> 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.
I guess we should take this as a lesson in communications. The "breakeven" thing is a red-herring that should have been have been left out of the message, or at least only mentioned as a footnote. The critical ELI5 message that should have been presented is that they used a laser to create some tiny amount of fusion. But we have been able to do that for a while now. The important thing is that they were then able to use the heat and pressure of the laser generated fusion to create even more fusion. A tiny amount of fusion creates even more fusion, a positive feedback loop. The secondary fusion is still small, but it is more than the tiny amount of laser generated fusion. The gain is greater than one. That's the important message. And for the future, the important takeaway is that the next step is to take the tiny amount of laser fusion to create a small amount of fusion, and that small amount of fusion to create a medium amount of fusion. And eventually scale it up enough that you have a large amount of fusion, but controlled, and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, or the ginormous fusion of the sun.
To give some more detail: hydrogen to helium fusion (even with intermediate steps) is extremely unlikely to happen. That's part of why the sun will last for billions of years. And that's also why first human attempts at fusion are not trying to use straight up hydrogen as the fuel.
Good old Wikipedia has this gem:
> The large power output of the Sun is mainly due to the huge size and density of its core (compared to Earth and objects on Earth), with only a fairly small amount of power being generated per cubic metre. Theoretical models of the Sun's interior indicate a maximum power density, or energy production, of approximately 276.5 watts per cubic metre at the center of the core,[63] which is about the same power density inside a compost pile.
Another fun fact: there's a decades old design for a gadget that fits at the top of your desk and does nuclear fusion. You could build one yourself, if you are sufficiently dedicated. Unfortunately, no one has ever worked out how to run one of them as a power plant. Ie how to get more useful energy out than you have to put in.
If it produced a quarter of the heat of the human body per volume, its temperature would be lower as well (less than 37 degrees Celsius).[1] This is obviously not the case.
[1] Obviously heat and temperature are not the same, I know that. But when something’s temperature is higher than another thing’s, then heat is exchanged along that gradient. Meaning if the sun produced less volumetric heat than the human body, a human body placed within the sun would warm the sun and cool the human.
For both the sun and a human on earth there are two processes going on:
1. Heat production per unit volume.
2. Heat loss per unit surface area.
The volume to surface area ratio for the sun is much larger than for the human, for a minor reason (the sun is a sphere) and a major reason (the sun's linear size is much bigger). So the equilibrium temperature of the sun in the same ambient outside environment is higher than the human's.
Your thought experiment about placing a human inside the sun would in fact work as you say, if a human body continued to produce heat once it had achieved thermal equilibrium with the surrounding plasma.
Yeah, this is a morbid analogy but if you got a bunch of people enclosed in a small area, the people in the middle will get so hot they will heatstroke, even if it's freezing outside. See the recent Korean crushing disaster.
Don't give them ideas, harnessing people power would solve all the major problems. Overpopulation, global warming, energy crisis,... Reminds me of that 'Mitchell and Webb - Kill all the poor' sketch.
Well, plant the idea that there is a fusion reaction going on in mitochondria at a very low scale. Throw in terms like "proton gradient", "electron transport chain" and create a science conspiracy.
Can you say more about the ways in which fusion reactors need to surpass stars, and why people believe it's feasible that we can sufficiently get to that point?
(Also - thanks for sharing one of the most interesting comments I've read on the internet in quite a while.)
That, but also mimicing the pressure of the sun here is just not possible (yet? :D), why we need to play with higher temperaturs with different problematic consequences.
> The highest instantaneous pressures we can obtain here on Earth are in the Fusion reactor at the National Ignition Facility and in Thermonuclear weapon detonations. These achieve pressures of 5 x 10^12 and 6.5 x 10^15 Pascal respectively. For comparison, the pressure inside our Sun’s core is 2.5 x 10^16 Pascal.
Total power radiated by a black body per unit surface area scales as T^4 (in Kelvin).
So for black bodies with identical shape and linear dimensions R1 and R2, with identical power production per unit volume, both in thermal equilibrium with whatever is outside them, you would expect:
R1/R2 = (T1/T2)^4
(because setting power produced equal to power radiated gives R proportional to T^4).
Pretending humans are spheres with radius 1m and the sun is a sphere with radius 7*10^8m, you would expect the sun to have ~160 times the temperature of a human at equilibrium in vacuum. It's going to be lower because not all of the sun is power-producing, of course. But higher because a human is not 1m in radius. And again higher because humans are not spheres and lose heat more than a sphere would for the same volume (more surface area).
The sun is about 6000K on the surface. That would give us ~40K for the equilibrium temperature of a human in vacuum, which at least seems truthy.
TL;DR: the sun is big, with a small surface area compared to its volume, because it's big.
and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons,
Ironically, this experiment was designed primarily to simulate the fusion you have in thermonuclear weapons. That's the NIF's purpose and the purpose of this experiment. From Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7
"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.”
How would it help build better weapons? I thought the existing thermonuclear bombs do the job perfectly fine. Sure, the military might want to make them a bit smaller or a bit cheaper, but is it really such a big deal as to warrant a major announcement?
"Nuclear stockpile research" is only making weapons "better" in the sense that they are reliable despite not having been tested in decades. There's probably a component of "unemployed nuclear weapons designers is a bad thing" also.
The fusion for power experiments are using the same laser equipment but different targets and sensors.
I guess they also don't want to blow up random civilians by accident again.
When castle bravo was tested, we didn't knew that lithium7 fusion was possible and that it would generate energy. The bomb had a lot of lithium7 because it was cheaper than lithium6. Castle Bravo then proceeded to explode with way more power than intended, it vaporized the measurement instruments, ruined the test site, damaged civilian property and caused a horrible amount of fallout that screwed a enormous amount of people from more than one country.
Even during war, I suppose you want your explosions to behave in the way you expect... so you need to figure out all the physics related to them.
Given the limitations on nuclear research for weapons purposes any information that can be gleaned from these experiments that is 'dual use' is more than welcome with the parties that are currently stymied by various arms control agreements. This is also why you will see a lot of supercomputer capacity near such research, it allows simulation of experiments with high fidelity rather than the experiments themselves. These are all exploitation of loopholes. The biggest value is probably in being able to confirm that the various computer models accurately predict the experimental outcomes. This when confirmed at scale will allow for the computer models to be used for different applications (ie: weapons research) with a higher level of confidence.
Presumably these computer models are mostly useful for creating new designs (since the old designs were proven by real tests). Would such new designs be convincing enough to the adversary to fulfill its role as a strategic deterrence?
When (in XX years?) almost all US nukes are only simulated on computers and not actually tested, the Russians may start wondering if the US aresnal actually works, no? That would be a horrible outcome, since it means the Russians would be taking somewhat greater risks in their decision-making. Wouldn't far outweigh any opertaional or financial benefits the newer designs offer?
I suppose one could argue that if the loss of confidence in strategic weapons matched the actual loss in reliability, it might be a "no op" (although even this is arguable). But if the Russians think the US simulations suck, while the US is actually building really good simulations, the loss of confidence would be greater than the actual loss in reliability. In the extreme case, the nukes work great, but everyone thinks they are scrap metal.
Of course, the same happens in reverse: if the Russians are upgrading their weapons to untested designs, the US may start underestimating the risk.
> the Russians may start wondering if the US aresnal actually works, no?
If anything the last year or so has probably made the reverse happening and the US and its adversaries likely both have very high confidence in that the US arsenal actually works.
Or the US finds that after x many years bombs degrade in unexpected ways, and that while we were able to figure this out and fix it. Then we speculate that the Russians probably haven't fixed theirs in the same way and their bombs aren't good anymore. Which means the risk of a nuclear war just jumps up, since MAD is compromised.
To learn about their degradation modes and how to maintain them (since full-scale nuclear tests are now verboten, and subcritical experiments only deal with fission part of the entire assembly -- we now also need some experimental setup to test the fusion part: radiation pressure, X-ray reflection, ablation modes etc. NIF is this setup).
Also, there is a constant need to improve fusion/fission rate in the total energy output, and perhaps eventually design pure fusion weapons, though this is still probably out of reach.
The USA no longer has the technical capability to manufacture the necessary parts to maintain the current stockpile. The whole strategic arms reduction treaty regime is basically a fig leaf to cover for the fact that we have to cannibalize some legacy weapons to maintain the rest. If nothing changes the USA probably won't have an effective arsenal within a century. Given the likely state of the USA by that time, that's probably for the best.
> > USA probably won't have an effective arsenal within a century.
> If other countries joined, it would be a great outcome.
Why the optimism? Without MAD, it's nearly certain that we'd have a world war at some point in time. Sooner or later, it will surely happen. If you think it won't happen, or won't cost millions of lives, or won't employ re-developed nukes eventually, please tell me why you think so. (No sarcasm.)
I don’t think MAD is all that effective. At this moment in time we’re seeing:
* Several concurrent arms races in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe
* A high intensity conflict in Ukraine
* China threatening a land invasion into Taiwan
MAD might be preventing a country like Poland from jumping into the Ukraine conflict, but more likely it’s because of its involvement in NATO.
I think collective security organisations are a far more potent force for peace than nuclear weapons. If countries abided by their security agreements in WW2, then we’d have nipped the entire thing in the bud.
> I don’t think MAD is all that effective. At this moment in time we’re seeing:
> * Several concurrent arms races in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe
> * A high intensity conflict in Ukraine
> * China threatening a land invasion into Taiwan
I mean... Only one of those is an actual fight. And there MAD doesn't apply because the defender doesn't have the Assured Destruction capability needed.
> Several concurrent arms races in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe
Which is to say, possible future proxy wars between the great powers where MAD will supposedly restrict conflict intensity. See below.
> A high intensity conflict in Ukraine
What's going on in Ukraine is a bog standard cold war style proxy war. The NATO plan is basically to turn it into another Afghanistan for the Russians. It's the exact thing that MAD is meant to keep from spilling over into a world war between the principals.
> China threatening a land invasion into Taiwan
This is more interesting. US conventional forces almost certainly have no hope of beating China that close to home. Therefore, any effective US response would require nuking China and China is presumably deterring that with their nukes. There is an argument to be made here that a non-nuclear Chinese military would be in Taiwan's best interests. However, I see no scenario where either a nuclear or non-nuclear China and a non-nuclear USA is in Taiwan's best interests. So while the MAD case isn't the best case for Taiwan here, it's also not the worst.
There are a lot more armed conflicts throughout the world that are proxies or partial proxies between the various powers in the world (US, Russia, and more). See Yemen, Syria, and many more throughout Africa. World powers tend to get on one side or another as they see their interests align and oftentimes this prolongs the conflict rather than bring it to any resolution.
I'm not really optimistic about this option, just a bit of wishful thinking about peace upon the world and such. OTOH, even with MAD we still have wars and probably much more than 100K people on average get killed in wars every year. Even with MAD, NATO is pushing conflict with Russia well beyond a proxy war at this point. MAD doesn't work if the world goes mad...
> 1. How does this research help address this problem?
I see it the other way around, this problem makes me doubt that this research will ever actually lead anywhere, supposing it's even as good a result as it first appears.
> 2. What are the sources for your opinion?
It's a fact. And my source is dead tree media. I don't recall all the details, but there are some very finicky parts that go into a state of the art warhead and we have lost the capability to manufacture them. Is this really so surprising? We can't even build new F-22s anymore!
The most famous key component that was speculated or leaked, was that we lost the makeup and reason for the Styrofoam that holds the primary and surrounds the secondary.
This research successfully initiated fusion, using a capsule of hydrogen made of some material, surrounded by something, with an outer layer. This outer layer is turned into X-Rays by the laser, which then ablate the hydrogen capsule's casing casing the inwards pressure. You could speculate, that they just found the makeup for something that would replace the Styrofoam, or we just improved upon it.
From what I can tell this is mostly a useful cover story as a fallback for the moon-shot type energy potential. But are there serious downsides to having this be the case? Does it significantly distract away from the pursuit of energy? Or somehow fundamentally constrain the projects scope?
Exactly the opposite: their task, assigned by Congress, is weapons work. Period.
But pretending to work on "carbon-free energy" is good for funding, just now. Four years ago, being all about weapons opened the tap.
Make no mistake, there is no story here. There will be no "unlimited free energy" from this, or any other fusion project. The fusion startups are spending down investors' money with zero possibility of payback (Helion conceivably excepted), because if they did get Q>1, they have no workable way to harness it. ITER will not even try to produce one watt-second of electricity. Its follow-on demo reactor won't start building until 2050, if not further delayed.
We know the way to get unlimited free energy: solar. Build more, get more. It doesn't have bomb scientists making inflated claims; it just works, and better every year.
> The fusion startups are spending down investors' money with zero possibility of payback (Helion conceivably excepted), because if they did get Q>1, they have no workable way to harness it. ITER will not even try to produce one watt-second of electricity. Its follow-on demo reactor won't start building until 2050, if not further delayed.
You seem to be awfully certain of that. I'm not an expert in this area, but my understanding is that the MIT Arc reactor is planned to use FLiBe as a liquid coolant that absorbs heat/neutrons/etc from the fusion reaction and is pumped into heat exchangers to boil water to run turbines. I mean, maybe there's some details not worked out and maybe I'm misunderstanding how it works, but it seems like a plan to generate electricity to me.
There's no plan to hook ITER up to a thermal plant because it's a research reactor not a power plant, but there's no conceptual reason they couldn't do it. (Not that ITER is a great example; the design is already antiquated before it's even finished.)
Driving steam turbines, even with other costs at zero, leaves you uncompetitive with renewables. But other costs would be very, very far from zero. Extracting the grams of tritium at PPB concentration dissolved in 1000 tons of FLiBe every day so you have fuel for tomorrow is an expensive job all by itself.
Making a whole new reactor every year or two because it destroyed itself with neutron bombardment is another.
You seem to forget that storage also has no operating expense.
The cost of operating a steam turbine far exceeds the cost of the coal or uranium driving it. But the steam turbine would not be the only operating expense for fusion. We don't know exactly what it would cost to sieve a thousand tons of molten FLiBe every day to get out the tritium produced that day, because no one even knows any way to achieve it at all. But it would certainly be a huge daily expense, if achieved.
Combined-cycle gas turbines are fine for backing up renewables and storage. They are used for that today. As the amount of renewables and then storage built out increases, the amount of time the gas turbines must run, and thus total operating expense, declines.
It should be clear that to build out storage when there is not surplus renewable generating capacity to "charge" it from would be foolish. The immediate exception is to time-shift renewable energy generated at midday peak for evening delivery, as is being done successfully today.
Steam turbines, by contrast, are expensive to operate, and slow to start up and shut down.
Capital expense of renewables is very low already, and still falling. Even substantial overbuild to charge storage from does not change this. Cost of various forms of storage is falling even faster. By the time much storage is needed, it will be very cheap.
> Combined-cycle gas turbines are fine for backing up renewables and storage.
So are plain steam turbines, if you have cheap steam.
> Steam turbines, by contrast, are expensive to operate, and slow to start up and shut down.
Huh? Combined cycle setups use steam turbines as part of the system. Steam turbines can ramp up and down plenty fast. It's traditional heat sources that don't ramp well.
> By the time much storage is needed, it will be very cheap.
That would be nice but I'm not depending on it, and I'm definitely not going to assume that long term storage will ever be cheaper than steam turbines.
> There's no plan to hook ITER up to a thermal plant because it's a research reactor not a power plant
Interestingly, that's not really true: IIRC the japanese team working on the WCCB breeder module (that uses supercritical water as coolant) plans on connecting the water loop to a small turbine. If they succeed it would be the first ever electrical power produced from fusion.
At least ITER has a plausible, in a sci-fi story sense, way of creating a sustainable fusion reaction to which more fuel could be given. The fact the neutrons produced, if it did reach the high Q ratios, would irradiate and break down everything involved, is probably 2070's scientists and engineers problems to solve.
Why won't fusion still be a worthwhile goal even if we do have abundant solar/wind?
Abundant and cheap are relative terms. Solar and wind could be abundant in a "powers everything we have now and for the foreseeable future of population growth" sense, but maybe not in a "gigantic power-hungry megaprojects which aren't remotely possible today" sense?
Most likely, spacecraft will rely on power delivered via laser.
If anybody succeeds in working out D-3He fusion, that could work in a spacecraft. (D-T, no.) We could probably scare up enough 3He to use for that, if there weren't too many.
If anybody in the universe is doing interstellar travel I think they would have developed D-D fusion which is somewhat more difficult than D-³He or D-T fusion but probably possible with the a scaled up version of the same machine.
Outside the frost line there is a lot of water and a higher percentage of D relative to H so it seems possible to "live off the land" between the stars without being dependent on starshine. A D-D reactor would produce ³He and T, a lot of those products would burn up in the reactor because the reaction rates are high but it would probably be possible to separate some of those out and use it as a breeder reactor that makes fuel for D-³He and D-T reactors elsewhere. I could picture the big D-D reactor running on a large comet or dwarf planet like Pluto producing D-³He for smaller reactors on spacecraft. (D-T not only produces a lot of neutrons but the T has a half life of 12 or so years and won't last for long journies.)
My guess is that interstellar travelers would develop a lifestyle that works around the frost line, where generic bodies above a certain size have liquid water inside. If they were grabby they might consume Ceres or Pluto but might not really care about dry, idiosyncratic worlds like the Earth and Mars.
Anybody doing interstellar travel should hang their collective head-analog in shame if they haven't mastered aneutronic p-11B fusion yet. (They will need to have figured out how to reflect xrays.)
Having got used to spending interminable ages out in the infinite chill void, they probably have come to prefer being there, so have no desire to roast deep in a stellar gravity well. Their equipment might not even work if warmed too much.
I think parent was talking about space applications.
Anyway unlike fusion, seasonal thermal storage is viable and available now, and will be scaled up in immediate future. Also, with electrical vehicles inducing massive investment into the grid, there will be both pressure and resources to solve the rest.
Since we're talking in present tense that's the remaining 1%.
Moon base can be fine with power beamed from a satellite or plain mirrors in orbit, no atmosphere in the way. Might end up being still cheaper than hauling nuclear reactor there plus all the infra to reliably dump waste heat from it.
It works super-great, collected in the tropics and shipped in chemical form. Before you object to depending on imported liquid fuel, consider that most of the world does already.
The main difference is that literally anybody can make it, not just "oil exporting countries" and "fuel refiners". And, will. And export excess production when local tankage is full.
I do software for a living so that gives you my level of ignorance of the real world.
I do have two question about solar
- is it “drivable” / “pilotable” ?
meaning reacting to surge in the grid? My understanding is that this feature is highly desirable for a grid.
- can we actually build enough solar panel, physically ?
Don’t we need some rare earth thingy that is not in sufficient quantity on our planet as far as we know ? ( follow up : if there is enough, will there be enough in 200 years ? )
The "rare-earths thingy" is a common, transparent lie told frequently about both solar and wind. No rare-earths are used in any solar panel. Some wind turbine generators have used them, but not the big ones. And, "rare-earths" are not in fact rare. So, a double lie.
Solar panels provide cheap power generation on a schedule. For dispatchability, you rely on storage. There are many different kinds of practical, efficient storage; which are used where will depend on local conditions. Which will be cheapest isn't clear, but probably not batteries. Batteries used won't need lithium, or rare-earths, either
The lie most frequently repeated is that storage needs some sort of "breakthrough". Second is that the small amount built out means more than that there is not enough renewable power yet to charge it from; when there is will be time to build it. In the meantime, we fill in with NG burning. The third is that "pumped hydro", the most common used just now, needs "special geography". Hills are very common.
The lie most frequently repeated about solar is that there is any shortage of places to put it. It is most efficiently floated on water reservoirs, where it cuts evaporation and biofouling, although efficiency is only one consideration. It shares nicely with pasture and even crop land, cutting water demand and heat stress without reducing yield.
There will never be any shortage of wind or solar: need more, build more; materials needed are all abundant. Likewise storage. Costs are still falling as fast as ever, but are already lowest of any energy source ever known.
They are in ores, but are mixed with other lanthanides that they are expensive to separate from. Two of them, yttrium and scandium, are not lanthanides and are relatively easy to separate out.
A new powerfully magnetic iron-nickel allotrope may eliminate much of the market for several of them.
In regards to your first question, the word you're looking for in google-able energy industry jargon is "dispatchable". And yes, dispatchability of intermittent generation is achieved in a couple of ways in contemporary electricity networks:
1. Deliberately backing off wind or solar generation from full capacity to provide reserves for demand spikes, transmission/generator outages, etc. This means other generation that may otherwise not have generated at all over that period, is brought online to cover the shortfall.
2. Co-locating grid-scale batteries at intermittent generation sites ("hybrid generation facilities" in energy industry jargon) to cover short-term contingency events.
Thank you, not my industry and not my language so “dispatchable” is a valuable keyword for me. ( it would be “pilotable” in French; if you ever have to discuss that abroad with my snotty kind )
Anyway. What I read is : having something else on the side can make solar dispatchable.
Realistically, what would be that other things ?
Nuclear don’t like to be turned on/off.
Wind has the same issue… are we saying the good ol’ coal burning kettle ?
If they can get a continuous fusion reaction going converting the heat energy from that to electricity won't be a problem. Getting a contained fusion reaction that gives out more energy than input is the problem how to convert that into electricity is not going to be a problem.
> If they can get a continuous fusion reaction going converting the heat energy from that to electricity won't be a problem.
Even accepting the qualification that's not just a mere matter of engineering, capturing that heat from a source that hot is not without trouble. A bit like how there is plenty of energy in a single lightning strike and yet we can't easily catch it even though in principle 'just build a large enough capacitor and connect it to a lightning rod' is a workable recipe.
> Getting a contained fusion reaction that gives out more energy than input is the problem
Not in the least because the container itself is a very hard problem to solve.
> how to convert that into electricity is not going to be a problem.
It is also a problem, albeit a lesser one.
The better way to look at all of these fusion projects is a way to do an end run around arms control limitations with as a very unlikely by-product the possible future generation of energy. But I would not hold my breath for that. Meanwhile, I'm all for capturing more of the energy output by that other fusion reactor that we all have access to, and learning how to store it over longer periods. Preferably to start with a couple of days with something that doesn't degrade (think very high density super capacitor rather than a battery), but I'll take advanced battery technology if it can be done cheap enough per storage cycle. We're getting there.
It doesn't make heat. It makes fast neutrons. Turning them into usable heat is a project of its own.
Turning dumb heat into electric power is expensive. Nothing that depends on doing that can ever compete with wind and solar, anymore.
Tritium doesn't grow on trees. Making it by blasting those hot neutrons into a thousand tons of FLiBe is easy enough. Getting your few grams a day, at PPB concentration, out of that thousand tons of stuff is... nobody has any idea how. But you need to, to have fuel for tomorrow.
No, there won't be any of that. It would be fantastically more expensive than fission. Fission is not competitive, and gets less so by the day. Fusion is nothing but a money pit (with the just barely-possible exception of D-3He).
Saying that there are unknown engineering challenges is kind of a "duh", otherwise we wouldn't be researching we would be implementing. As you also mentioned there are other alternatives which we could consider than tritium.
> Fission is not competitive, and gets less so by the day.
> Fusion is nothing but a money pit (with the just barely-possible exception of D-3He).
We genuinely don't know if fusion is a money pit or not, because we don't have any idea how much a successful form will cost. Tritium blankets may be easy or not. Maybe helion's D-3HE will have a breakthrough. Maybe it's ICF.
I've not seen suggestions by anyone that wind and solar build-outs stop, or get diminished. Indeed at this point because the cost are low, industry will continue to invest in them regardless.
However, we will need a lot more energy production than folks think. We need to decarbonize the atmosphere. And that's going to require a lot of power.
All that aside, solar and wind are not getting you to mars in a timely fashion. We have reasons to research fusion that escape large commercial power generation.
We certainly need a lot more energy production but to decarbonize the atmosphere there has be a target level with an evidential basis on which to proceed. If it's considered (as by many) that we have a climate emergency (though this is not reported at all in the IPCC report) then any decarbonization at all will obviously serve for starters. If this is not the case then there are other considerations such as the fact that as CO2 levels have risen so has global food production - about 30% over the last 30 years.
Simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (LCC) (4%). CO2 fertilization effects explain most of the greening trends in the tropics, whereas climate change resulted in greening of the high latitudes and the Tibetan Plateau..
https://sites.bu.edu/cliveg/files/2016/04/zhu-greening-earth...
This is not a surprise given that carbon is needed for plant growth, a fact well understood by commercial growers who pipe CO2 into their greenhouses. So one issue might be, if decarbonization is successful then what might be the acceptable level of reduction in global food supply?
Another issue relates to temperature. From an analysis of 974 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries it’s been concluded that twenty times more people die from the cold as from the heat.https://composite-indicators.jrc.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/... A recent paper (Dec 12 2022) regarding heart attacks states “extreme temperatures accounted for 2.2 additional deaths per 1,000 on hot days and 9.1 additional deaths per 1,000 on cold days.” Circulation. doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.061832.
Do any of the reports present an ethical problem? No, they do not given an extreme interpretation of climate models.
They put 2.05 MJ in and got 3.15 MJ out. The 300MJ comes from equipment inefficiency- remember this is a research facility to prove plasma physics and ignition itself, mainly designed for weapons research. The fact they got definite fusion at 1.53x input energy is not just breakeven, but net gain. This is the first time ever we've gotten net gain, in any fusion device. A lot of people in gov leadership thought fusion was impossible, the fact they can said they did it, despite 1980s era technology and a shoestring budget for decades, really says something.
ICF is just one fusion technology, and probably not the best one, but fusion in general will probably see a massive budget increase worldwide now that it's been proven it can be done.
I fully expect a working fusion plant of some kind by 2030, assuming funding increases. Once we get them commercialized; coal, wind, solar and other power production will be obsolete for the most part. We can also use fusion heat to separate waste into it's base elements (you can recycle anything!), and help make any process needing a lot of thermal or electrical energy more efficient.
Regular fission plants take 5+ years to construct. So in the next 2-3 years you're expecting this technology to become mature enough to roll out and hook up to the power grid?
By 2030? Lol. Lmao, even. 2050 if we're lucky--we're still not even close to developing a reactor that can produce meaningful amounts of power for a sustained period. It'll take decades more to get to that point, and once all the technical limitations have been crossed and we figure out how to get enough tritium, the actual hard work begins of getting it online and integrated with our current system. Fusion is distant future technology.
To have a hope of supplying grid power, they need to scale up the energy gain by four orders of magnitude and reactor run time by 12 orders of magnitude.
Those are just two of the engineering problems. It'll be a while, and I doubt it will ever compete with solar, wind, and storage.
Remember that the human genome project was started in in 1990, completed in 2003. In 2003 it took a year to sequence 80% of the human genome, now it takes a day to do 98%. In 1990 they had the understanding on how to sequence DNA, but scaling that across whole human genome seemed like monumental task.
I'm guessing in a decade we'll have a viable early stage industrial process, and in 2 decades we have commissioned fusion reactors.
If we don't kill the planet with nuclear war or the climate crisis.
> Maybe not on earth, but there are applications in deep space.
Depends on how long the interstellar craft is supposed to travel. If it's under 100 years, fission should be able to do the trick of keeping the craft warm and the lights on for the sealed ecosystem to function during the decades of coasting between stars.
Fusion rockets would be more convenient than fission ones because you can store the hydrogen you need in the form of water and water also acts as a great radiation shield while in deep space. Then, to brake, you use your radiation shield as reaction mass for fission or fusion rockets.
If we are talking about much more than that, fusion is probably a better answer as fission fuel will half-life itself into paperweights over a grand transgalactic tour.
You'll need a constant power supply for the entirety of the trip. After doing the math, it turns out, fission seems quite viable - all usual fuels, in storage, have half-lives of more than 10,000 years.
So, if you have enough fissiles for keeping the closed ecosystem happy for the duration of the flight, you can go quite far.
The ship/colony will need to enter orbit around a star and drop by a rocky planet at some point, to gather more fissiles and reaction mass (and other materials needed for fixes and upgrades), so it wouldn't be able to stay indefinitely in deep space. If it's fusion-driven, a gas giant may be a good option for both fuel and reaction mass, and icy moons may work well for replacing water.
I'm not talking about travel. I am talking about permanently living between the stars, and essentially living off hydrogen harvested from the interstellar medium.
You are operating under the rather naive assumption that the people and resources used in fusion research are fungible with the people and resources used in other things.
When you have a bunch of people who know how to build nuclear bombs sitting around with nothing to do, you damn well keep them busy before another country finds them a job.
Having worked in the field for 6 years, the estimated cost per shot at NIF is roughly $1MM. The estimated cost for a day of shots at OMEGA is $250k-$300k.
The cost per target varies a lot due to the precise manufacturing tolerances and the methods to get them. For example, the sphere with the fuel in it is made by dropping liquid glass from a drop tower. And then metrology is done on hundreds and hundreds of glass spheres.
So though the electricity might cost that, we are talking about a building in which just the lasers and their optical paths take up 3 foot ball fields of advanced warehouse space. And the target chamber is at ultra high vacuum, which is 10 meters in diameter. There are also countless diagnostics, computers, and other electronics, the lights for all the facility, and the number of people required to run it so this delicate experiment goes off without a hitch.
Honestly, it's almost not worth talking about as a power source anytime soon. Even if Q > 2 on NIF there are countless engineering problems that would have to be overcome (and haven't really been thought too hard on in the ICF field) to get a power reactor out of this tech.
My two cents, look towards MIT and CFS for news on their SPARC tokamak and plans for ARC tokamak. Based on some data I have seen, SPARC should hit Q>1 pretty easily. With some estimates of reaching Q> 3 to 9. And before you scoff at it, this reactor design is using magnetic tech that has proven it can withstand and produce a 20T magnetic field! In MCF, field strength and heating are the two key metrics. To put this into perspective, the massive tokamak being built in Europe has a MAX possible field strength of 13T, assuming it's run to the edge of it's theoretical design limitations. The SPARC one hasn't even been run to it's design limitations, most likely due to the mechanical stresses a 20T field produces in a 3-4 meter D coil.
Give it a read. Intertial confinement fusion with a Q > 1 may very well point the way towards a realistic powerplant. Fusion is at a point it deserves investment. The NIF cost about the same as a single b-2 bomber.
Total annual US public research into fusion that is not ITER or this project (which does not come from the fusion pot. As others have said this project was built for weapons research) is about $300 million per year[1]. We, as a country, do not give a rats ass about having fusion as a power source. VC funding recently (for the first time) supported many fusion startup ideas at or above the $300 million level. Too bad ZIRP is over and private funding is now likely to dry up. The recent private funding in fusion was really amazing. Many new ideas and methods are being tried. This is what fusion research needed. Not spending billions on magnets and cement in France that is ITER. Hopefully some of them have a long enough runway to get promising work done and get follow-up funding.
We may be certain, anyway, that all the startups will spend all the money they get. There will be no power generated. The investors will not get any of their money back.
That would be fine, except some of the investors are pension funds.
As I understand it that's largely because some of their equipment is outdated or not optimised. Building a new facility from scratch would result in a much lower power consumption from the grid.
given how long it takes to build these places, I feel like the number of iteration cycles is an important metric, especially when other options are not standing still.
I do understand that with more focus things can happen faster but you can really only pour so much concrete per day. Hopeful that we can figure out "leaner" ways to get this done.
I would love to see progress on this stuff, just don't like the idea of betting on successive megaprojects in the age of "a website is hard".
If it takes 300 one time in the future to start a long term reaction that’s a price I think we would all pay. The fact that we proved the idea now makes this just an engineering problem.
I'm not trying to undermine but more just act as a reminder to some folk. There is no such thing as "just an engineering problem". These things do not exist in a vacuum. It is a part of the tripod of economics and politics. If any one of these three buckles, the whole thing doesn't happen. Concord was an engineering problem we solved, but the economics and politics around it made it a white elephant. Here's hoping this doesn't happen to this.
Now add in the 50% efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity (and that's very optimistic), and it's only 1.5 megajoules, or 0.5%, right where I calculated it based on initial information.
IANAP, but I see no path forward to sufficient Q-total using plasma fusion to put this to any practical use. Unless the reaction can somehow be self-sustaining, I do not believe this will ever work.
don't you think it's nuts that your arrogance would have you believe that the people on the ground doing the experiment know less about the power consumption and output than you do? Because I do.
There's a lot of supporting stuff as well as energy to drive that stuff that goes into leading edge tech development like this, that does not matter in terms of the reaction itself.
If they say they achieved more output than input, then I will believe them over a random HN comment snob any day of any week.
I'm sorry but you sound much more arrogant here with your strange assumptions. AFAIK all of those things he said are based on the data from the experiment. And I've read the same (i.e. that it's very far from being energy efficient).
> will believe
Wouldn't be better if you were able in to verify stuff to some degree yourself instead blindly trusting every expert (not at all implying that the people who did this experiment are untrustworthy but your bound to run into some bad apples with this attitude eventually)
The paper was very clear what was involved and that information was poorly communicated. The experiment used X energy from a laser pulse to get Y thermal energy. The issue w0mbat referred to is to be self sustaining you need to use the output energy to drive the process. Aka the important number is after all relevant losses including electricity > lasers > fusion > heat > electricity, with each of those stages have losses. The reason they don’t communicate end to end efficiency is from a scientific standpoint it’s meaningless as they aren’t converting any thermal energy into electricity.
For example p + p Fusion releases neutrinos which then escape any practical device without depositing their energy as heat. This isn’t a concern with DT fusion but again the point is we don’t really care about the actual mass to energy conversion but rather the amount of useful energy obtained.
none of what anyone said is about a self-sustaining reaction.
this is about more power leaving the reaction chamber than what entered it. that's all the announcement is about.
this is NOT about how much energy it takes to ready the lasers. this is NOT about the electricity consumed by lighting, computers, cooling, or measurement or anything else-- none of that counts when you are measuring the efficiency of the reaction itself.
this is about more energy leaving the reaction chamber than went in.
understanding that is key to understanding the significance of the announcement, and this is significant.
and I maintain that the poster I originally called arrogant is arrogant, because they indicated in their comment that they knew how to calculate reaction efficiency better than the physicists doing the work. I called it arrogant because it is --objectively-- an arrogant position to take.
if that makes me arrogant, then so be it. my arrogance is independent of theirs and has no bearing on comments made before my own, and my comment did not influence theirs. (they were being arrogant before I pointed it out.)
> none of what anyone said is about a self-sustaining reaction.
Actual power plants are self sustaining as in they use the electricity they produce to operate, it’s mandatory though not sufficient for any commercial fusion power plant.
So, this isn’t about a different way to “calculate reaction efficiency better than the physicists doing the work” he was directly quoting their numbers from the paper. It’s only a question of communicating the meaning of efficiency.
> this is about more energy leaving the reaction chamber than went in.
The exact same energy was there before and after fusion only it’s form changed. It might seem pedantic to point that out, but if you don’t make it clear people will misunderstand.
Also, the applied laser energy also leaves the reaction chamber so any fusion would be net positive thermal energy by that yardstick.
> Actual power plants are self sustaining
Actual power plants are not necessarily self-sustaining and practically none of them can start if the grid power is not available. See: black start power plants and https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w
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.
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.
“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
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
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)
I think it might be an allusion to alchemy. Basically, the alchemists believed that ash (what was left after burning something) was the soul of all things...And-- this is where my complete lack of understanding about science shows-- I'm pretty sure Ash has lots of carbon? It's, you know, poetic. Many have claimed that poems are the "language of paradox" so it's okay for it to be a little non-literal. My interpretation of it, though, is that the soul is something impure that you must burn away, or maybe that the soul is polluted by our own words and behavior. It's definitely not meant to be scientifically accurate.
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…
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.
You and I are complicated but we're made of elements
Like a box of paints that are mixed to make every shade
They either combine to make a chemical compound or stand alone as they are
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.
I joke with my Son all the time about turning Mercury into gold (He works in the nuclear industry).
Once you get past the enormous energy costs to do this you have a secondary problem, all the gold produced this way is radioactive and it beta decays to.. Mercury.
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.
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.
Phosphorus is supposed to be rare in the wider world. Considering how central it is to everything important, life might find it very difficult to start in our temperature range, without.
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.
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?
In terms of "where do the electrons come from", an ordinary neutron in free space has a half-life of about 10 minutes, decaying through beta decay which produces a proton, an electron and a neutrino.
That sounds fairly energetic... So after 10min you'd have some odd mix of heavy elements probably approaching a decent fraction of the volume of everest. Half the volume of everest x (densityofgranite / densityoflead)
That kind of expansion rate has to rival any explosion imaginable.
It's essentially a giant atomic nucleus, so absent a star's worth of gravity holding it together it's going to decay rapidly into stable isotopes. So essentially it would act more or less the same as a huge fission bomb of the same mass.
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.
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.
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.
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?
You are right about supernova hampering life evolution, but it's unclear how long the fireworks lasted. In my comment I argued that it is possible to have the conditions of life emerge much earlier than 13.5 billion years. Not that it necessarily happened.
Regarding the second point have a look at https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-GW170817Kilonova/in... . That isn't my field of specialization, so I am not sure about recent publications. At the time though this was a big deal as kilonovas seem to be the primary source of heavy nuclei in the universe. That particular event crested between 1/100th to 1/1000th solar masses worth of heavy ( heavier than iron) nuclei. This is a greater rate than supernovas estimations.
> how LIGO changed the understanding of how heavier elements are usually formed, guessing it changed the expected neutron star prevalence?
It's not about the prevalence, but about the light curves observed during the event AT 2017gfo. They indicate significant heavy metal ejection but, what's interesting, also production.
> mergers of neutron stars contribute to rapid neutron capture (r-process) nucleosynthesis
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.
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….
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).
> 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.
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)?
That's because the periodic table is essentially about chemistry (i.e. about electron orbitals), not about nuclear physics (i.e. the atom's nucleus). For example it doesn't talk much about isotopes, aside from usually reporting the average atomic mass.
It will happily fuse further. It just won't support the outside of a star against gravity, while doing it. So the star collapses, fuses lots more stuff even heavier than iron, and then explodes. Most of the iron and heavier stuff fuses into the core of a neutron star, the ultimate in energy-consuming fusion.
Iron will not happily fuse further because this NEEDS energy and where would that energy come from?
"heavier than iron" elements are produced when a star explodes because that collapse produces enormous amounts of energy.
During the collapse, the outer edge of the star is accelerated to something like 20% of the speed of light, that is an ENORMOUS amount of energy slamming down on the core.
Lastly, neutron starts don't produce energy, they are the incompressible remnants of a dead star.
You answer your own question: the energy for further fusion, all the way to neutron degeneracy, is provided by gravitational collapse. The outer layers fusing provide energy for the explosion.
If I understand this right, I think some of the lighter than iron elements are also created in those exotic processes. But yes, unlike for the heavier-than-iron elements, the lighter ones are _also_ created in normal stellar fusion.
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.
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.
Tritium has a half-life of 12 years so there is no deep pool of tritium upon which to draw. The primary source of tritium on earth is cosmic-ray interactions in the upper atmosphere that produces 7.5Kg of tritium a year worldwide.[1]
Isn't that going to cause a serious problem if it requires 323Kg/yr of tritium just to power New York City?
Apparently no, because it can be made by the fusion process itself, via contact with lithium, and there's enough proven reserves of the latter to supply us for 100s of years.
Nobody knows how to get tritium at PPB concentration from the thousand tons of radioactive molten FLiBe it is dissolved in. You have to process all of it every day because you need that tritium for fuel tomorrow.
> 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.
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.
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.
That such a small amount of matter could generate so much power is pretty remarkable. I might be way off base but from what I can find online it seems you'd need over 2000 times as much uranium?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
If I understand correctly, tritium is the result of bombarding lithium with neutrons.
I'm not sure how tokomaks are expected to work; do you just add lithium and expect the tritium to get where it needs to go to keep the reaction going, or do you actively remove gases from vessel, filter out the tritium, and re-use it as fuel?
Either way, I don't imagine it'd be too hard to recapture the stuff.
> It is also why there is so much iron as it is kind of the base state of both of these reactions.
I always thought this is the interesting takeaway, both fusion and fission funnel their constituent matter towards iron, as the final stable state of matter. Far future civilizations will have a lot of iron on their hands.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
> "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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Just bootstrap a second fusion power plant with the first, then continue on, similar to how compilers for a language can be written in the language itself.
Bootstrapping the power plant isn't the problem. The economics of the power plant are the problem, naming producing a worthwhile surplus of power, after accounting for all the power needed by the plant itself.
So if we had the 20% wall plug efficiency, then we need that 3.2:2 ratio to become 10:2 to hit break-even. That looks like a huge gap but maybe there are tricks here that resolve this once you get over the initial gap.
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.
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.
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.
a typical power price at trading hubs is US$40 per megawatt hour, though this varies considerably depending on many factors and is sometimes actually negative
a typical retail price is US$120 per megawatt hour
I think you're out by some orders of magnitude. With the current energy issues in the UK it'd be under £100. Other things suggest in California it's more like 20 cents per kWh so were you thinking ~$20?
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.
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.
The electricity bill is like $2000. It'd waste more money for a manager to think about how to replace equipment, at California pay rates. This whole thread is making me lose faith in HN.
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.
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.
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?
> 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!
I agree.
To explain further, my post and the included (noted silly) analogy were made with respect to explaining the aspect of sillysaurusx's post(s) that boc seemed to be criticizing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly! It's so strange this is somehow made to be about fusion as an energy source.
I'm happy to announce that Q>>1 has already been achieved on multiple occasions. In the cores of the thermonuclear devices tested by the US and USSR in the 50s.
(Unfortunately that technology proved unviable as a path to civilian fusion power.)
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
> 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.
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 …
"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.
>> 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
Ummm.. I thought remote work was no less efficient?
Remote work is fine in some circumstances. One of the circumstances where it is definitely not fine is in designing, manufacturing, and testing high-precision aerospace hardware. You aren't gonna put a 5-axis CNC mill in your garage.
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.
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".
You think their satellite fleet has absolutely no precise equipment for knowing and maintaining its position? Or for communicating with terminals and each other?
Like, come on. I get shitting on Musk is the cool new thing, but this is genuinely the case where SpaceX is doing cool things in space, and at an extremely fast pace. Get over yourself if you can’t see through your Musk hate and only see them as “a company that builds trucks”.
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 higher 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.
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.
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.
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.
Fission means, in practice, paying enough for coal generation, over the decade, to have built enough solar to displace the nuke; and paying many times that, on top, to build the nuke.
So, no. Each dollar diverted from building out solar to mining coal or fooling with nukes brings existential catastrophe nearer.
Simulations and estimations about processes in the physical world always leave room for surprises when one is doing things that haven't been done before.
I think a major bottleneck for fusion research from the lay public (including myself) is lack of interest.
Fission reactors work really well and have been around for 50+ years. If we are going to go nuclear instead of renewable, we need to address the elephant in the room.
The elephant in the room is: why not just fission?
And somehow harnessing the power of the literal sun will have a better safety rate? It's all speculation at this point because fusion doesn't exist yet... but it does seem like a huge undertaking to get superior safety over fission.
It’s not speculation because so much is known about the physics and elements involved. With fusion you want lighter particles which tend to be less radioactive, rather than heavy uranium etc particles for fission.
”Regulatory bodies have vast experience in the realm of safety and security for fission. We are working with them to ensure that all applicable knowledge is transferred to fusion."
Let me put the question another way: suppose we get fusion that's equally as safe as fission like IAEA is saying here. Why would we switch to it if we were unwilling to switch to fission?
You’re making false equivalences, and ignoring all of the fundamental differences between the technologies. The materials involved are different, the chain reactions are different, the kinds of radiation and half lives are different, the way you build the cores are different (and are still being worked on for fusion).
The entire reason why people are working on fusion IS the fact that it’s much much safer due to all of the key differences. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons from fission to transfer, just as lessons from ICE cars have gone to EVs.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The talent + purpose (which drew the talent) was what defined Manhattan. The money came easy when all of the greatest minds in the country were pointing a giant flashing light in one obvious direction.
This is big news but fusion will largely be a product of the people it attracts. The people can do the job attracting money and other talent if it's justified.
I've seen the Canadian gov try to throw money at trying to build a local tech scene and it all went to hucksters, old school finance suits with megacorp resumes, and administrators. While all the tech talent just kept going to SF where the capital was going into high risk ventures... not expensive buildings, events, 'entrepreneur/small business programs', and propping up old school D-round investors. Money is easily wasted even when the pursuit sounds noble and valuable on the surface.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One use for such a 'laser initiated fusion' is the LLNL (Teller) proposed X-Ray laser satellite from the Star Wars program in the 80s. The proposed solution then was to use the X-rays from an exploding bomb at the heart of a satellite and amplify and focus them through a 'lasing' material. It turns out they never found a lasing material that would work, and it would be fairly easy to confuse defeat it, so the project died. What also killed it was the end of the testing program.
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."
Most of the fission energy in an H-bomb comes from the massive amounts of neutrons created by the fusion bomb initiating a fission reaction in the U-238 tamper of the secondary. The primary is used for its X-Rays, which cause the incredible pressures within the secondary by ablating the surface of the cylinder. When you look at this experiment and see it uses x-rays to ablate case containing the hydrogen, causing an implosion, the purpose of the experiment is clear.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes but, as far as I know, research into achieving laser induced fusion hasn't itself run into many classification hurdles. I suspect that may not be the case with the scaling phase.
It is interesting that there hasn't been many classification hurdles on something that is pretty explicitly weapons research. My guess is that they achieved high Q values a long time ago in classified research using mechanisms that would give away some secrets.
Well, its not so much in making the bomb, but the particular ways of focusing the X-Rays and particular efficiencies in creating the tamper for the most velocity and thus most compression in the secondary.
The key thing here is the Lasers aren't doing the immediate compression, the lasers are simulating X-Ray radiation which then is ablating the casing around the tritium. Figuring out how to create and amplify a x-ray pulse was a major sticking point in the Star Wars program.
The bigger the target, the more energy is needed to compress it. So it would require more laser energy to get to 100 MJ or 1 GJ, I think. But maybe only a few times more powerful. (Pity they didn't build in some head room!)
The question is whether once ignition is achieved there could be a way to design the target/geometry in such a way that the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining/self-propagating.
The history of thermonuclear weapons leads me to think that the answer may be yes. There does not seem to be any real upper limit to how large a thermonuclear weapon can be made. In the 50's and/or 60's there were proposals to build GT devices. I don't think the fission trigger for such a weapon could have scaled by nearly as much.
So by analogy if a relatively small fission trigger can cause a fusion explosion that is many orders of magnitudes larger maybe one or more tiny laser induced fusion reactions could be used to trigger a much larger one.
If that were the case the efficiency of the laser trigger would be of little importance.
the unsolved issue with laser fusion (ICF) as an energy source is the fast
degradation of high powered lasers. High powered beam degrades optics on it's path and those things are expensive. ITER has similar problem with superconducting magnets.
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.
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.
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.
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]
You are correct that in a Teller-Ulam design most of the energy can come from fusion, but as a note it's generally a fission-fusion-fission design in "modern" deployments with about 50% of the energy coming from fusion.
"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."
Yes, but if you get into the details... The second stage of a bomb is the fusion in which a cylinder of hydrogen and/or lithium is encased by U-238. The primary stage, a trinity-like a-bomb, forces the cylinder to compress by its x-rays. The fusion reaction creates a bunch of energy, but more importantly a huge amount of neutrons. These neutrons cause the u-238 to undergo fission, which is responsible for a majority of the energy and pretty much all of the fallout.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Uhhh... it's definitely being used for "stockpile stewardship." The fusion crowd went splitsies with the weapons folks to get this funded in the first place.
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?
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.
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The issue is, we've been able to get more energy out of a fusion reaction than put in for 60-70 years now. The H-Bomb is very good at doing that. You will say, yeah, but an H-Bomb is a one time use thing, and it has a habit of destroying everything. If you look into how the second stage of an hbomb is speculated to work, its pretty much identical to this experiment, that is by design, not by accident.
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.”
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.
>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.
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.
> It's big because the people doing it call it big.
How does "[It's big b]ecause sustainable positive energy out has never been achieved before in 60 years of research" translate to "because we say it's big" in your head?
You might not consider it big, but a specific reason was provided and it had zero similarity to your rephrasing.
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.
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.
> 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'?
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.
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.
Irrelevant? Seems like Q is one of two factors in that calculation. If the throughput is tiny, you're useless, but if your Q is too small, the same is true.
The higher the Q, the lower throughput needed for feasibility.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
> 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.
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
That's quite high. Here in Germany they assume 530-800€ per kW_peak for a utility-scale ground-mounted system (2021) [0]. You can add additional CAPEX for inflation and expansion of the grid, but <$1500 per kW_peak (aka $1.5m per MW) should be quite possible. Especially if you include scaling effects.
If you add batteries for night-time balancing, LCOE roughly doubles for now.
Economically, no other energy source will beat non-winter day-time PV in the foreseeable future. Imo, as long as other plants are running during those times, investing in PV is a no-brainer.
I suggest we do not lay all of our eggs in one basket. Climate change can be best countered if we use the sweet spot of all current available and anticipated technologies, including photovoltaic, long & short term storage solutions, and fusion. There is no need to bet on one technology at this stage.
Solar panels are cheap and the market appears to be fine with unreliable power[0] if it's cheap enough.
[0] Unreliable, but predictable that is. You can estimate with decent confidence what the weather will be like tomorrow and you can definitely tell what it's going to be a few hours from now, so energy auctions a day ahead are feasible.
Do you have week long blackouts currently? In any given year you can count on a week where a panel only produces 10%. It just has to be cloudy or rainy. However much solar we add, even with storage to get through a night, needs some other source to get through the cloudy week, unless we are ok with blackouts.
A panel. Panels spread over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres produce power averaged over that area, so they're much more consistent and predictable.
HVDC lines help with this a lot. It has gotten to a point where there are serious plans to build a long, undersea HVDC line from the UK to Morocco which, get this, is poised to cost less than the equivalent(GWh delivered annually) Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant:
Glad it will work there. There has been local opposition to new transmission lines in the USA (see Maine recently) so when folks say “just build powerlines” all I can think of is the difficulty of the land assembly and permitting. Technically it is easy, it is all the humans in the way that make it hard.
The batteries do exist, but it’s better to use them in cars. If we start diverting our battery supply for grid storage it will drive up the price of EVs.
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.
People should understand that it is all an energy problem, regardless of how that energy is currently delivered. Transportation can be (and, of course, is being electrified), most industrial processes and agriculture currently use fossil fuels as inputs because its the cheapest source of input.
For example, nitrogen fixation for fertilizer currently uses natural gas almost entirely for the source of hydrogen. Vastly cheaper energy means it would make much more sense to switch this to electricity, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.5808....
But I agree with your sentiment, there are a lot of engineering details to consider before one can shout "free energy".
If there’s a glut of cheap electrical energy, there would be a rapid push to electrify things like iron and steel production (8% of emissions), heating (10% of emissions) and transportation (10%)… and so on.
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
$600 per ton of CO2. The industry is trying to get to $100 per ton of CO2.
Energy estimated is 1,200 kilowatt-hours per ton of CO2 removed.
Nuclear fission energy averages 0.4 cents/kWh. That's $480 in energy costs alone (ignoring profit margins for removal, etc).
Why would bleeding edge fusion that requires cutting edge lasers, magnets, and various other containment stuff have a cheaper energy generation cost? I could be wrong, but I don't think nuclear waste (which is the primary difference with fusion) is the primary cost contributor. So why would you want to invest in more expensive fusion to remove all this carbon instead of cheaper fission? Nuclear waste by the way isn't waste. It can be reused in breeder reactors and it's used a lot in medicine (I could be wrong but one of the reasons nuclear imaging has gotten more expensive is because radioactive materials are more difficult to obtain due to reduction in global fission energy).
Those are figures for current electrical production schemes.
After decades of R&D fusion should become significantly cheaper than fission per kWh if only due to having less of a regulatory burden and smoother permitting process.
It’s more expensive now, but in the long run it will be cheaper.
You hope. It’s not “more expensive now”. It’s infinitely more expensive because we can’t even build one. It’s unclear how much a fusion reactor will end up costing but I wouldn’t use hope to blind myself into thinking it’ll be 10x cheaper than fission. There’s certainly reason to be hopeful because solar and wind are cheaper, but construction for those is also relatively simple and easy to mass manufacture most of it. Fusion reactors will probably look more like fission than not (ie complex to mass manufacture, still require complex structures, need regular complicated maintenance due to radioactive decay in the containment materials etc). Additionally, solar and wind don’t pose real threats to established fossil fuel interests. Fusion would and it’s unclear how they might respond from a regulatory hurdle perspective.
Fusion plants should be able to save a lot of money though simpler permitting processes, not needing the same level of containment structures, needing less security, and less regulator scrutiny. The equipment itself might be more expensive at the start but if we build these plants at scale those costs should reduce over time.
The first commercial reactor designs are probably 50 years away and another 50 years before costs come down to be reasonable / we can build enough to start replacing existing fission and coal. This is from the CEO of General Fusion a leader in the space. I think if even the fusion people are saying “build fission today to solve global warming” then that tells you something about the time scale this is happening on.
I suspect the regulatory environment is from regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry. Otherwise why would Gen IV reactors, which can’t meltdown, be suffering many regulatory delays? What kind of nuclear proliferation concerns exist for reactors built and deployed within the US?
There are a lot of bigger picture items around energy. Part of Europe's challenge with the war in Ukraine is that a lot of countries buy Russian gas & oil.
>Russia accounted for about 55% of Germany’s natural gas imports and 35% of Germany’s oil imports last year, causing Germany to resist a blanket European Union ban on Russian energy.
If every country could assure their energy independence, geopolitics would look very different. Yes, there are still many problems, like natural resources. But if you can assure all your residents can keep the lights on, their houses warm and the economy moving (EV's for transit, technology)... its very reassuring.
Cheaper and cleaner energy has never in the history of enery lead to global reduction of pollution, actually pretty much the opposite. Plus, nuclear power is already virtually free and has been available since the 1970s. If stopping climate change was an energy source problem, it would have already been solved then.
Basically the only energy that is cheaper and cleaner than fossil fuels is wind and solar, which have only gotten to that point in the last 1-2 decades, so it seems difficult to make claims about what has happened in "history".
You must have some bizarre way of framing things to make today statement - you should at least tell us what that is since you must know that you are making a controversial claim.
LMAO. Good luck to get funding passed through GOP-controlled congress with all these oil and gas companies rallied behind. There is zero chance that the USA will ever do that.
With abundant electricity wouldn't we face another type of global warming? We will would start to consume so much electricity that this will heat up the planet?
We aren't "heating up the planet" .. we're "insulating the atmosphere".
Increased C02 (and the close following methane and water vapor increases) serve to trap more of the heat radiated outwards that would otherwise escape.
The vast bulk of that heat comes from the visible light of the sun which passes easily through the atmosphere coming in, gets converted to IR energy as it warms the earth and oceans, and then escapes outwards.
Our changes to the atmosphere have disturbed that balance.
Your comment has some small merit, but you would need to work through the heat output of human generated power and then compare that to the daily heat energy originally from the sun that radiates outward.
Of course I did. It is rude to suggest otherwise. Your blanket assertion followed by your long explanation is confusing and less helpful to anyone asking the original question than it would be without it.
I have no idea. Obviously we get more heat from the sun than we generate on our own. That does not make your blanket assertion true.
The original question is a good one. We will use more energy as it gets cheaper (see monster trucks, Las Vegas, Dubai). We should be thinking of what we will do with the waste heat when everyone has a fusion reactor.
Your repeated assertion that I made a "blanket assertion" suggests you're either someone with english as a second language or else someone who stubbornly digs in (unless there's another explanation here?).
To be clear I made a qualified assertion; the phrase "Relative scales of various factors matter here" does the work.
> Obviously we get more heat from the sun than we generate on our own.
Yes - but, again, How much more?
If it's barely twice as much (which seems unlikely) then heat from our activity is a major factor in all this.
If it's 100,000x times more then I stand firm, heat from our activity has effectively zero impact on the AGW issue (although other by-products from our daily routines are the crux of the problem).
If it's some other factor then what relative signifigance does our human heat generation have?
> I have no idea.
It's a shame you didn't grab an envelope and make use of the back, it's a classic Fermi problem [1] of the kind I and my class mates were posed in high school and the kind of thing many other HN commeters would delight in taking a run at.
If you're feeling game you might like to start with the daily heating of the earths surface from the sun, and then look at the petajoules of energy generated and consumed per day and take a stab at guesstimating the waste (unused, released into the lower earths surface layer) heat as a percentage (or google efficiencies, etc).
But some people would start driving 6 ton vehicles because fuel is free. Limiting factor for crytpo mining would be only number of hardware you can get (provided crypto survives for so long). Some people would probably do the math and decide that thermal insulation is too expensive, and run heating/cooling on max. I could probably come up with more examples.
EDIT: from quick google query it looks like per day earth receives equivalent of yearly power consumption (not only electricity but also fuel). So we would need to x356 our energy consumption which is not that much unreasonable if you could have for example heated outdoor pool for free anywhere in the world.
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.
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.
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".
It probably is though. Sure, they didn't have as much distractions, but they also didn't have the sum total of the world's knowledge at their fingertips in the same way we do today.
People having been saying "this next generation is inferior to the last one" since the ancient Greeks. If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario.
This general idea that a previous generation was better because they lead a less pampered life goes back to some of the earliest writing. Yet here we are.
World changing people seem to me to be very much the right people in the right place at the right time. The best way to find them is to try to create those places now.
Opportunities for WWII and post-war era research don’t exist now. Everything with funding is very short term, politicized, and narrowly focused within a micro specialty.
Realistically, I don’t think that will change until it has to.
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.
> 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.
A lot of wonderful people are doing that, but do those jobs pay anywhere close to the ad companies? Surely there's a lot of bright minds lost to the allure of money.
At this point, it's not even about "money" in the traditional sense (wealth, prestige, etc.); rather, it's about stability, the alleged "American dream". I live in Chicago, so I'll consider the local national laboratory, Argonne. They pay their software engineers $101,888 per year, according to Glassdoor ($71,640 after state and federal tax). Using the 28% rule most lenders use nowadays, with today's rates, that's a maximum mortgage payment of $1,671 at 7%. However, the median house price in DuPage County is $335,000 [1], and a 30-year mortgage (with 10% down) has a monthly payment of just over $2,000. No dice - even for a highly skilled professional living in one of the most affordable parts of the country. Keep in mind that you still need to pay 2.3% per annum property tax, besides owning a car and saving for retirement. It's just not nearly as feasible a path towards financial stability as taking a $"TECH" job with west coast pay.
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.
lmao, brilliant scientist Elon Musk is NOT. A closer comparison would be general Groves, someone who can get the team and resources in place so the work can get done.
He's actually the complete opposite based on reports of what it is like to work with him at SpaceX and Tesla in recent years. Employees describe having to avoid him so he doesn't meddle in the projects and screw them up.
Maybe he was like you describe long ago but something...happened.
This is not quite correct. LLNL is a Federally Funded Research & Development Center (FFRDC) which is owned, as a facility, by the government, but managed and staffed by a non-profit contracting organization called Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC (LLNS) under a contract funded by DOE/NNSA. The board of LLNS is made up of representatives from universities (California + TAMU), other scientific non-profits (Battelle Memorial Institute), and private nuclear ventures (e.g. Bechtel.) LLNS pays, with very few exceptions, staff salaries at LLNL, and they are not beholden to the government civilian pay schedule.
Be that as it may, a number of positions at LLNL, including many of those affiliated with NIF, require that candidate is a US person and is eligible for a DOE security clearance. A security clearance is not necessarily binary on being a US person, but a number of national-security related positions may require not only the clearance, but also that the candidate is a US person (or outright forbid foreign nationals.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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).
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Good things often have dubious or downright evil origins (which would never be justifiable a priori).
A relatively recent example: development of cancer chemotherapy began with the incidental finding that the chemical warfare agent nitrogen mustard reduced the white cell count of affected soldiers.
We make progress building on the shoulders of giants, but those giants are often standing in dung.
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).
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).
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.
I dunno, if you look at the Boring Company through the lens of "this man really wants to go to Mars", it kinda makes sense. Probably a lot of Mars colony infrastructure should be tunneled underground, given the lack of atmosphere / magnetosphere.
Things like Hyperloop also make more sense in that context.
> We wouldn't have to fight those wars for resources.
You mean wars for oil? Fusion would not solve that, that wars were not about energy per se but about control and domination, keeping USD as world reserve currency and US as world hegemon. Look at Taiwan and chips situation, no oil there, there will be always some "oil" out there that you will want to control instead of giving that control to your rivals. It's game theory 101.
okay but oil is a fundamental input into everything hence a much bigger threat than say TSMC's nextgen fab. everybody understands that with some effort those outputs of a strong economy can be recreated but not inputs. Arguably lithium or water may become that but we are currently far from it. Sure there will always be something we'd want to control but we can go in more calm, clearheaded way towards it rather than just use force because we have the biggest stick.
people love to invoke game theory but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined. plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks. The wars in Iraq/Afghanistan themselves have cost close to 3T over time & thats outside of annual budgets. Personally I'd have preferred to take medicare for all for that amount of money.
> Sure there will always be something we'd want to control but we can go in more calm, clearheaded way towards it rather than just use force because we have the biggest stick.
Unfortunately no, you can't go more calm because projection of force is what keeps status quo and your rivals in place, not liberal values or clearheaded minds. There is no world police, the one with the biggest stick makes the rules. US is not the first hegemon in history of the world, we had Roman Empire, we had Dutch Empire etc, all of the world hegemons were major military powers. There is always some challenger waiting in the shadows to take over your position, you can't just sit and be calm because you will lose what you have, I assure you that others will not just sit calm but claim what's yours if they see sign of weakness, history proves that again and again.
> but fail to explain why only we spend more than next 10 countries military budget combined
Well it's easy to explain, US have it in its doctrine that it needs to have military strong enough to fight 2 wars at a time so it needs to spend more than at least a few countries behind it but a lot of this budget is probably not spent well.
The problem here is that when you stop being world hegemon with the biggest stick, your currency stops being world reserve currency which means you can't finance your debt the same way as before, which has drastic consequences to your budget and it would be really fatal for US. Sometimes you just can't stop the music even when you don't like the melody because silence will hurt you.
> plus its quite unclear what we get out of it because of all the secrecy & likely its mostly inflated costs and kickbacks.
Agreed that's inefficient, you probably could achieve the same with lower costs but how much lower I don't know if anyone knows.
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]
This is why tenure for fundamental research is very important. You have to be free to fail without consequences or you won't be able to take the risks to figure this stuff out.
Exactly, this is the biggest problem with modern universities.
I wish billionaires would fund things like this directly as in no patent no nothing, just from the goodness of their hearts, which they claim is there seeing how much they all pledge to charities... But the reality is different, Oxford pledged to donate the rights to their covid vaccine for free then was urged by the bill & melinda "foundation" to reverse course and sold it to pharma companies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily, it depends on how the reaction scales. If the reaction does not scale linearly (as is claimed) you don’t necessarily have to get more efficient, you just have to up the power until the output curve has increased past the input scaling. How big that is is determined by the efficiency of the input device itself, but it isn’t a question of if it will ever happen.
Yes, sure, it's just still a breakthrough or so (or at least work, I don't know how within grasp it is) away from what one may have (as did I) initially assumed.
Tangentially, it does seem fairly intuitive that it should be non-linear in that 'jump start' as it were: a fire can be grown arbitrarily large having started from a single match (or flint or whatever).
You are correct: this is the important point. Until this is actually powering homes at scale and competitive price- which, clearly from these numbers is a fantasy- developments in this field should be dismissed. It's embarrassing to see HN so excited about what's really quite the failure.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
>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?
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.
> badge of honor that you are loyal to your nation.
When ya'll roped us into fighting the British, that declaration you published called us the "united States of America." Not the "United States of America." That's a subtle difference, but an important one.
When in the course of human events, one State does something another State considers intolerable, that State has every right to throw off the shackles of friendship and loyalty. We united our states out of a common interest, but we _never_ signed away our rights to a federal government. We started as, and remain, a republic of states.
And yeah, you may be Athens with all your philosophy and fem lit universities up north, but before you go threatening war, remember which part of the country is Sparta.
>And yeah, you may be Athens with all your philosophy and fem lit universities up north, but before you go threatening war, remember which part of the country is Sparta.
There is just so much wrong with this statement I don know where to begin
First off the Athenian league Won against the Spartans... so Ok we are agreed that the south is Sparta in this analogy.
Also you do realize that the southern culture and spartan culture are completely opposite on everything but slavery right?
Sparta had institutionalized Pederasty and post-birth abortion and encouraged homosexuality in the military none of which are thing liked by the south.
secondly Sparta went into decline as it increasingly focused on suppressing the helots (slaves) the the exclusion of all else destroying there society. as Sparta militarized itself to the point that spartan men spent most of their lives living in their barrack away from their wives dropping their birth rate.
as for "fem lit university" spartan women were some of the most independent and educated in the ancient world.
as for claim that
>State has every right to throw off the shackles of friendship and loyalty. We united our states out of a common interest, but we _never_ signed away our rights to a federal government.
you did. what you are talking about dates back to the articles of confederation which was superseded by the US constitution which was ratified by all of the states the south included, and provisions a strong federal government.
Sparta lost, by the way. Just as the Confederacy did. So I can’t argue against that. If you guys can get off disability or out of the Waffle House to fight us.
A states rights argument. We know what you wanted, to enslave mankind so you didn’t have to work. That’s what it was about. We already did war. And we successfully put an end to your treasonous ancestors, and ended your deplorable system of slavery.
I’m not sure what you folks are angry about. Losing? No slaves? Failed at treason?
When I lived in Texas I asked a man there how they could possibly celebrate the 4th of July. No one can answer that. The CSA were traitors, and all traitors receive a traitors death.
Never heard such sentiments before now from an American. That's just disgusting. Disdain for fighting for the freedom of our nation? Much of The South really is a cesspool.
The rest of this recent reply is just hilarious though. Pretending you got "tired of killing them" and surrendered? Yes, exactly. Great interpretation of an utterly and completely defeated people. I lived in Texas, they can't even defend our southern border from illegal immigration, and we're supposed to be scared? I saw nothing particularly tough or built about any of it. They're just bitter and pissed like many south of the Mason-Dixon are to this day. Hatred for real Americans (Yankees) doesn't mean a thing. Come up here and chop some wood in the winter, your balls will drop and may sprout some hair.
As noted, simply being of or from The South does not make one a traitor (nor does it make one wise or tough). Whether it's Ulysses S. Grant or the great patriot, Sam Houston, men from all parts of the US ended up in Texas.
It's everyone's choice whether you want to go the route of hiding under a woman's dress like the Jefferson Davis, or a man that history looks kindly on like Sam Houston. Some of you are built different for sure. Not very bright, and prone to treason. Apparently in both the Civil War and Revolution. That was a new one for me. Lines up well with January 6th though.
> Come up here and chop some wood in the winter, your balls will drop and may sprout some hair.
Hmm... I lived out of a tent in the Catskills for a full year. I only left because I didn't want to go through a second winter. In fact, I've lived on every coast of this country, and walked through a huge chunk of it. Where I live now, I built by hand from scratch. Cleared the land with a chainsaw, machete, and shovel. I seriously doubt you've got room to talk about balls dropping.
My point is that using the Civil War as an example of the "extreme military prowess" of the United States is kind of a joke, because that presupposes that "the United States" was the Union, and the Union lost way more men than the Confederacy did. Hundreds of thousands more. So maybe don't hold that up as a banner victory, because you did objectively lose it for the first ~3 years.
By the way, I'm a fuckin' anarchist, so don't put Jan 6 on me. I don't give a fuck who's president.
“Texas declared its secession from the Union on February 1, 1861, and joined the Confederate States on March 2, 1861, after it had replaced its governor, Sam Houston, who had refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy.”
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
I think you're hand waving too many of the problems away and letting your imagination run way ahead of reality.
> no need for fission plants
Not sure why this is a goal in and of itself. Everything you said is available today with fission and yet still too expensive to remove CO2. Fission has a more real shot at getting to the right price point before fusion even gets off the ground so why not push for more arrows behind something that's likely to help in our lifetime?
Energy is an input to basically every single thing we make or do. In economic models it’s often been found that “technology” parameters (inversely) correlate almost entirely to energy prices.
If energy cost very little, we could do previously unviable things like vertically farm and let farmland go back to nature, smelt ore onsite, or run simulations/models for a fraction of what they cost now.
That’s what I’m saying. Why are you assuming that energy costs for fusion would suddenly be lower? These plants take a lot to build and it’s not like the primary cost for fission is the fuel. It’s the recoupment of massive capex spend, cooling, maintenance, highly trained personnel.
I’m trying to show you that fusion isn’t going to magically rain energy mana down on us. It’s just fission with less waste (if you discount newer fission designs) except and potentially safer (if you discount newer fission designs) It’s likely significantly more expensive given it’s a more complicated reactor and we’ve built 0 commercially (and even with this achievement we’re not that much closer).
My point is, if you’re looking for boundless carbon-free energy, fission reactors already meet all the needs. Additional investments would get reactors that would generate waste competitive with fusion (and in fact can consume all existing generated waste as fuel) and are similarly safe (no runaway reactions).
I would encourage you, if you’re serious about carbon-free boundless energy, to devote your advocacy to advancing fission reactors. They’re here and there’s a straightforward R&D path to get the new reactors (regulatory hurdles are another thing). Fusion reactors won’t be here in any reasonable time frame (even if we had a workable design today it would take many decades to build them and then upgrade the grid).
Let's be honest: the ecological problems we have today (i.e. the fact that we destroyed 2/3 of trees, mammals and insects) has nothing to do with climate change. We did that because we had enough cheap energy to destroy natural habitats.
The consequences of that cheap energy (fossil fuels) is yet to come, that's the climate change problem. And it is big.
Now let's pretend we get fusion to work: maybe (just maybe) that could help the climate change issue (unless it takes decades, in which case its too late), but that won't change the other big problem we have: with cheap energy, we destroy the planet to build malls and swipe TikTok.
We need to re-learn to live with less energy, that's the only way.
Not that I enjoy being a downer, but I think we're still quite a ways off from a trajectory towards Star Trek society. Clean energy production is absolutely key, with pollution and climate change being big obstacles to a prosperous future, but clean energy doesn't solve all air and water pollution. It won't necessarily scale economically. It also doesn't temper any megalomaniac's pride, to stop them from creating conflict as they try to subjugate everyone else. We live in a very divided, hierarchical world with a fragile order, subject to the whims of people with godlike power over the masses.
One of the most fantastical aspects of Star Trek was the societal evolution into one without interpersonal conflict, the idea being that without scarcity there's no good reason for conflict... I'm just not sure how well that would hold up, knowing people. I don't think all desire for status and power stems from scarcity of resources, and people will continue to lie and do harm to each other as long as they desire power over others.
> My kids are likely to spend the majority of their lives living a world where energy is clean, cheap, and available to everyone.
Being available to everyone does depend on who "everyone" is. If people use the energy to grow food (and more people) until we run into some other population-limiter, we'll always have too many people. Part of achieving sustainability is ending runaway growth. Maybe you can ask people nicely enough to stop reproducing, maybe education will do it, maybe nothing short of force will. Yet our economics were built around continual growth. So, that's all a big problem to solve, still.
The yield numbers don’t factor in all the energy needed for lasers etc. It is still massively in the negative. There is also no feasible way to extract energy from fusion done this way.
I love the optimism but it sets you up for failure and disappointment when you start thinking about all the free energy your children will have from this.
Free energy from a very successful fusion experiment called the sun bathes our planet every day. We know fusion works, but the devil is in the details.
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.
After the Wright brother's first demonstration of powered flight, I like to imagine all the pessimists in this thread would have said that commercial air transport would never be viable because wood and fabric don't have the material properties to carry a ton of steel.
Yes, try to imagine a London - Tokyo non stop flight in 1902.
Would be pretty crazy to imagine, considering that the longest distance the Wright brother flew was 180m.
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!
[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.
>> 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.
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.
Hopefully, both. Even if fusion works extremely well, fission should find niches. Fission power is likely to remain more power dense than fusion for a while, so in situations where one cares about weight and size it is better than fusion.
> 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.
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.
A small fission reactor is also incredibly dangerous and will always require exotic material.
A fusion reactor does not pose environmental risk and could eventually run on highly available basic elements for everything after the initial "startup" once the technology progresses.
What exotic materials? Molten salts and steel is most of it. These reactors have essentially 0% chance to have airborn escape of radiation.
An fusion reactors don't actually run on basic elements. The require a fuel that is specially breed. And when they operate they have radioactive materials that can go airborn.
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).
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.
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.
1000 time gains is double performance every 2 year, means in 20 year we would be able to achieve fusion with hydrogen from water at home scale min power plants.
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.
> 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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Or it needs to pretend its about fusion as an energy source, to mask its really about creating and maintaining a stockpile of h-bombs that could destroy every city on earth.
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.
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.
> 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?
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Except this is also true for fission. So if fission has failed to transform society, why do you think fusion will?
Uh because building fission reactors, despite being fairly safe, is still a risk compared to fusion? We don’t want to put fission reactors in every town, but we could one day with commercial fusion. And the sheer amount of energy we could harness would allow us to do insane things.
> despite being fairly safe, is still a risk compared to fusion
I recommend you read up on the Gen IV reactor designs. They’re totally safe - meltdowns are impossible because of the way the reactor is built. If anything catastrophic happens, the reaction stops and can never get to a runaway reaction (physically impossible). Look up Gen 4 reactors. Those will be available before fusion even gets off the ground (and I’ll note that fusion has 0 reactors built so who knows what kind of safety issues actually come up when engineering theory hits the road).
Even Gen III reactors are fine to put up everywhere (20x margin over Gen II) and Gen III+ reactors continue with the theme of adding passive safety measures that would prevent accidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl. Critics who rate any possibility of accident as unacceptable will never be pleased but that’s not a reasonable position to take because nuclear energy isn’t built in a vacuum and global warming and existing coal power poses a significantly higher threat and renewables and batteries simply can’t scale no matter how hard we believe.
Fukushima and Chernobyl were Gen II designs which do have a cost advantage and EVEN WITH THOSE ACCIDENTS those designs are safer than existing coal and LNG power plants we are fine with having all over the place (nuclear is slightly safer than wind). Even Gen II designs built today are a fair bit safer than Chernobyl and Fukushima. Fukushima also ignored many and repeated safety warnings from internal and external reports although critics will generally point to this as a general criticism against all reactors (even though Fukushima still failed comparatively harmlessly all things considered).
Even with all of that, the death rate per kWH generated is drastically safer than coal and on par with wind and solar. Also construction costs tend to go down when the regulatory environment doesn’t inhibit building reactors due to political fears that aren’t grounded in the actual engineering.
I’ll also note that China is building many many nuclear reactors and Russia is also following suit. So from a competition/national security perspective, China and Russia both have access to significantly more clean energy and more energy independence than we do.
Look. I understand there are problems with fission reactors. They remain the only feasible way to generate nuclear power in the next 60-100 years at scale. Yes there are downsides and risks. However there’s one big upside vs fusion: it exists. It’s possible to build these plants now without physics and engineering breakthroughs we haven’t made yet. The advantages of fusion are safety, nuclear waste management, theoretical proliferation concerns. There’s no reason to believe construction costs will be significantly lower. Even if they are, we’re not even close to the first real commercial power plant even with this achievement as impressive as it is from a progress perspective.
I answered why fusion would change the work in ways different to how fission changed the world.
> Look. I understand there are problems with fission reactors. They remain the only feasible way to generate nuclear power in the next 60-100 years at scale. Yes there are downsides and risks. However there’s one big upside vs fusion: it exists.
If you re-read the original comment, it supposed that fusion exists. You can't criticize something in development for not existing and use that as a point against why it won't be beneficial. That's circular reasoning.
> The advantages of fusion are safety, nuclear waste management, theoretical proliferation concerns.
Yeah, just nuclear waste management. No big deal.
> They remain the only feasible way to generate nuclear power in the next 60-100 years at scale.
You absolutely cannot predict with that level of certainty over 100 year time scales. You severely underestimate how much we can achieve over timescales as long as that.
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
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.
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.
Even the great deserts of the southwest have life. In fact, I challenge you to drive through these tens of thousands of miles of landscapes in the hour or two after a rainstorm and tell me they're dead. You're missing out if you've not seen the desert in bloom.
I grew up by the desert, and I don't know why people think it's dead. There are some extremely fragile ecosystems there.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
Neutrons aren't that hard to capture. They are certainly harder to capture than charged particles but there are plenty of materials that are dense enough to reliably capture neutrons. This is how heat is extracted from the reaction to use in a generator. The activation of the containment material is a problem but it's not even close to the level it is for fission reactors where you're forced to deal with spent fuel rods.
At the moment fusion is obviously not cheap but no one is planning on using the technology in its current form for actual power generation. The processes involved will all get more efficient and given the astronomical upper limits of energy output from fusion it doesn't take a big stretch of the imagination to think that it will eventually be preferable to solar and wind power. There's no guarantee that will happen but hopefully this breakthrough will trigger more investment and momentum to make it a reality. I also want to add that I'm very pro solar and wind, especially in the short term.
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.
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.
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.
Well, for one thing achieving it is the purpose for which the "National Ignition Facility" was created. It's right there in the name. They're justified in having a bit of a party about it.
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.
I have been a HN user for a long time. Honestly, I disagree. Most HN users commenting here with smart stuff about fusion, just read it on another page a day or a week ago, from a bite-sized article or a reddit comment. Everyone, for the most part, parroting what they read on a short note somewhere else. Some more committed ones read the synopsis of a few papers before writing something smart.
Anything you read on the internet, explaining any advanced scientific concepts like fusion etc... take it with a huge grain of salt.
They’re a tiny tiny minority if any, compared to what we are seeing here in comments.
I’m sure they would agree with what I said when they scroll through the comments.
I would not want to wander into HN comments section if I am doing any kind of divergent innovation, challenging the limits of what's technically possible. People here just parrot the status-quo as the absolute truth. If that was the case, humanity would have made zero progress.
Some nerd in some quiet corner, working hard in disbelief of the rest of the society, is the one changing the course of history. Not the ones, parroting established textual truths. There is GPT-3 for that.
Maybe if the article would contain the HN names of the scientists in the experiment in bold instead of Senator names, it would be easier to find them (I'm sure some of them are around here). We should just find those sources, it's not that hard in the internet age.
HN comments is an exploration of the topic. There is no stated goal to reach consensus. Also there is
no requirement to be deeply knowledgeable about physics, energy or fusion to comment.
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"
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
It is an obvious necessary condition that input power < output power, however merely satisfying this could have no special practical significance for any design that could end up being devised. The obviousness of that condition is what makes this a PR accomplishment only.
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”
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.
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?
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.
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.
I personally believed so since a while ago, for that exact reason. Although I was thinking more of miniaturizing the existing bomb design where fusion material is surrounded by a fission shell made of material with lower critical mass. But I am no expert either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Edit: Taking the internal combustion metaphor further, I'm imagining these connected in a circle. The grid is the starter motor to power the first laser, then each active chamber powers the laser on the next one (probably by capacitor not directly). Thus the energy production moves around the circle with each chamber being flushed and refilled before the laser powers back on. How far off is that image in my head? I've never actually seen it described
NIF never was designed to be a power plant or have anything to do with power generation. This is something most commenters don't appear to appreciate. It's an experimental facility that, when distilled to its simplest explanation, lets us study things when you squish them really, really hard. It turns out, fusion is one of the things you can study when you squish stuff really hard - and one of the big challenges was controlling how you do the squishing (which turns out to be pretty difficult).
There are lots of other problems that NIF also studies that boil down to "what does this do when we squish it" that have nothing to do with fusion or energy production. Aside from the weapons program applications, there are experiments that take place there in materials science, understanding extreme environments ("what do these elements we believe sit in the core of Jupiter act like at those pressures?"), etc.
TLDR: Think of NIF as a lab for energetically squishing things. It's not a power plant, it's not a prototype for a power plant, it's not a pre-prototype for a power plant, etc. It's a lab for basic physics research. It's about as close to being a prototype for a power plant as a test tube in a lab full of hydrocarbons is to being a prototype of an internal combustion engine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
I'm unaware of a clothes washing machine currently on the market that finishes the job in seconds. I believe that the technology has yet to be introduced.
I suppose that you don't remember when the microwave oven was introduced. Food warm in 60 seconds? Nuking it? It will destroy all the nutritional value, it was said. I remember people, including my family, excusing the fact that we owned a microwave oven with the phrase "hospitals use it".
> “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!
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.
> Fission is currently the most common method of generating nuclear power, and it has been used in power plants for many years. It is a relatively well-understood technology and it can provide a large amount of energy with relatively little fuel. However, fission produces radioactive waste and the risk of accidents, such as the one that occurred at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan in 2011.
> In contrast, fusion has the potential to provide even more energy than fission and it produces very little radioactive waste. It is considered a safer and more sustainable source of energy than fission.
>>: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.
What would it take to store/feedback the gained (converted) energy to power the lasers? Sort of like a bootstrap with a very inefficient source of power, and over time transition to the produced clean energy?
Armchair scientisting aside, this news seems like the most exciting news over the past few years - a great way to end this year (/pandemic). We are far out from a production-ready thingy, but if it took decades for brilliant scientists to conjure up this initial clunky toy thingy, I am sure an army of scientists/companies would work at building the real thing much, much faster: we had only a freaking 8086 not 30 years ago!!
We have the basic blueprint from government funded research no less.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Yes the efficiency of the laser is poor and modern tech is more efficient, but not enough to make it an energy producing process. The best lasers are ~50% energy efficient.
- This can only be maintained for short periods of time and the time to restart the process in long. Not only that, tritium is a rare isotope. These are probably the largest challenges to overcome.
- The energy is released in the form of high-speed particles, and there is no efficient energy capture process.
The significance of their achievements is overblown. Yes, they achieved ignition, but no it is just an incremental process towards commercial fusion power.
3.15 MJ is equivalent to 1.5 lb TNT, so it was quite a bang in their target chamber. Just for comparison, it's also just short of one kWh, so it would run an electric car for about three-four miles.
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.
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.
145k TC for Software Engineer. Better than I'd expect from a government job, although a qualified applicant could obviously make so much more elsewhere. And supporting the needs of a bunch of PhD's doesn't really sound fun.
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.
> 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:
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.
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.
Inertial Fusion in a Magnetic field is something I've been pushing for a long time. There are a lot of interesting variations on this design, and I hope I can get more interest in my design at http://www.DDproFusion.com
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?
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
as somebody already explained to you earlier, the NIF uses arcane lasers because their focus is not lasers at the moment, it is fusion. At current tech level we have about 20% laser efficiency (with some types as much as 50%, not sure if they apply). this experiment specifically was about energy positive from a fusion reaction which has never been done except for uncontrolled things like hydrogen bombs. as far as a fusion milestone goes, this is a big deal.
Also, the other thing most commenters are missing here is the remaining problems are incrementally solvable so we should see steady improvements in laser efficiency and pellet optimization going forward. this is even doable with VC money (which we have some now but not significant). in that sense it is a pretty decent development.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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).
This is a huge deal, but not as big as it is being made out to be. This is only a fractional output, there is still significant work required to make this feasible for use outside the lab.
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.
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"
Since the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water was signed in 1963, all nuclear weapons tests must be performed underground. This is typically done by digging a deep shaft or tunnel in the earth and detonating the weapon at the bottom of the shaft or tunnel. The explosion is monitored by a variety of equipment, such as seismographs, radiation detectors, and air samplers. The data gathered from these tests helps to understand the weapon's performance and its potential impact.
In addition, computer simulations are often used to test the effects of a nuclear weapon, such as the predicted fallout and atmospheric effects. These simulations are based on data collected from previous nuclear tests as well as theoretical models.
Every breakthroughs starts from government (people) funded initiatives, congrats to everyone involved, a future without the need to generate selfish profit is at reach!
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
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?
> 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
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.
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.
Yeah but the Wrights were following research from all over the world, including England and Germany. You might as well say that the Wrights were also funded by the British government.
The Wrights didn't start from a government-funded initiative. Using govt resources, like public roads or receiving public schooling as a child doesn't make every subsequent output a "government initiative." This is semantics at this point though. You've made up your mind, and so have I, and you're obviously sitting on this thread to rapid fire rebut on this Tuesday night. Here you go, have the last reply:
I didn't say anything about roads or school. The Smithsonian actively executed aviation research by physically building and flying powered aircraft. These experiences were among the information sent to the Wrights. The Wrights' work was directly informed by government experimentation at the Smithsonian. I don't understand how better to communicate this, and I don't understand why you got weirdly personal about it. I hope things get better for you.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 González 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.
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."
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.
I met a physicist who had written a paper in the 1980s about a fusion reactor that used the high energy neutrons from D-T fusion to breed ²³³U from ²³²Th, around the time that people were losing interest in fast reactors. The reactor itself might not be a profitable source of energy directly, but the fuel it produces would be useful in thermal fission reactors.
Fusion will be attractive as a neutron source long before it is attractive as an energy source, in fact there are many kinds of neutron generators already in use that use fusion.
The waste from fusion will be different in character from fission. Unless you are trying to make TRU you are not going to have any transuranic waste. Most of the real danger from fission products is in isotopes of a few elements in a particular range of atomic number, particular Cs and I.
On the other hand, a D-T reactor is going to have a lot of T around and T is hard to contain since hydrogen likes to infiltrate between the atoms in metals. The flux of neutrons on the first wall is going to be absolutely brutal, how bad the activation is will depend on what exact materials you're using, but the difficulty of the situation is such that you might not have much of a choice.
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".
> 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.
Lyndon Larouche came to my high school (in New Hampshire) for the presidential primaries in 1988 and talked about antimatter as an energy source.
Years later I saw a picture of an Iranian woman holding a sign that said "Nuclear Power is a Human Right" and thought... She much be a LaRouchite.
I wound up voting for Diane Sare, another LaRouchite, for US Senate in New York this year even though I know they're a coercive organization like the Scientologists or the Longtermists and I disagreed with her position on Ukraine -- we had a really sad ballot this year since they made it much harder for 3rd party candidates to get one and she was the only one.
LaRouchites are the only people left who want to stamp out the Beatles but they are required to not only listen to only classical music but are only allowed to listen to Brahms and anything older. If I ran into a LaRouchite and wanted to make them squirm I would talk to them about Debussy.
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.