 warheads
| are actually maintained and functional is still a useful
| one, though. Less so if 100/6,000 tanks work.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Do you remember when there was a tiny blip in production
| for COVID, and suddenly the shelves were empty? What do
| you think is going to happen if 100 nukes go off and wipe
| out strategic chunks of the USA?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The idea that any armed conflict between the two is
| guaranteed to escalate to nuclear weapons is widespread,
| but certainly not proven. A US _invasion_ of Russia seems
| likely to result in nuclear war, but an engagement
| between conventional forces over a third-party nation
| like Ukraine seems quite unlikely to. Neither side is
| suicidal at the leadership level.
|
| US and Russian aviators directly engaged in Vietnam
| without nuclear holocaust.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| I hope you are right, but I am not convinced in Putin's
| case.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If Putin had a big red button that ran wirelessly and
| automatically, I'd be concerned.
|
| Human beings have to actually implement the order. I
| think a first-strike order on the US without a serious
| and _immediate_ existential threat to the Russian state
| and people winds up with someone offing him with their
| sidearm.
|
| The Russians have plenty of precedent for this (both
| offing the leadership, and more generally "oops, he fell
| out of a window" as a solution), and we've a number of
| historical examples of lower-level folks going "I don't
| wanna" in false-alarm situations, like Stanislav Petrov.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| I agree, a first strike order is very unlikely. But what
| if he fires off a nuke over Ukraine? Maybe in a way that
| it's not 100% clear whether it's a Russian nuke, or a
| power plant blowing up, or somebody else?
|
| Or he orders to detonate a bomb over the open sea to
| demonstrate the capability?
|
| But certainly, if I would be Putin, I'd be nervous
| drinking tea, or walking close to a window. That doesn't
| make him more stable though.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| You can't make a nuke look like a power plant explosion;
| they're simply too different. No nuclear power station
| can explode in that fashion.
|
| A bomb over the ocean wouldn't demonstrate any new
| capacity, and would be seen as the bluff it would almost
| certainly be.
|
| A nuke on Ukranian soil would further open the floodgates
| of Western aid, expand sanctions, and push more nations
| firmly into the EU/NATO fold as Finland and Sweden
| already have been.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| A nuke on Ukrainian soil also has the problem of the
| prevailing wind direction being from west to east.
| Detonating a nuke on Ukraine looks a lot like detonating
| a (smaller) dirty bomb on Russia.
| baseballdork wrote:
| Probably the warfare that involved invading and occupying
| 2 states thousands of miles away for 20 years with
| complete air dominance and suffering under 10,000 KIA.
| Russia has suffered 20,000 deaths in under a year on its
| boarder.
| adventured wrote:
| > Uh what US warfare have you been watching?
|
| The one where the US tends to perform well against its
| adversaries. True in the Civil War. True in WW1. True in
| WW2. True in Korea. True in Vietnam. True in the Gulf
| War. True in Afghanistan. True in Iraq.
|
| And now just a smidgen of its old weapons are helping
| Ukraine humiliate Russia.
|
| The US was in Afghanistan for two decades with 1,932
| soldiers killed by hostile action.
|
| Russia lost 15,000+ soldiers in Afghanistan in ten years
| (probably far higher given the information available and
| how we've seen Russia lie so dramatically about its
| losses in Ukraine). It's going to lose 100,000 soldiers
| in Ukraine in a little over a year.
|
| The US could have held Afghanistan perpetually with
| 15,000-20,000 soldiers on the ground. The Taliban is a
| joke of a fighting force, they never competed well with
| the US; but they have replacement numbers, and guerrilla
| wars are very time consuming to fight and require massive
| troop deployments to actually win (you have to suffocate
| every corner of the enemy presence, like battling an
| infestation). It wasn't worth it and voters decided that,
| it had begun to become an unpopular nation building
| exercise despite the very low losses for the US.
| trhr wrote:
| smegger001 wrote:
| > True in the Civil War.
|
| >You think so? Ya'll lost 200,000 men to Southern fever,
| steel, and shot. Next time it'll be 20 million. Know your
| limits, yankee, and stay north of Dallas.
|
| The south started with a treasonous surprise attack and
| had most of the the infantry that wasn't stationed in
| isolated western frontier territory or along the us-
| canada border, the countries war college at westpoint and
| many of the countries highest generals, once the north
| got its act together it started to burn the south to the
| ground. There is a reason the south still dreads the name
| Sherman.
|
| You got set on fire once when you started the fight with
| sucker punch, and you want to try to pick fight again?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Nit: The south did _not_ start out with West Point. It 's
| in New York.
| BuckRogers wrote:
| Well put. For our international observers I would note
| that the War of Southern Aggression that began with the
| treasonous attack on Fort Sumter is nearly identical to
| the behavior we're seeing out of similar origins today.
| New US states were increasingly free rather than slave
| states, and thus when democracy wasn't going the way of
| those who wanted to maintain slavery, they attacked their
| own government.
|
| The terrorist attack on January 6th was the exact same
| root cause, democracy not going the way some want it.
| Leading them to embrace terrorism and violence. After the
| Civil War, the KKK was created, which continued the
| terrorism of our citizenry for decades. Yet in that case,
| the KKK came after the failed attempt at succession,
| today MAGA came before the attempt.
|
| I describe myself as a 'pre-MAGA Republican who supports
| labor unions', but there's a rotten seed in American
| discourse today that was always there and it's largely
| the same people then as now.
|
| The south would have no chance in Round 2. Most of their
| money and manpower actually comes from 'Yankees'. Which
| historically when someone is called that, it's the easy
| indicator to who is loyal and true to the United States,
| a real American patriot. Whether spoken spoken by a Brit
| or Johnny Reb, you definitely want to be called a Yankee
| as it's a badge of honor that you are loyal to your
| nation.
|
| Those that are moving south are whose ancestors'
| allegiance was to the United States of America in the
| Civil War, and they still maintain that allegiance to
| this day in those families. They are not loyal to the
| defunct Confederacy and would not die for their Lost
| Cause.
| baq wrote:
| You misspelled 'China'
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| What unmanned nuclear bomber?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| The fancy black triangle of like a week ago
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Because now it's reproducible, controllable and consistently
| net positive in terms of energy output.
|
| It's not a fluke anymore and I assume the engineering behind
| this is now understood well enough to develop it further and
| scale it up.
|
| Fusion for the most part isn't a physics problem it's an
| engineering problem the difficulty was always in how to
| implement it in the real world rather than in math at ideal
| white paper conditions.
| jeffbee wrote:
| What information available to the public suggests this is
| reproducible and consistent? They do hundreds of shots
| every year. Why do we think that this energetic shot wasn't
| just a result of getting luckier this time than they did a
| few years ago?
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Because the press release stated that they've ramped up
| the reaction and got higher energy output and the scaling
| wasn't linear in a good way.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Because they've been able to do it multiple times, which
| is better than the zero or one times before.
| civilized wrote:
| Curious where you found this? I skimmed the press release
| for a minute and didn't immediately see discussion of the
| repeatability.
| willis936 wrote:
| I listened to the two hour press conference. NIF leadership
| made it clear that energy research is not what Ignition Day is
| about, why the NIF was made, or why the NIF is operated.
| anon291 wrote:
| Yeah... this is a great breakthrough and an historic day for
| physics and engineering and humanity. Every American should
| swell with pride.
| Balgair wrote:
| I agree. This is a _Big_ deal. Like, first-lightbulb big, or
| polio-vaccine big.
|
| My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living
| a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to
| everyone. Climate change is something that is not only going to
| be stopped, but can be reversed for them. Energy grids can be
| made to be smaller and mutually supporting, lessening the
| impacts of disasters. Oil dependency and all the political
| problems that come with it are going to be gone by the time
| they are grandparents. Nations like Nigeria and East Timor can
| have power generation like everyone else. The deserts and
| oceans and tundra of their lives will be places dotted with
| little greenhouses and fresh vegetables. If they get this down
| to the size of a car, then everything opens up for travel and
| recreation. The only real baseline I have to use here is Star
| Trek.
|
| Of course, there is a long way to go. There is a lot of work
| and show-stoppers still out there. And the ideas that I see as
| their future are just _sooooo_ tiny compared to their reality.
| I 'm thinking of faster horses and they're going to live in a
| world of supersonic jets. That kind of difference and small
| thinking of mine.
|
| I'm so happy that, assuming the best with fusion, they are
| going to live such better lives.
| opportune wrote:
| I agree. I am thinking of my future children or myself into
| my old age. Even if we don't get commercial fusion until the
| 2040s, imagine nearly limitless energy (of course we still
| need to pay for likely massive capex, R&D, and transmission)
| and its repercussions!
|
| At the very least we can likely pull carbon out of the air
| faster than we put it in. No more destructive hydropower, no
| need for fission plants, radically reduced costs for
| industrial manufacturing. Cheap energy could make raw
| resource extraction much cheaper and more easily automated.
| Fast transportation, vertical farming. With the concurrent
| innovations in battery tech, robotics/automation, and
| electric vehicles and ships, the future is looking incredibly
| bright
| BoGoToTo wrote:
| > My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives
| living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to
| everyone.
|
| Unless you're in your early teens and don't plan on having
| kids until you're in your 30's this proba
| whycome wrote:
| I guess December 5th was Ignition Day and we didn't know it?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Also Repeal Day for those who want to get lit.
| petilon wrote:
| When you consider that they laser they used consumed 300
| megajoules from the wall plug, in order to send 1.8 megajoules
| to the target, the fact that they got 2.5 megajoules out looks
| puny in comparison. Even newer lasers only have 20% wall plug
| efficiency according to the press conference.
|
| So the important point here is, there was no net energy gain.
| They spent 300 megajoules to get 2.5 out. The scientists only
| talk about the 1.8 megajoules of laser energy sent to the
| target, not about the 300 megajoules of electricity needed to
| send 1.8 megajoules to the target.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Energy is conserved in the universe so there is never any net
| energy gain.
|
| See how pedantic and not helpful that is?
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| Power plants add energy to an electrical grid by converting
| external (chemical/nuclear/kinetic) energy into more
| electricity than they consume. There's no loss of
| energy/mass overall, but the amount of available
| electricity goes up. Since the laser would use electricity
| from the grid, that should be taken into account.
| OJFord wrote:
| The point is to get some of it from somewhere cheaper/free
| - mass, or outside air as in heat pumps.
|
| You can't run your laser on mass or air, if you need a coal
| firing power plant to run your fusion reactor, from which
| you get less than you consumed from the coal plant...
|
| It's great progress, it's just not as close to viable as it
| might sound like - more breakthroughs needed.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I have yet to find someone saying it sounds like fusion
| power reactors are right around the corner, but I have
| found lots of people shadowboxing these people and
| attacking the scientists for misleading press releases.
|
| Seems like an overcorrection to something I haven't even
| seen anyone here say.
| OJFord wrote:
| I think to a lot of the technically minded, but non
| nuclear physicists here, it initially sounded like less
| (paid for/electricity) energy was used than was put out.
| That's extremely exciting, and the actual news is still
| fantastic, it's just that 'actually, we needed to pay for
| over 100x more energy than we counted as the "input"
| energy [and it's possible to do 10x but not 100x better
| than that]' is quite a massive caveat on a 3:2 or
| whatever yield.
|
| I'm not saying they've claimed anything wrong or
| deliberately misleading, it's just a
| misunderstanding/misalignment and possibly made worse by
| the PR teams in the middle.
|
| In other words, I don't think it's an angry 'well
| actually' type correction so much as it is disappointment
| - it initially sounded even greater.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That's a non sequitur. The laser ignition facility is not a
| smaller version of the entire universe.
| petilon wrote:
| In nuclear fusion, mass is converted into energy according
| to the famous equation E = mc^2, where E is energy, m is
| mass, and c is the speed of light.
| wahern wrote:
| Mass _is_ energy. Add energy (in any form, such as heat)
| to a system and you increase its mass. Thus, in the NIF
| reaction, the mass lost from the pellet is mass imparted
| on the surrounding environment. Immediately after the
| fusion reaction, before the energy can dissipate further
| as heat, etc, the reaction chamber system has the same
| mass as before the ignition.
|
| There are some nuances regarding the distinction between
| rest mass vs relativistic mass, but they're not really
| relevant in this context.
|
| I think what trips people up here is confusing mass with
| matter. Matter is also subject to mass-energy
| equivalence, of course, but AFAIU in most common types of
| nuclear reactions little if any matter, per se, is
| transformed.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Fair enough. To be extra pedantic, mass-energy is
| conserved in a fixed inertial frame of reference.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| As was pointed out in other comments, their lasers and
| electrical equipment were not efficient as it was not
| necessary to get the scientific knowledge.
| petilon wrote:
| In the press conference they mentioned that modern lasers
| have "20% wall plug efficiency". That means fusion has to
| generate 5x more energy than this experiment did, for you
| to get more energy out than you put in.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The NIF is not intended to be a power plant, and inertial
| containment in general is probably not a great design for
| producing power.
|
| This is scientific breakthrough. The best point of comparison
| is probably a fusion bomb, which requires an initial fission
| detonation to create enough pressure and free neutrons to
| force a net-positive fusion reaction. But at the NIF they do
| it using only lasers... incredible.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Maybe I missed it but it's not a net positive output. From the
| article, the implication it is:
|
| "LLNL's experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering
| 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15
| MJ of fusion energy output"
|
| From newscientist, the same info followed by a rider:
|
| "generated a power output of 3.15 megajoules from a laser power
| output of 2.05 megajoules - a gain of around 150 per cent.
| However, this is far outweighed by the roughly 300 megajoules
| drawn from the electrical grid to power the lasers in the first
| place"
| belval wrote:
| This was explained by another commenter yesterday, but this is
| not an issue. The 3.15:2.05 ratio is the news as it is the part
| that was difficult to achieve. The 300MJ accounts for
| significant laser inefficiencies in much the same way that the
| 3.15MJ of output won't convert to 3.15MJ of electricity as the
| conversion is not loss less.
|
| In other words: it's a net-positive output for that reaction,
| not the whole process, there is still a lot of work to be done
| before you and I exchange comments on a server powered by
| fusion energy in homes powered by fusion energy.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Granted...
|
| > in much the same way that the 3.15MJ of output won't
| convert to 3.15MJ of electricity as the conversion is not
| loss less
|
| ...and very much touche! That's a good point. But I do feel
| the overall loss should have been made clear and distinct
| from the gain in one part of the whole. Gross vs net perhaps?
| jasonhansel wrote:
| IIRC part of the issue is that NIF's lasers are very old
| and much less efficient than more modern ones. So the 300
| MJ needed to power the lasers is higher than would be
| expected if this were commercialized.
| empiricus wrote:
| I still don't understand why we waste time and money with fusion.
| Fision so much easier. Should focus on it. Fusion is ok, but 100
| years into the future when we are bored.
| empiricus wrote:
| Actually just a rhetorical question. We are so irational that
| fusion makes perfect sense.
| gfodor wrote:
| Another good time to remind everyone that the inventor of the
| maser (which led to the laser), Charles Townes, was discouraged
| by his department chair (allegedly): "Look, you should stop the
| work you are doing. It isn't going to work. You know it's not
| going to work, we know it's not going to work. You're wasting
| money, Just stop!" A few months later, it worked. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.theregister.com/2015/01/29/charles_townes_nobel_...
| nielsbot wrote:
| "If we'd known it was impossible, we never would have
| succeeded!"
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Early in my career I had the pleasure of interning at LLNL
| (ironically, working on a completely open source compiler
| project) but I was able to go on a number of tours of NIF. It was
| extremely cool. They have a whole team of software engineers
| writing software just to keep all the mirrors calibrated and
| things like that. In person it is much bigger than it seems in
| pictures.
| dsign wrote:
| HN people has three orders of magnitude more technical background
| and education than politicians, yet when it's about fusion,
| fision, renewables and climate warming, we only manage to output
| a miserable 0.01 % consensus and the rest dissipates in waste
| argument.
|
| It comes to reason, the politicians are going to produce only
| 0.00001% of consensus.
|
| Conclusion: things are looking rather bad. We are not going to
| achieve Civilization Survival, much less Singularity Ignition.
|
| My suggestion: highly educated Homo Sapiens may not be the right
| course. There is a proven way of saving the planet which, by
| virtue of its remarkably sustainable intellect, we should be
| investing more on: koalas.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I hope commercial fusion power generation becomes a reality but
| I'm far from convinced that's the case. What we see here is just
| solving one problem with many more to go.
|
| Energy output exceeding energy input produces a surplus of
| energy. That's a must and that's the breakthrough LLNL is
| announcing but le tme list the some of the known barriers to
| producing electricity:
|
| 1. How stable is the reaction? What failure modes does it have?
| While fusion doesn't have the same failure modes as fission does
| (eg Chernobyl) it could still result in significant damage to the
| container or even the facility;
|
| 2. What's the relationship between capex ("capital expendiutre"),
| lifetime, maintenance and power generation. An extreme example is
| if your power plant costs $50B with annual mainteance of $2B and
| a life of 30 years but only produces 100MW of power then even
| though the fuel is free it's not economical because those capex
| and operational costs have to be amortized over the life of the
| plant;
|
| 3. How available are the fuels? Of course hydrogen is abundant
| but most of it is protium (H1), which is not useful for current
| fusion research. Most of it is DT fusion, meaning deuterium (H2)
| - tritium (H3). Deuterium is naturally occuring (IIRC ~1ppm).
| Tritium is not. It needs to be bred.
|
| 4. What about neutrons? Neutrons create two problems. The first
| is energy loss. High speed neutrons are energy loss from your
| system. Inertial confinement (ie this result) tries to capture
| neutrons with a "shell". Older designs (eg ITER) use a tokamak,
| which is magnetic containment of a superheated plasma. Magnetic
| fields are great for containing electrons and hydrogen nucei
| because they're positively charged. Neutrons obviously have no
| electric charge so just escape. The second problem is the damage
| these neutrons cause (ie "neutron embrittlement").
|
| 5. How do you convert that energy into power? Nuclear fission,
| for example, heats water into steam that turns a turbine that
| generates electricity. This isn't particularly efficient and
| greatly adds to the costs. It's another system that needs to be
| maintained. "Direct energy conversion" would be the holy grail
| here but that's all very theoretical at this point.
|
| Once you start adding up efficiencies in the different stages of
| electricity generation you have to do significanlty better than
| simply exceeding power input.
|
| It's a notable achievement but as the release says, viable power
| generation is still a long way away (ie decades).
| pelorat wrote:
| This experiment was never intended to/or form the basis of a
| nuclear fusion reactor.
| typon wrote:
| This makes me feel America is back. This is a big achievement and
| should not be underplayed whatsoever. Whichever country achieves
| practical fusion is going to be dominant in the next century.
| drumhead wrote:
| America never went away. The major scientific and tecnological
| achievements of the the last 30 years are virtually all
| American.
| padjo wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this heavily politicised press release is
| designed to make you think America is back.
| supergirl wrote:
| everyone should watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
| to put this into perspective.
|
| for some reason, all the news articles are extremely misleading.
|
| previous output ratio for this fusion method was something like
| 70%, now it is 150%. it's a useful improvement, but not a major
| breakthrough. the whole system still consumes 100x more energy
| than it produces. 100MJ of energy is needed to power the laser.
| the laser generates only 2MJ of energy that powers fusion. fusion
| generates 3MJ of output energy. so all the articles are saying
| "they put 2MJ energy and got 3MJ energy back". no, they put 102MJ
| and got 3MJ.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > "We have had a theoretical understanding of fusion for over a
| century, but the journey from knowing to doing can be long and
| arduous. Today's milestone shows what we can do with
| perseverance," said Dr. Arati Prabhakar, the President's Chief
| Advisor for Science and Technology and Director of the White
| House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
|
| This part gives me so much hope as we have understandings of what
| is theoretically possible, and in due time humanity reaches them.
| This gives me a lot of hope especially in the fields of curing
| major diseases and in longevity!
| logical_ferry wrote:
| On a scale of 1 to invention of
| fire/wheel/smelting/electricity/computers, how relevant is this?
| I have trouble comprehending the historical impact.
| lostmsu wrote:
| It is less of inventing and more of engineering. But I would
| put it along with ARPANET.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| wright brothers first flight?
| snshn wrote:
| I like how over 60 years after the nuclear boom, it somehow just
| happened to happen today. Just when the world is ready to
| transition to electric vehicles on a global scale, just when oil
| companies aren't able to make as much money from oil as they used
| to, just when one of the major suppliers of fossil fuels (Russia)
| is at war with the West, it has somehow magically happened. What
| a coinky-dink.
|
| Throw lots of money at something when you need it to happen and
| then it will happen. Or have control over the technology and
| don't let it see the light of day until it benefits you
| financially and makes your enemies lose their main stream of
| income. I truly applaud this timing and will err on the side of
| conspiracy rather than coincidence reading more about this
| "breakthrough".
| Alifatisk wrote:
| You're right when I think about it, the timing is amazing
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _I like how over 60 years after the nuclear boom, it somehow
| just happened to happen today. Just when the world is ready to
| transition to electric vehicles on a global scale, just when
| oil companies aren 't able to make as much money from oil as
| they used to, just when one of the major suppliers of fossil
| fuels (Russia) is at war with the West, it has somehow
| magically happened. What a coinky-dink._
|
| It would be coincidental timing, if the most breathless
| headlines were actually true. But in reality we're still
| decades away from commercially viable fusion power generation.
| A fusion energy gain factor of Q=1 is little more than a
| psychological hurdle. Imagine you have a process that consumes
| 1 gigawatt of power and produces 1 gigawatt + one additional
| watt of power; that's Q=1. And it's certainly not commercially
| viable.
| johnlk wrote:
| "...a game-changer for efforts to achieve President Biden's goal
| of a net-zero carbon economy".
|
| That's the best outcome you can think of as a result of possible
| free energy?
| seanw444 wrote:
| Thank you, Saint Biden, for doing the bare minimum for the
| ability to slap your name on it.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| 10% for the Big Guy.
| randomsearch wrote:
| This is a really hard question to answer, but do you think in
| peacetime 1930s if you'd asked someone how long it would take to
| build the bomb, they'd say "we're only a few decades away with
| proper funding"?
|
| The pay off achieved by accelerating fusion development seems to
| justify almost any amount of spending. Is it worth going for it?
|
| The most important subquestion for me: is there a sufficiently
| brilliant living scientist who has the technical ability,
| managerial skills, and integrity to be trusted to deliver? I
| wonder if this is the reason we haven't already done it.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Science is a collaborative achievement. There isn't one
| scientist that can deliver at this scale and complexity.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I'd love to hear the pros and cons of fusion vs micro molten salt
| fission reactors.
| loeg wrote:
| Both are decades away from being viable power plant technology,
| which is either a con or a pro depending on your point of view.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Fission requires material that can be used in nuclear weapons.
|
| Fission can always melt down.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Congrats Doc Ok.
| tommica wrote:
| Gratz to the scientists, seems like an impressive achievement!
| kobalsky wrote:
| ELI5 level question.
|
| Please correct me if I'm saying something stupid.
|
| If you toss a solar mass of water into the sun it just becomes
| fuel.
|
| So, could a fusion reactor, when efficiency is improved, use
| water as fuel?
| ArtificialAI wrote:
| Yes, that's generally correct. If you were to toss a solar mass
| of water into the sun, it would become fuel for the sun's
| fusion reactions. Fusion reactors work in a similar way, but on
| a much smaller scale. They use fuel, typically hydrogen or a
| mixture of hydrogen and helium, and use intense heat and
| pressure to fuse the atoms together, releasing a large amount
| of energy in the process.
| yuvalkarmi wrote:
| Tangential, but fun: the following is NOT what this post says.
| The following is the response to a the ChatGPT prompt "write the
| press release by an imagined body called the Department of Energy
| announcing the achievement of fusion ignition." Mind you, ChatGPT
| training data ends in 2021, so it's definitely not aware of this
| news:
|
| "The Department of Energy is pleased to announce the successful
| achievement of fusion ignition in our latest experiment. This
| breakthrough marks a major milestone in our pursuit of clean,
| limitless energy.
|
| Fusion, the process by which atomic nuclei combine to release
| vast amounts of energy, has long been considered the Holy Grail
| of energy production. It has the potential to provide an
| virtually limitless supply of clean, safe energy, without the
| harmful greenhouse gas emissions or dangerous waste products of
| other forms of energy production.
|
| For decades, scientists and engineers have been working to unlock
| the secrets of fusion and harness its power. This has been a
| challenging and complex endeavor, but we are now closer than ever
| to achieving our goal. The successful fusion ignition in our
| experiment marks the first time that this process has been
| achieved outside of the core of a star. This is a significant
| step forward in our efforts to harness the power of fusion and
| bring it to practical use.
|
| We believe that fusion has the potential to revolutionize the way
| we produce energy, and we are committed to pursuing this
| technology with all of the resources at our disposal. In the
| coming years, we will continue to conduct experiments and
| research, with the goal of developing a fusion reactor that can
| provide a stable, reliable source of energy.
|
| We are extremely proud of this achievement, and we will continue
| to work tirelessly to develop this technology and bring it to the
| world. This is an exciting time for energy production, and we are
| confident that fusion will play a major role in our collective
| future. We are grateful for the support of our colleagues and
| partners in this effort, and we look forward to continuing to
| push the boundaries of what is possible."
| lukeplato wrote:
| What does this mean for ITER and magnetic confinement fusion?
| Palpatineli wrote:
| Calling this fusion ignition is stupid. Laser fusion is unlike
| other fusion devices in that the efficiency of laser is extremely
| low. It is true that the reaction created 3MJ when the laser
| energy input INTO THE REACTION CHAMBER is 2MJ. But the whole
| laser system took 300MJ to run for this one shot. Thus the real Q
| value is extremely low compared to other fusion methods.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand your criticism
| leephillips wrote:
| Note that the announcements refer to laser energy supplied to
| the target, not laser energy entering the chamber. The former
| is a fraction of the latter, and the basis for the term
| "scientific gain". The actual target gain may be < 1.
| devmor wrote:
| This is some of the most incredible and inspiring scientific news
| in my lifetime. I am overcome with excitement right now.
| cm2187 wrote:
| It's a weird scientific annoncement, punctuated with quotes from
| politicians...
| bioemerl wrote:
| Here's your most exciting paragraph
|
| > LLNL's experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering
| 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15
| MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a
| most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE).
| Many advanced science and technology developments are still
| needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and
| businesses, and DOE is currently restarting a broad-based,
| coordinated IFE program in the United States. Combined with
| private-sector investment, there is a lot of momentum to drive
| rapid progress toward fusion commercialization.
|
| It's fusion Manhattan project time.
| jpeter wrote:
| Imagine if Musk spend 44 Billion fusion
| adventured wrote:
| Given it's Musk and his stated primary life goal, the most
| ridiculous aspect of the Twitter debacle for him, is: not
| only of course did he overpay for Twitter by at least 2x; not
| only is his net worth going to contract as Tesla's stock
| compresses (such that the poor Twitter decision is going to
| be that much more painful in relation to his overall wealth);
| but the $40x billion could have probably paid for getting
| Starship to Mars. He's not going to be as rich in the future
| as he was in that moment, and he'll be relentlessly mocked
| for the context as his ship takes on water (eg when he's
| worth $60-$80 billion and spent $44 billion buying Twitter
| and SpaceX needs $10+ billion infused into it to keep
| pursuing Mars).
| p_j_w wrote:
| >the $40x billion could have probably paid for getting
| Starship to Mars.
|
| Maybe he doesn't actually believe in Starship.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Or maybe he expected Twitter to actually make money, or
| at least not lose money.
|
| And this could still be true.
|
| People here act like he bought Twitter and then deleted
| the website. This isn't the case.
|
| Did he overpay, yes, but its still a business that is
| worth something.
| zizee wrote:
| Are you suggesting it's all an elaborate scheme?
|
| I know it is popular/easy to hate on the man right now,
| but this is a really strange take.
|
| Given that Musk has been talking about mars since at
| least 2001, many years before he had the resources he has
| now, and almost went bankrupt funding spacex's first
| orbital rocket, it's hard to believe he's pretending.
|
| People seem happy to believe all negative things they
| hear about him, but discount anything that doesn't gel
| with this negative image. It's like how the same people
| who put all missteps of Tesla/SpaceX at Elons feet, will
| also discount any of the successes and say he has nothing
| to do with them.
| asdff wrote:
| The boring company was literally an elaborate scheme on
| the other hand. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you
| can't get fooled again.
| adventured wrote:
| It appears to be working/progressing properly so far (and
| quite rapidly compared to norms in the industry),
| including the Raptor engines. I doubt that's it.
|
| Musk has very obviously poor impulse control. Someone
| more contained, patient, less impulsive, would have
| waited and taken a more strategic approach to acquiring
| Twitter (which would have left an opening to let the
| stock implode with the rest of the tech market, after
| which one could have pounced and grabbed it for far
| cheaper). On the flip side, that less impulsive person
| probably wouldn't have started SpaceX in the first place
| (given the suicidal fiscal task involved and context at
| the time in the industry), or wouldn't have gone to the
| financial extremes required to make it succeed (betting
| essentially all of his wealth on Tesla and SpaceX).
| DesiLurker wrote:
| Imagine if we've spent 10% of the current military budget
| ($600B+) on renewables & fusion. We wouldn't have to fight
| those wars for resources.
| [deleted]
| simiones wrote:
| That's a very apt analogy, as both this and Manhattan are
| weapons research programs.
|
| I'm not very excited in hearing we'll get even more powerful
| thermo-nuclear bombs.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Do more powerful bombs really make any difference? Seems a
| bit like worrying about the impact of climate-driven ocean
| rise on the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
| jerf wrote:
| Fusion bombs have existed since the early 1950s. Technology
| rapidly developed to the point that they can essentially be
| built to be arbitrarily large, far beyond any practical war
| purpose. There is no need for any larger bomb than what was
| built many decades ago. None of this research is necessary
| for bombs. All of the difficult problems fusion power
| generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away
| when you're just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are
| willing to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise
| uncontrolled manner.
| jboy55 wrote:
| It is necessary since they banned the testing of nuclear
| weapons. Before they would do this kind of research by
| imploding a cylinder of uranium encasing a hydrogen core
| with X-rays produced by a "Fat Man" style bomb. Now they
| implode a cylindrical casing full of hydrogen by x-rays
| caused by a laser vaporizing an outer layer.
|
| "It's a big milestone, but NIF is not a fusion-energy
| device," says Dave Hammer, a nuclear engineer at Cornell
| University in Ithaca, New York.
|
| Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many
| steps on the path to laser fusion energy. "NIF was not
| designed to be efficient," he says. "It was designed to be
| the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the
| data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research
| programme."
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > None of this research is necessary for bombs.
|
| And yet that's exactly why the NIF was actually built. They
| do plenty of weapons research:
| https://wci.llnl.gov/facilities/nif I'm told the building
| was even built to switch over between civilian and
| classified use unusually quickly, but I'm having trouble
| turning up a citation for that right now with just my phone
| and 2022-Google.
|
| > All of the difficult problems fusion power generation
| faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you're
| just trying to squeeze as hard as you can and are willing
| to use fission bombs to do it in an otherwise uncontrolled
| manner.
|
| Not if you want them to fit in a submarine warhead. This
| sort of work is _not_ easy to do well.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > And yet that's exactly why the NIF was actually built.
|
| You're both half-right.
|
| The NIF is the replacement for nuclear tests. It's
| necessary to maintain the arsenal in a working fashion,
| as the warheads degrade over time and have to be replaced
| with new ones. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.
| php?storyId=655921...
|
| The NIF is not for _more powerful_ nuclear weapons, as
| that 's entirely unnecessary. If anything, most interest
| these days is in _less_ powerful weapons for potential
| battlefield use.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| That isn't what this would be used for. In fact, yields for
| the largest deployed H-bombs today I think are smaller than
| they once were (due to better targeting capabilities).
| tetha wrote:
| This is true. The issue is that already a relatively small
| nuclear weapon is perfectly sufficient to wipe out most to
| all civilian structures. However, it does so in a roughly
| circular area, and you need to increase the initial
| explosion a royal lot to increase the devastated area by a
| bit. And as you increase the overall spherical blast of the
| weapon in order to increase the circle of doom on the
| ground, more and more explosive power just vaporizes air.
|
| That's why MIRV was introduced. One ICBM delivering 10 - 20
| small warheads result in much greater devastation than an
| equally heavy warhead in one package, because less power is
| wasted on air and space.
|
| It's morbid math, but it makes sense.
| simiones wrote:
| What do you think the US nuclear weapons research lab will
| use their research for?
|
| You're right that increasing the yield was a bad example
| from my side, but the purpose is to improve the weapons,
| nothing else.
| hwillis wrote:
| The B53 bomb was built in 1961 and it released 38 PJ or
| 10 BILLION times more energy than this experiment. Data
| gathered about plasma and fusion at NIF temperatures and
| pressures is not helpful for the insanely different
| environment of a nuclear bomb.
|
| > What do you think the US nuclear weapons research lab
| will use their research for?
|
| Why do you think that _fusion_ is not enough? Complete
| strategic energy independence for the US, and dominance
| in the electricity sector? That 's so, SO much more
| valuable than better nuclear weapons.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| The purpose of NIF, and it's not hidden, is to maintain
| the existing US nuclear stockpile since we can no longer
| rely on using underground nuclear weapon testing to
| ensure they still work. There's a very big supercomputing
| capability funded under the same effort. Instead of
| testing the weapons by exploding them underground, we use
| computer modeling with the modeling validated (ie backed
| up) by experiment (at NIF) to make sure the stockpile
| works and can maintain its strategic deterrent. The
| euphemistic name for this is "stockpile stewardship."
| badrabbit wrote:
| You should be very excited because we live on a planet with
| independent competing countries and well... you don't want to
| live in the US or Europe with China or other not so friendly
| countries building a bigger more powerful nuke. If a weapon
| can be built, it will be built. How, when and if it can be
| used are things you can control not whether someone somewhere
| will develop it. Especially in war time, all bets are off.
|
| Although, it would be interesting to see fusion reactors on
| planes and ships powering other types of weapons like lasers
| and more powerful railguns or faster icbms.
| lizknope wrote:
| Soviet Union built this and it wasn't really practical and
| ended up leading to test ban treaties
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| I would love to see "fusion Manhattan project", this planet is
| well overdue for new gigantic R&D projects such as Manhattan
| and Apollo.
| Victerius wrote:
| Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi,
| Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and
| Stanislaw Ulam?
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| off-topic, but related. Ulam's "Adventures of a
| Mathematician" is an excellent and very inspiring book.
| bioemerl wrote:
| Hiding behind the names of institutions that got smart
| enough to not give the peons fame or recognition.
| StevenNunez wrote:
| Elon Musk ::ducks::
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi,
| Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and
| Stanislaw Ulam?
|
| they're working on getting you to click on an ad
| [deleted]
| rllearneratwork wrote:
| yeah. But some are apparently working at Livermore Nat.
| Lab still. Also, I feel like there is a bunch at SpaceX,
| Tesla, NASA, DeepMind and OpenAI
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Yeah, I think we have a lot of sleeper geniuses out there
|
| I'm a pretty smart dude. I'm no big deal on HackerNews or
| in Silicon Valley, but I look easily 10x as smart as most
| of the normal people I come across in the real world. And
| I regularly come across people so much smarter than me,
| they have to explain things to me the same way I talk to
| a toddler
|
| I'll bet a lot of geniuses are congregating in cool orgs
| like those where they can make a real difference in the
| world.
| euix wrote:
| Hear hear!
| phtrivier wrote:
| They can't exist any more for structural reason.
|
| This generation was classically educated, without TV or
| social media in their childhood. They spent the time
| we're wasting on HN reading _books_ and following the
| discipline their elders learned in WWI. They had plenty
| of occasions to tinker.
|
| I claim the brains of those generation was structurally
| different from ours, and we're talking about the best
| minds of this generation.
|
| It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on
| ads" - the reality is that, no, we webshits are not the
| "best minds".
| antonfire wrote:
| > It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on
| ads".
|
| "The last generation was better because they read _books_
| and had _discipline_ and didn't waste their time on
| frivolous garbage" is also a trope.
| govg wrote:
| I mean, sure. But at the same time they were constrained
| by the tools of their time, had no internet for instant
| information access and spread, and scientific
| collaboration has never been at a higher level than it is
| now. There's no reason to believe that people who grow up
| with instant lookup and massive computational power will
| somehow be less capable than people whose only tools were
| pen and pencil. What is possible now couldn't even be
| dreamed of back then.
| adventured wrote:
| > they're working on getting you to click on an ad
|
| They're not, and there's zero evidence to back that
| frequently floated premise up. That's a particularly
| laughable myth created by those same industry people to
| feel better about their terrible life choices. If you
| can't do something meaningful, at least you can pretend
| to be a genius doing nothing meaningful. It turns out
| that both things are false, they're not brilliant and
| they're wasting their lives.
|
| No, the brilliant people are working at TSMC, Intel, AMD,
| nVidia, Applied Materials, ASML, Illumina, ARM, TI, et
| al.
|
| They're working on CRISPR. They're working on mRNA
| vaccines. They're working on stem cells. They're trying
| to cure HIV just as the same type of people cured
| hepatitis C. They're working for Moderna, Pfizer,
| BioNTech, Roche, Novartis, Amgen, Regeneron, Sanofi,
| Gilead, Merck, Glaxo, et al. They're trying to figure out
| how to roll back or cure Alzheimer's. They're dedicating
| a lifetime of work into exploring the human genome, so
| that future generations have a much better, much more
| useful map.
|
| They're working on robotics at Intuitive Surgical or
| Boston Dynamics. They're working on self-driving tech.
| They've been building out the massive, global cloud
| infrastructure. They're at NASA, or SpaceX, or ESA and
| they're doing the work to get us a base on the moon or to
| Mars. They just got done building rockets that can land
| upright. They're building a massive, extraordinary,
| global satellite system in Starlink.
|
| They're working on fusion.
|
| And so on and so forth.
|
| Ad clicks? Yeah right. They're not even in the room.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Wow. That was long overdue. Thank you!
| antipotoad wrote:
| Thank you for this, sincerely.
| tootie wrote:
| There are already funded commercial fusion projects underway.
| No idea which will bring a product to market first or at all,
| but they suddenly seem a lot more plausible.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/technology/commonwealth-f...
| dleslie wrote:
| The question on my mind is: where do I sign up to join this
| effort?!
|
| Edit: I'm Canadian, the question is rhetorical.
| brianyu8 wrote:
| Assuming you have experience in software, then
| https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers/find-your-
| job/0d6...
| [deleted]
| lostmsu wrote:
| Aren't they required to post salary ranges by some
| Californian law?
| donquixote25 wrote:
| Law goes into effect next year.
| lostmsu wrote:
| BTW, they don't seem to have software roles at NIF:
| https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers/find-your-
| job/liv...
| arbuge wrote:
| https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers
| wedn3sday wrote:
| Former LLNL employee here, they hire a LOT of foreign
| nationals. Several people that I worked with there were
| Canadian.
| [deleted]
| lizknope wrote:
| Google "national ignition facility careers" and this is the
| first link
|
| https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/careers
| opportune wrote:
| 100% agree. We should be dumping as much as we can in getting
| fusion up and running ASAP. It could be a silver bullet to stop
| climate change alone, and by driving energy costs lower, enable
| huge innovations in AI/automation and increasing material
| wealth.
|
| $1T to move fusion forward just 5 years from eg 2040 to 2035
| could alone have a huge ROI in terms of climate mitigation and
| decarbonization
| markasoftware wrote:
| Will not be a silver bullet, electricity production
| contributes less than half of global CO2 emissions. Still
| need other solutions for transport, industrial processes,
| agriculture, etc.
|
| Further, it's possible that fusion plants might be
| prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, even if their
| fuel is cheap.
| opportune wrote:
| I'm not thinking about just replacing grid energy, but
| carbon removal. If we can get fusion scaled up and
| efficient it should be no sweat to use it to just remove
| carbon from the air
|
| In fact carbon removal might be a great way to subsidize
| fusion at the outset so that it can be overprovisioned/have
| a guaranteed minimum price
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Most of the funding for the Manhattan project went into the
| industrial infrastructure required to produce plutonium and
| enriched uranium.
|
| It will be time to unleash resources once they have a working
| fusion reactor design in order to build fusion power plants and
| the industrial infrastructure required to supply them.
|
| Until then they should of course get the resources they need
| but I don't think throwing money at them will necessarily speed
| things up.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| A uranium-gun bomb has a very simple theoretical basis, but
| enriching uranium is very expensive (and was even more
| expensive in the 1940s. Producing enough enriched uranium was
| the only hard problem in making that bomb; in fact they did
| not even test the bomb before dropping it on Hiroshima
| because they were fairly sure it was going to work and
| wouldn't have enough enriched uranium for a second bomb on
| the timelines involved.
|
| Plutonium was significantly more easy to produce, but it did
| require some novel engineering for the implosion lens. They
| weren't sure it was going to work and did, in fact, test the
| bomb before dropping it on Nagasaki.
|
| I think the Manhattan project is a great example of where
| more funds can help; if the funds were more restricted, it's
| entirely possible they would have gone with the "sure thing"
| of the uranium bomb instead of spending resources on the less
| sure plutonium bomb. Trying out multiple ideas in parallel
| often "wastes" money since if you try ideas in tandem, you
| will always try the high-percentage ideas first.
| mlindner wrote:
| The design of the National Ignition Facility was never intended
| to study commercially viable fusion power. It's exclusively a
| physics testing facility with origins for testing the physics of
| thermonuclear fusion weapons for better bomb design.
|
| Nothing that happens at the NIF is very useful in heading towards
| commercially viable fusion. The design of the testing apparatus
| is also similarly incompatible with making a sustained fusion
| device as there is no way to continuously feed in fuel into the
| device, nor methods of extracting the energy.
| seandoe wrote:
| Swaying public perception in an optimistic direction is enough
| of an effect to justify the cost and effort of this
| achievement.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Those sound like problems less complicated than a huge array of
| laser beams, but the devil's in ths details I suppose.
| brianyu8 wrote:
| What an amazing achievement. I was curious, so I looked up the
| open software roles at LLNL[0]. I'm very curious how the salary
| compares to your average bay area tech salary.
|
| [0]: https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers/find-your-
| job/0d6...
| pdonis wrote:
| Calling this "ignition" is a misnomer. The correct term, as given
| in the article (as opposed to the headline) is exceeding
| breakeven: more fusion energy output than energy input to the
| target.
|
| "Ignition" means the reaction becomes self-sustaining and does
| not require any further input of energy to continue.
| donquixote25 wrote:
| No, this is ignition. However, the reason why this is a big
| deal is because it is scientific break-even.
|
| The first time they achieved ignition was in August of 2021.
| See paper below:
|
| https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| They actually achieved both ignition and scientific breakeven.
| The resultant fusion heat helped produced significantly more
| fusion, not just relying on external energy (ie from the laser
| implosion).
| dogma1138 wrote:
| And it was just that the after the initial laser pulse that
| triggered ignition there was no need to sustain it to continue
| to heat up the fuel to induce fusion.
|
| The fact that this indeed was ignition was one of the main
| reasons why the fusion reaction itself was net positive.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> it was just that the after the initial laser pulse that
| triggered ignition there was no need to sustain it to
| continue to heat up the fuel to induce fusion_
|
| I don't see this anywhere in the article. Is there a better
| reference for what actually happened during the experiment?
| lostmsu wrote:
| > the reaction becomes self-sustaining
|
| This is applicable only to continuously running reactions like
| in jet engines.
| pdonis wrote:
| Which would also include any other method currently being
| pursued to achieve fusion, besides laser confinement. I'm
| guessing that the laser confinement community had to invent
| another meaning for "ignition" since the usual one would not
| be applicable to them.
| apienx wrote:
| Exciting! Is this work published somewhere? I'm curious to hear
| more about the setup and other experimental conditions.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| Thank you, Biden!
| dqpb wrote:
| > maintaining a nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing
|
| What is meant by this?
| s_dev wrote:
| Christopher Nolan couldn't have timed the release of Oppenheimer
| better.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Well, it would have been better if the release date was this
| week, no? (I see it's currently scheduled for 2023-07-21)
| ck2 wrote:
| This was for a few seconds using radioactive "fuel" correct?
|
| So perpetually 10-25 years away at all times?
|
| https://m.xkcd.com/678/
|
| Beware science packaged as press-releases.
| JaggerFoo wrote:
| Ok, so how long do I have to wait to get a coffee-can sized
| device to power my house?
| JohnBerea wrote:
| Let's say this all works out and over the next few decades fusion
| replaces all other electricity generation, and we're past the
| point where all the initial infrastructure costs have been paid
| for.
|
| How much will my electric bill be reduced?
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Initial investment cost to build reactors would in all
| likelihood be very high just by the nature of these being some
| of the most complex machines on the planet. It seems unlikely
| any sort of fast manufacturing line could be created to build
| these, and they'd all likely be built one at a time like
| fission reactors.
|
| Running costs and maintenance would also be high, the fuel
| alone is expensive (right now), and I've heard that wear and
| tear on parts of the reactors can be high so much of the
| housing for the reactor would need to be replaced with time.
|
| You've probably also got a small army of engineers running each
| one of these reactors you've got to pay.
|
| All that said, the energy produced via fusion is EXTREMELY
| abundant. I imagine with later reactor iterations (after supply
| chains have been setup and electrical transportation routes
| upgrades) electricity could become very cheap even relative to
| renewables.
| drusenko wrote:
| If you live in California, even if electricity generation cost
| nothing at all it would still only lower your bill by ~15%.
| Transmission & distribution of electricity is the expensive
| part not generating it. It doesn't _need_ to be expensive, yet
| here we are.
| happyopossum wrote:
| This is kind of a silly question given the time horizons and
| other potential factors that can crop up in 30 years, but my
| electric bill has separate charges for generation and delivery.
| Even if generation drops by 90%, it'd still only cut my bill in
| half.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i doubt your electric bill would be reduced at all. It would
| probably increase at a more constant rate instead of dramatic
| ups and downs though. So there's that..
| dotancohen wrote:
| > How much will my electric bill be reduced?
|
| Your bill will be the same, or higher. But you'll be doing so
| much more with electricity. Push a button, and your clothes are
| clean in seconds. Push a button, and your beard is shaved in
| seconds. Push a button, and four of your five senses are
| entertained for hours.
| raydiatian wrote:
| > achieve President Biden's goal
|
| This seems unnecessarily partisan to mention
| alexose wrote:
| The full quote is
|
| > This historic, first-of-its kind achievement will provide
| unprecedented capability to support NNSA's Stockpile
| Stewardship Program and will provide invaluable insights into
| the prospects of clean fusion energy, which would be a game-
| changer for efforts to achieve President Biden's goal of a net-
| zero carbon economy.
|
| That is his administration's goal, and it's the directive that
| DoE is working under during his presidency.
|
| Unless you have another party in mind that's been vocally
| championing a net-zero carbon economy?
| raydiatian wrote:
| Thank you for educating me. I was unaware Joe Biden invented
| the concept of bringing down CO2 emissions. It's important
| that we're calling him out by name so that we can illustrate
| the sixty years of effort put forth by the hard working men
| and women in nuclear physics. It is, after all, his money
| that is funding this research effort.
|
| Sincerely, a Biden voter
| anon291 wrote:
| The GOP has been pro-nuclear for a long time.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This work is the result of decades of effort under many
| administrations. This PR piece makes it sound like it all
| happened in the last two years under Biden-Harris and a set
| of Senators and Representatives who all happen to be from one
| party. I had to stop reading to get the vomit taste out of my
| mouth.
| johnp271 wrote:
| Wow so all this was accomplished starting from scratch in
| January 2021. Given another year or two and a second Biden
| term we should be finished.
| desertlounger wrote:
| Sure ain't a Reptilian goal.
| raydiatian wrote:
| If they could, literal reptiles would absolutely be in
| support of this.
|
| Because Godzilla.
| valine wrote:
| I am okay with any amount of partisanship if it means more
| funding for fusion research.
| mFixman wrote:
| Widespread energy generation nuclear fission is politically
| impossible in most Western countries.
|
| Why are people optimistic that fusion won't have the same kind of
| problems, such as new plants being too expensive to build and old
| obsolete plants being too useful to decommission?
| fullstackchris wrote:
| I'm sure they said the same thing about coal plants before any
| of them ever existed
| dontwearitout wrote:
| Fission's amazing potentially is nerfed by three main things:
| proliferation risk, meltdown risk, and waste handling. These
| are all solved problems but dramatically raise the cost (you
| need armed guards, and the reactor has to be built to withstand
| a 747 strike, etc etc). The fuel cost is a very small fraction
| of the price of nuclear.
|
| If you can eliminate or reduce the need for armed guards and
| mountains of red tape, this has the potential to solve many of
| fission's problems while providing the same benefits (unlimited
| zero carbon power with dirt cheap fuel).
| risyachka wrote:
| The main backlash for fission is not cost but danger.
|
| Fusion removes it.
| BudaDude wrote:
| I'm a bit more optimistic about this. This technology will be
| more important for space exploration than it will be
| (currently) on the ground.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| > such as new plants being too expensive to build and old
| obsolete plants being too useful to decommission?
|
| There's no guarantee that these issues will be surmountable.
|
| _But_ fusion largely avoids the fear association with past
| fission disasters and fears about nuclear waste. This is a non-
| trivial political problem in many parts of the world,
| especially much of Europe. If fusion becomes economical (big
| if) and the differences between it and fission are well
| communicated it might be easier for the world to swallow.
|
| I think visions of a 100% fusion world are fairly pie in the
| sky. Most of our energy most of the time will probably come
| from already viable renewables. But renewables cannot offer
| consistent baseline power all day, year-round, in every part of
| the world. We need either huge breakthroughs in storage, or
| carbon-free baseline generation. Economical fusion if it were
| achieved _could_ offer that without some of the most
| politically difficult drawbacks of fission.
|
| I'd probably still bet the farm on renewables + storage though,
| at least for my lifetime.
| BeetleB wrote:
| IIUC, there is no concern about radioactivity with fusion.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It is already widespread, being used for 10-20% of US energy,
| isn't it? And 30-40% in several European countries. I think
| it's definitely possible since it's already in place, we just
| need to talk about it more.
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