I see people reacting left and right saying "yeah, but the lasers used 300MJ" like a gotcha.
At the press conference, they were pretty clear about what they achieved. They stated multiple times that it was the laser energy in, and not the wall plug energy. Also they also said that the lasers weren't designed to be efficient in the first place, because they want to maximize scientific output. And they were pretty clear that there are many many steps required until we have fusion energy.
It is a significant milestone, and people are trying to downplay that by stating fusion will never be feasible anyways, and this is why we shouldn't be excited.
> “The fusion reaction is heating the fusion reaction, which is making more fusions happen,” says Steven Cowley, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. “It’s like the fire has been lit. This is the first controlled fusion ignition that we’ve ever seen, and that’s spectacular.”
Well for me it's debatable whether this is such a huge achievement, because the distinction between controlled and uncontrolled fusion is a bit academic in this case. In uncontrolled fusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon), you are using a nuclear fission primary stage to generate enough energy to start the fusion reaction in the secondary stage. In the NIF, you are using lasers (that have to be aligned to trillionths of a meter and damage their own guiding optics everytime they fire) to start the fusion reaction in a smaller pellet (that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars). So the only real difference between the first and the second case is that the H-bomb is smaller, much more expensive per amount of energy released, and explodes inside a chamber. And it's obvious to pretty much everyone who is paying attention that transforming this setup into a working and cost-effective fusion power plant is a very tall order...
I'm one of those people. But it's mainly various reporters I'm angry at, for misreporting and hyping up the story. I saw none of what you wrote in the news.
And well, this really doesn't seem like a very viable path to a power plant, though I'm all for more fusion research.
I wouldn’t be angry at the reporters. They don’t come up with this stuff by themselves. LLNL has a staff dedicated to public relations¹. The insertion of misleading phrases and ideas into news articles is a longstanding, deliberate practice.
The headline implies that the "breakthrough" (why the scare quotes?) is a dead end, and thus contradicts its own subtitle, which is "Just one more step on the long road to commercialization".
> As Lawrence Livermore director Kim Budil said during the announcement, this result is a necessary first step.
Correct. Has anybody even been claiming it's anything other than that?
Well Neil DeGrasse Tyson went on Fox Business and talked about this like we have achieved net energy gain in a power plant, when in reality NIF uses 100x more energy than they got out of the pellet. He makes it seem as if we have solved fusion, which I think is pretty dangerous, as any viewer who believes what he says could start to believe we don't need to think about renewables anymore.
The following is a partial transcription of what he said:
Neil: Right at this moment I don't think people know for sure what the announcement will be, but if the secretary of energy is giving the press conference, everyone I think is thinking that we finally can get out more energy than we put in, and that is the key..
(Neil describes fission versus fusion, and (weirdly) magnetic confinement fusion, even though NIF is inertial confinement. It really feels like he doesn't know anything about NIF.)
Host: alright so lets say we've overcome some of those challenges and finally created more energy than we put in to the experiment.
Neil: That's it.. you got it. so now it's up to the engineers. Once we get the physics figured out, which it seems like we have, then the engineers say can I make that smaller, can I make that portable, would it fit in to a car? or is it only the size that might power a city? there are places that don't have access to energy... either oil or sunlight for example... so this would be transformative to civilization, and I see it akin to the transition from horses to automobiles, which happened in a matter of a couple of years, because we got the physics figured out for engines, internal combustion engines, when that happened you couldn't give away a horse, yet we were riding horses for thousands of years, building civilization literally and figuratively on its back. so my analogy to that is, we've been digging fossil fuels out of the ground for 150 years...
Host: How long will it take to heal the planet from any harm that we've done to ourselves?
Neil: Yeah here we are harming a planet that was itself trying to sustain us. by doing that you've sewn the seeds of your own extinction. and so the planet will heal, slowly. a lot of the carbon is taken up in to the oceans, so if you start dropping the carbon in the atmosphere, the oceans will equilibrate with that, so it will take time. but now is better than any time later than now, so oh yeah... I'm giddy.
I think the GPs point is that "it's just an engineering problem now" doesn't mean it is easy to solve. It's been "just an engineering problem" for a long time. Of course, new physics discoveries can make the engineering problem easier, but that is true of practically any engineering problem.
I understand that, but a lot of progress has happened just in the last 10 years, especially with regards to superconducting magnets which are vital for the magnetic containment.
I see so much negativity regarding fusion power when so much is happening it’s important to show all the positive things happening
Oh I am a huge believer in CFS and their SPARC system. I’ve watched every hour long lecture they’ve posted on YouTube. My whole issue is that this announcement from NIF is not some kind of holy grail so many in the news are making it out to be. It’s a positive step but Neil DeGrasse Tyson is talking about “now engineers need to figure out if they can put this in cars” and it’s like… no that’s very much not the next step. In fact NIF isn’t really trying to be a path to a functional power plant so much as a weapons research system that happens to produce research which might be useful for other systems.
I just really feel like NdT is really misrepresenting the importance of this specific announcement. In particular he’s conflating Q plasma with Q power plant. The NIF draws about 100x more power than it delivers to the target so if they actually tried to harvest the energy they generated they’d be losing 99.4% of what they’re putting in, at least according to comments I’ve read on HN about it. NdT makes it sound like they have actually gained energy when they are two orders of magnitude away from doing that at NIF.
Having watched it I don't agree with your take at all.
He was very clear that it's speculative, and at no point did make it seem as if we had solved fusion. In fact, he goes to great length to talk about the challenges that have kept us from solving fusion.
I thought it was odd that he talked about magnetic confinement fusion, when NIF is inertial confinement. He never described inertial confinement even though that’s what was being discussed in the announcement. And then he said he suspected the announcement was that they had generated more power than they had put in, which is not true and was not expected. (They announced that they got more heat energy emitted than they put in to the pellet, but their laser system is 1% efficient so they lost 100x more total energy than was emitted by the pellet.) so he’s conflating Q plasma with Q power plant. That’s actually a really important fact he ignores. If he had actually tried to understand this announcement he could have talked about how NIF is a research facility and isn’t meant to be a power plant. Instead he just goes on talking about a hypothetical world where scientists have solved fusion power and the earth can begin healing from carbon emissions. But we’re many decades from being able to use fusion for that. You’re right that if you follow his words carefully you will see that he’s technically clear he’s speculating, but he completely fails to explain the actual significance of this announcement, does make several inaccurate claims (talking about magnetic confinement when discussing NIF, and critically conflating Q plasma with Q power plant), and generally makes it seem like this small stepping stone is more like some holy grail. Anyone not well versed in the subject could watch that and come to the conclusion that we’ve solved fusion power generation, and we just haven’t.
One of the things about Tyson is that he will just bluff his way through stuff when he doesn’t really know about it. He has like a really friendly personality and he projects a lot of confidence, but he says a lot of inaccurate things for a science communicator. The fact that he talks about magnetic confinement and never mentions lasers for example makes me question if he even knows how NIF works. It’s not his field and he may literally not know. But that didn’t stop him from going on national TV to discuss it, while making sure to mention his latest book.
I mean isn't that accurate? The same could be said for the moon landing. We knew all the requisite physics by the 1900. The rest was engineering. No one said that engineering was the easy part.
The idea of using nuclear fusion as a source of energy dates back to the 1920s and 1930s, when Rutherford first began exploring the possibility. By the 1950s and 1960s significant progress was made in understanding the complex scientific processes involved in nuclear fusion and in developing the technology needed to harness this form of energy. So based on your criteria you could have said the "rest is engineering" back in the 60s!
In reality though we are still far away from engineers being able to take over, even now. Because we need way more than 1.5x coming out of fusion in order to compensate for the inefficiencies in generating laser from electricity, and also the inefficiencies in converting heat output into electricity.
Mostly we did. The Apollo Guidance Computer used integrated circuits on silicon, and we needed quantum to get a good handle on semiconductors. And transistors were first theorized in 1926. Getting funding was probably the easy part, all it took was a superpower Cold War.
Except they are not even in the same ballpark. Nobody is denying fusion can be done, but if you told me moon landing tickets were available to the general public I would say you were lying.
It is not an engineering problem, they haven't solved half the physics still. You can't just tell the fuel pellets to burn hotter please, would you mind transferring your energy to this battery on the way out, they have none of the required steps to do this yet.
Once it's actually possible to get net positive energy, then yes by all means engineer away the inefficiencies, before that it's still as much a pipe dream.
We also always ignore economics in these situations. The reason we all don't have a Boston Dynamics level robot right now is because of the economics of mass producing such a robot.
To call that an engineering problem is too simplistic to me.
We don't need to just solve fusion. We need to produce fusion in a manner that undercuts the price of fossil fuels. Then stack "renewable" on top of that. Sociologically, people operate on self interest and will in-group into team Fossil Fuels, Team Wind/Solar and we might even end up with Team Fossil Fuels and Team Wind/Solar forming an alliance to oppose Team Fusion.
Of course, outwardly and individually we play make believe that we are all impartial 3rd party observers that just want the best for Team Human. It is those self interested jerks on the other team that are the problem. Never you and I.
You left out the previous paragraph from this local news low quality source:
> For that reason, and others, Chang says using this type of fusion as a clean energy source is likely decades away. But he says a fusion-powered future is coming.
Because we are not there in terms of Physics! They generated 1.5x the energy input through laser, but 0.0067x the energy consumed from the wall plug. That means we need more Physics, not just engineering!
The theoretical physics is working just fine here, if anything this experiment has demonstrated that Q > 1 is possible. The hard part is scaling this up and keeping Q > 1 for more than a fraction of a millisecond.
The top commment though is just wrong. He says Q would be 0.375 with modern lasers. Which would be worse than the result announced today! Q is a factor internal to the fusion reaction, so upgrading to more efficent lasers would not change Q.
Presumably he means something like total energy efficency would be very close to breakeven with modern lasers. You can tell how dubious this is from the fact no one involved in the project says anything like this. In fact, breakeven is still two orders of magnitude away and I don't believe anyone has suggested anything more optimistic.
It (combined with the ignition last year, which this shows wasn’t a fluke) definitely WAS a “leap of some kind.” Showing fusion ignition shows potential scalability, and this is confirmed by the achievement of scientific breakeven.
If you scale up a process that only returns 1% of the energy you put in (which is the case here based on how inefficient the laser is), you’re still not gonna come out ahead.
The scaling is non-linear, which is exactly why ignition is important. By showing that fusion heat is actually leading to more fusion reactions, to get double the amount of energy out of each shot, they won't have to double the amount of laser light. In other words, higher gain should be relatively straightforward scaling of the system.
(Also, the laser inefficiency is a complete red herring as they just used plain old flash lamp pumped lasers, not the much more efficient lasers we could have used and which are available now, with efficiencies about 10-20 times that of those used.)
They achieved a 1.5x gain. To get useful electricity out (without heroic efforts) will require a gain of 20-50.
As I understand it they demonstrated a net gain relative to the energy output by the laser, but not relative to the energy put into the laser. 1% is correct for the actual efficiency given the cost to generate the laser.
(Yes, that distinction does seem important and wasn't brought out by the news reports.)
These are the people desperate for hope, not truth. When they’ve seen many such “breakthroughs” over the years that ultimately lead to nothing, they will learn to look upon such announcements with a cynical heart. You could tell me the cure for cancer was discovered tomorrow, and I would immediately search for reasons why it’s bullshit.
If you watch the video it looks like it was shot earlier this year, but it is 10 years old. And yet, the video mentions 192 lasers (so that hasn't changed in 10 years), and they also mention that even after ignition is achieved, "laser fusion won't be able to power a city until a plant can fire 100s of shots a minute."
Interesting quote from a skeptic in the video: "We'll see pigs fly before we see ignition at the National Ignition Facility".
EUV lithography is interesting. You drop a microscopic droplet of tin. You then aim and shoot it not once, but twice with a laser so it produces the correct wavelength. Then you do this with 100% reliability thousands of times per second all day, every day for years.
The problem doing this with fusion seems to be money. Their "big" grant of 600M wouldn't even buy a handful of those machines and wouldn't come close to the many billions it has cost in the past 30+ years of research to reach the point where they are finally viable (it had been "a few months away" ever since the early 2000s).
This video from Asianometry on EUV light sources is well worth the watch. It's pretty incredible.
Yes. If we ever need an extremely expensive isotropic point source of high-flux fast neutrons to do anything useful, then this is a good start. Currently, the only hopeful use is for simulating nuclear weapons.
the improvements have come in confinement and fuel
if this approach works, you'll see laser innovation over time to improve energy per shot. You'll also see engineering to contain the released neutrons so everything in there doesn't get made radioactive.
I don't like the communication that's been set forth by LLNL and DOE, it has misled many people into thinking that fusion is a done deal and we're on our way to limitless, clean energy.
The reality is that charging up the lasers takes about 400 MJ, then due to very large inefficiencies you only get 2 MJ directed to the target, and they got out 3 MJ from the fusion reaction.
So we did not get more energy than we put in. We started by using 400 MJ, and got 3 MJ in return. We're not net positive energy generation.
Nothing will change in our daily lives yet. And a lot of people that have been misled by the reports are going to be very disappointed. This is a problem, because we're overhyping results and we're setting ourselves up for disappointment. And this can lead to resentment and funding getting cut.
The results are unequivocally good. But they're being portrayed as something they're not. We are yet unable to generate more energy than we put in.
I think it's the only way they can garner interest and gain more funding. Fusion energy has always "50 years away." I agree it's a bit misleading but what else can LLNL do to attract more funding? I'm really not quite sure.
And let’s also not forget that the 3 MJ is just heat. It still needs to spin a turbine if we want to turn some of it (maybe half? maybe less?) into electricity.
Some of these IEEE headlines are getting pretty, reactionary? Contrarian? I don't know the right word but they seem designed in ways I wouldn't expect from the org.
The very first sentence misplaces putative fusion generation's use:
> It’s not about to solve climate change ..
Well quite. Obviously no single measure 'solves' climate change, but even its logically possible contribution - decarbonising electricity production - isn't going to happen. We need to have thoroughly completed this project long before there's any realistic chance of fusion-generated electricity becoming widely available.
So if/when fusion power is to hand, it will add to or replace existing decarbonised power sources. It's not any less exciting for that - if it lives up to a fraction of its potential, it could be utterly transformative for human activities, as were newly discovered energy sources before it. Some of those uses could include future climate change mitigation and adaptation measures - you just can't predict what might be possible with vast cheap energy surpluses on tap.
But we have to get there first, which includes the formidable task of keeping a global technological society functional enough to be able to complete projects of this scope. A necessary condition for that is going to be to decarbonise while we can.
> So if/when fusion power is to hand, it will add to or replace existing decarbonised power sources.
There are a few misconceptions about energy I think it's important to clear up.
- New energy sources have never replaced older ones. Instead they were just added to the pile. We are currently burning more biomass and more coal than ever before. So-called decarbonized energy sources have never replaced fossil fuels.
- There is an interdependency, a symbiotic relationship if you will, between different energy sources. To pump oil you need steel, which means burning coal. To mine coal you need diesel-powered machines. To build solar panels you need to mine minerals with diesel-powered machines. To make wind turbines you need steel, and thus burn coal. To build nuclear reactors you need lots of steel, lots of cement, which also means burning coal. Even to be able to burn biomass (renewable, carbon-neutral, yay) on an industrial scale you need machines to cut all those trees, powered by fossil fuels. And so forth and so on...
- The mining activity related with so called "decarbonized energy" (solar, wind, nuclear, lithium batteries etc) is heavily based on fossil fuels. This, in addition to its multiple disastrous environmental impacts: destruction of ecosystems, water pollution, air pollution, aquifer poisoning.
- The global economy is still totally dependent on fossil fuels - for mining, global transport, food production and to a large degree manufacturing. Just about any object in your house or in your pocket was manufactured and delivered to you using fossil fuels. Those Teslas everybody is so enamored with won't exist without the coal burned to make the steel they contain, the oil burned to mine all the other metals (actually a substantial chunk of the periodic table), and also the oil burned getting them delivered to you. Not to mention the fact that you'll still need to burn some gas and coal in order to charge them.
For nuclear fusion, even if the technology is advanced enough to create a stable reaction that releases more energy than it consumes, personally I highly doubt it will be sufficient to ween us off fossil fuels. Nuclear fission (the most dense energy source we currently have) has never done that.
I made no comment on the feasibility of decarbonising energy production (let alone that of any other sector), and won't because it's not really relevant to this thread. I'm just arguing that fusion power won't come about without prior substantial decarbonisation, therefore if that happens it ipso facto will be replacing or adding to already clean power generation facilities.
Interesting aspect about fusion power in relation to the current climate crisis and fusion technology still being decades away from mass adoption is that we do need to electrical infrastructure. We need a robust grid, we need electric transportation vehicles, we need electric heating and cooking, etc. If we got fusion tomorrow, it would be cool, but it still wouldn’t save us from the climate crisis because we simply don’t have the infrastructure to use all that electricity.
Transferring to renewable energy as we build up the infrastructure and retrofit our housing is the smart choice here. And when fusion finally becomes a reality, we’ll be ready to use all that abundant energy from day one. Maybe we could use all this extra energy for sucking carbon out of the atmosphere in a giant cleanup effort.
Yes. At least we know how to build the infrastructure. It can be done very quickly if we so choose & fund. And again, yes, fusion could conceivably help us reverse some of the damage caused in the meantime.
Re fusion power, the causality is the reverse of how it's normally expressed. We don't need fusion to fix the climate crisis (it comes too late). But we do need to fix the climate crisis to be able to create usable fusion power. The scale of research & implementation it relies on depends on a well-functioning global network of nations. If we collapse into multiple wars over who will take the hundreds of millions of mid-century refugees, who will and won't quit fossil fuels, not to mention the trivialities of Great Power politicking, then fusion power just won't happen.
True. I think it's a reasonable assumption. But it doesn't matter as I don't see there being much competition between it and solar/wind. The latter will be needed to get us to the stage of being able to do fusion at scale anyway. Fusion is such a huge project, I don't believe it can be done without a well-functioning global network of individually thriving nations, and think dealing with climate change is a necessary prerequisite for that.
In other words, in my view for fusion to have become useful at scale, I think we already must have decarbonised electricity production (with solar/wind/geo etc). If at that stage fusion is cheap enough to give our civilisation a boost, all the better. If not, we'll be in better shape than looks likely now anyway.
This sounds sort of perfect for rocket propulsion, instead of using the famous "Nuclear bomb out the back" method, why not hydrogen pellets and lasers hitting it? Sure, reading about this it seems extremely far off still, but the mode of operation with sort of pulsed explosions sounds perfect for moving a big rocket through space.
This video by Anton Petrov explains very succinctly, in understandable language, what the breakthrough was and the technicalities are. He basically agrees with the premise that this is not as big of a breakthrough as it was maybe made out to be, but still a significant milestone:
It's not a big breakthrough, just like the invention of the cathode ray tube was not a big breakthrough. That is to say, it's not something that shortsighted reactionary people are going to recognise as the dawn of a new world. But it definitely is the dawn of a new world.
Watching his video, I would not agree that it heralds the dawn of a new world.
It is not likely that this particular method of fusing atoms will lead to usable fusion energy. Like he talks about in the video there are several key problems:
1.) This relies on using Tritium, which is one of the most expensive and rare materials on the planet.
2.) The measured energy output relative to the input given was a technicality, the real efficiency of the system was < 1%, they would need to improve the efficiency of lasers to bridge that gap somehow.
3.) This method of fusion has not been reproducible at any other labs in the world.
Not saying it isn't possible, I'm actually an optimist when it comes to things like this. However, looking at the physics, I think it's safe to say that it doesn't seem likely that this will be the type of fusion that becomes the reactor of the future. His conclusion, with which I agree, is that fusion is still at least 10 years away.
Sure. But watching a bird fly is a key step towards making a 747 too.
The energy that came out of the fusion reaction was more than the energy in the laser beam that ignited it. But the energy that went into the laser was about 100 times more than the energy that came out, so we've gone from -99.5% efficiency to -98.5% or something like that. Is that a key step? I suppose. Is it major progress? Maybe. Does it get us substantially closer to practical fusion? No. Not by a long shot.
The headline is deliberately designed to be more controversial than the article body is... perhaps so that one might, say, bait you into clicking it? :)
It's not overly pedantic to expect headlines to not be the exact opposite of a true statement. Contradicting the first sentence with the second sentence doesn't make the first sentence any more true.
I'm not saying it can't happen, but those fuel pellets are awfully expensive to make.
Even if you fix all the other issues (laser efficiency, actually generating all the energy that was released - the blanket needs to absorb and produce more power than was put in and therefore will not be as efficient, waste disposal and fuel pellet replacement), the pellets themselves sound like they take MejaJoules to even make, in the form of extraction transportation, refinement, and housing.
Gold is a rare earth, diamond is not as rare as it once was but even CVD methods take 1000 deg f Temps, hydrogen is relatively cheap but still costly to produce and store.
Perhaps there is another combination of materials that are cheaper to produce/manufacture, but this is the first and largest question to be answered, energy ratio and mechanics questions aside.
Until then, it's far from inevitable that this can be done, the hidden costs are probably many order of magnitude higher than directly estimated.
It might. I think most people expect tokomaks to be more practical, but generating power from inertial confinement is at least theoretically possible. It might even be reasonably cost-effective if someone can figure out how to manufacture the hohlraums/fuel capsules cheaply.
Is that relevant? I think the point is that ignition has been demonstrated. That gives people confidence that it is possible and can only accelerate research.
That thermonuclear ignition can be technologically achieved has, unfortunately, already been demonstrated. It has not yet been demonstrated in a way that seems to be leading to practical power production, and that goes for this result, too.
Lawrence Livermore director Kim Budil is being misleading in saying that this is necessary first step. Ignition will be a necessary step along the path to practical fusion power generation (if it can be achieved), but it is far from clear that inertial fusion is on that path.
It's a weird tone for IEEE. I'm not a regular reader or anything, but that article reads like a letter to the editor of a print magazine, or a comment on a Facebook article.
That weird tone is a 10 year old precedent they've never disowned. Now there is the science free collection of talking points plus a click bait headline.
Perhaps it's not actually "weird."
Look, may I actually say the thing that is going carefully unsaid here without getting modded into the dirt? The suggestion, now apparently armed with distant glimmer of feasibility, that we might actually solve energy problems without adopting a greatly reduced consumption profile is extremely unwelcome to a lot of people. Energy policy and the present prescription of extreme conservation+renewables is the lever with which the entire consumption structure of our species can be altered in a desired direction, and events such as the NIF fusion breakthrough are seen as a setback to the requisite narrative. And so we're getting abundant amounts of FUD and downplaying about NIF, just as we have from day one.
I can't hold with this. NIF is fundamental Science. People are building things, solving problems, asking questions and measuring stuff no one anywhere has ever dealt with, and nobody, not Nature, not you and not me, know where this will lead. It may all be the giant boondoggle that Nature et al. have argued it is for going on 10 years now, or we might all have an iFusion Pro Model 3 in our pockets by 2040. We don't know. NIF and other attempts to find out are worth the cost and deserve a bit of room from everyone, despite whatever sacred narratives might be in jeopardy.
Also, people fail to take into account that even with reduced consumption, we would still need to improve the electrical grid. We have to electrify transport, heating, agriculture, industrial processes, ... Even if we all stopped buying iPhones and computers tomorrow, if we are serious about decarbonisation, we still need more electrical energy.
Most of the critique of this milestone sounds like dismissing the Wright brothers at Kittyhawk.
Yes at this point it's a totally impractical and the future is uncertain. Yet here we are with 20 hour flights across the globe.
Yes modern flight took over a century but given today's generally advanced technology you have to be much more optimistic about its practicality and timeline.
Despite all the endless talk of addressing global warming, here is an engineering solution to global warming that makes carbon obsolete...
...but now the media elite are throwing fear, uncertainty and doubt rather than urging for a Manhattan 2.0 style project to commercialize fusion technology.
It's noteworthy, but it's not a breakthrough. You can't be both really if you think about it. And this, while noteworthy, still leaves us decades (and several actual breakthroughs) away from even a prototype practical fusion reactor.
Couple things. One, they're asking scientists to evaluate engineering problems for many of the items on list of concerns. Let's get the right evaluation before we toss this in the someday column.
Two, we live in an awe-inspiring age of magic but our society, or at least our media, seem hell-bent on making sure we don't start getting excited about it. Fusion ignition, ChatGPT, a vaccine for malaria, CRISPR, reusable rockets... what a time to be alive.
The general public barely have any idea of what fusion is let alone that it will likely be a few decades out at best. All they'll hear is "safe nuclear" and "limitless energy" from the talking heads/skimmed article
Literally a drop in the bucket compared to what the warmongers in Washington spend on killing and bombing and generally dominating the shit out of the entire world.
Of course, the rulers de jour prefer blood and gore over peace, philosophy, science and sustainability, like their Roman counterparts.
> “Our thermonuclear weapons have fusion ignition that takes place in our weapons, so studying fusion ignition is something we do to support the stockpile stewardship program,” Mark Herrmann, Lawrence Livermore’s program director for weapon physics and design, said during a technical panel on Dec. 13. “In addition, fusion ignition creates these very extreme environments that we have no other way to access on Earth. In this experiment, for the first time ever, we were able to put some samples of materials that are important for future stockpile modernization efforts that are going on at Lawrence Livermore today in very close to this intense neutron burst and then see how did they respond to that intense neutron burst.”
I think people underestimate how much faster things can develop given prioritization. NYT famously said a COVID vaccine would take several years to develop normally, and 18 months in the best case scenario. It took 50% less than that, even: just under a year. With the floodgates open, you can't apply old priors. If there's a burst of funding from the US and EU, we could see this change rapidly.
They are actually behind schedule reaching this stage with NIF. The problem turned out to be harder than their simulations suggested. And going to a commercially viable power plant? Very dubious, for multiple reasons.
Shortcuts were taken in that case. It was effectively tested live, offered protection measured in months, and did not prevent transmission as none of them were sterilizing vaccines.
Most people are implicitly acknowledging all of this by avoiding boosters.
When I choose my medical options, my standards are not only implied here but I also look for 20 year studies on top.
In sum, I’m not sure a burst of funding incentivizes the behavior we need, most of the time. Perhaps when no one stands to immediately profit from the situation. In that case, this fusion breakthrough being one step in a long journey secures these advancements as not being reckless endeavors towards unbelievable profits.
I'm not sure what claim you're insisting this is supporting. The summary from your link is clear and seems to contradict your earlier point about boosters being a no-brainer.
Bivalent mRNA COVID-19 booster doses containing an Omicron BA.4/BA.5 sublineage component were recommended on September 1, 2022. The effectiveness of these updated vaccines against COVID-19–associated medical encounters has not been established.
People have been working on inertial fusion energy for decades, and not simply because they like playing with stadium-sized, $5-billion-dollar laser facilities. Internet commenters who multiply two numbers to calculate a laser efficiency and then think they're smarter than thousands of people who have dedicated decades of their lives to this effort - should reconsider their perspective.
The physics of thermonuclear burn is well-understood from nuclear weapons experiments.
The yield from burning DT fuel in an ICF target is just as nonlinear as striking a match. If you've never seen a matchbox before, you might watch someone fruitlessly swiping the match on the side of the box with no discernible result. One, twice, three times. Maybe at some point you see a spark, but clearly the spark is insufficient to do anything with. You might start laughing, and exclaim "Why do you keep doing the same thing, clearly nothing is going to happen! Why are you wasting your energy?" But as everyone knows - eventually the match will strike and burst into flame.
At the press conference, they were pretty clear about what they achieved. They stated multiple times that it was the laser energy in, and not the wall plug energy. Also they also said that the lasers weren't designed to be efficient in the first place, because they want to maximize scientific output. And they were pretty clear that there are many many steps required until we have fusion energy.
It is a significant milestone, and people are trying to downplay that by stating fusion will never be feasible anyways, and this is why we shouldn't be excited.