Another example is the state of communication about fusion power right now, which is deplorable. The media has been full of claims about how they finally achieved "net energy gain." Except "net energy gain" is a narrow scientific description that does not, in fact, mean what we would normally consider net energy gain for viable fusion power.
If we look at the actual total power input to the experiment in question, and the power output, we see a 99% energy loss: the total output power was only 1% of the total input power. That means we're 100 times, two orders of magnitude, away from achieving an actual energy gain.
On HN there is probably a good amount of awareness of this, but I bet there are some people reading this comment who were not aware of it, and were misled by the reporting. Here's an article for the unfamiliar: https://whyy.org/segments/why-the-nuclear-fusion-net-energy-...
So I think the headline could be generalized: science communication has a high degree of dishonesty in general, and that makes good science communication hard.
Yeah. But it goes beyond that. Even in the science, even thinking of not economically viable energy gain but just net energy gain within the reaction, it's kind of not a real immensely useful result. The "net energy gain" being talked about is technically a breakthrough result we've been expecting for the last half-century. If obtained on a small scale within a continuous reactor it could signal the beginning of true sustaining thermonuclear fusion. However, the result here is not in a continuous (or long-pulse) reactor like a tokamak or stellarator – it is instead in a miniature nuclear bomb in a military researcwhile doing it. h facility focused on nuclear weapons development. We have demonstrated this kind of positive fusion gain on a large scale before, and blown several craters in various indigenous lands while doing it. In fact, the exact same components that exist in the NIF targets exist within nuclear weapons – we just replace the the source of the energy the hohlraum reflects with a bank of lasers. In nuclear devices, it's another nuclear bomb instead. That it works on a smaller scale is not exactly surprising, nor is it useful.
NIF is mostly to study weapons performance without violating test ban treaties. There's very little chance it'd ever be useful for power production, though that is the cover story for it.
Describing anything complicated to a general audience is tough.
Most people fundamentally misunderstand the issues around fission and its economic viability even though there’s hundreds of nuclear reactors. No base load power isn’t inherently a good thing, it was actually coined to describe a downside. Clarifying just that misunderstanding gets info market forces, investments, and engendering to a non trivial level but you essentially need to condense it down to an infographic or people will lose interest. I have no idea how you could pull that off in an interesting manner.
IMO, the trick is to narrowly address the common misconceptions. Flat paper airplane wings provide lift, therefore Bernoulli’s principle isn’t why wings work. However that doesn’t extend to actually explaining complex topics.
In the fusion case though, hype has been raised to the point of being outright false or even fraudulent. It’s not just a question of “describing something complicated”.
It’s very easy to tell people that the latest experiment only produced 1% of the power that was put into it. Instead, they were told that the “net energy gain” was positive, and that this was a major breakthrough that brings viable commercial fusion power significantly closer.
I suppose, when you have experiments costing tens of billions of dollars being funded by the public, that this kind of corruption of the truth is inevitable. But that quite understandably undermines public trust in science communication.
Those experiments have basically nothing to do with fusion power and everything to do with validating computer simulations of nuclear reactions.
The fig leaf of nuclear power generation is why you get the seemingly ridiculous Q factors based on energy in the pellets. Otherwise the obvious suggestion to cancel the program if ITER demonstrates Q = 10 while these things are Q = 0.01 could gain steam.
> Those experiments have basically nothing to do with fusion power and everything to do with validating computer simulations of nuclear reactions.
then news reports should say "nuclear fusion computer models improved by 5% today" and be on page 94, instead of lies about fusion power progress on page 1.
Consider the implications of what you’re saying. “Highly classified program developing radar absorbing paint announces new milestone with 5% better performance.”
Energy Secretary Granholm said the following at a press conference: “This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society.”
> “This astonishing scientific advance puts us on the precipice of a future no longer reliant on fossil fuels but instead powered by new clean fusion energy.”
> “This monumental scientific breakthrough is a milestone for the future of clean energy.”
> “This significant advancement showcases the future possibilities for the commercialization of fusion energy.”
As I said, there are plenty of ways to put out press releases that don’t claim world-changing results where none exist. The idea that this was a necessary cover for the weapons applications is laughable.
fusion is also tied into another problem - there's large swathes of the business/political world that don't want to do anything useful about climate change, and so suggesting that fusion might soon appear and solve all our problems without having to do anything hard or soon hugely advances their cause.
Australia has a related problem, where anti-climate-change-action forces on the Right have pivoted to supporting nuclear fission as the solution - Australia has no nuclear fuel industry and no existing nuclear power reactors, and so pushing that has the effect of delaying any actual climate action for decades.
I don’t believe that they seriously see fission as a solution, touting it is just a tactic for delaying real action on behalf of the fossil fuel industry.
Yes, it’s science, precisely for the reason I raised, which is that fundamental research is still needed and still being done before it can get to the point of being pure engineering. There’s no path to viable controlled nuclear fusion that can be achieved by simply applying engineering principles using known physics.
That’s why the Fusion Energy Sciences program within the Department of Energy’s Office of Science was allocated three quarters of a billion dollars in the 2023 appropriations bill.
Here’s a list of institutions involved in fusion research in the US alone:
There are similar lists for all the countries involved in the $40+ billion ITER experiment.
Of course, there’s serious engineering involved in these projects as well, just as there is for the LHC, for example. But presumably you wouldn’t call the research being done at the LHC “particle engineering”.
Another example is the state of communication about fusion power right now, which is deplorable. The media has been full of claims about how they finally achieved "net energy gain." Except "net energy gain" is a narrow scientific description that does not, in fact, mean what we would normally consider net energy gain for viable fusion power.
If we look at the actual total power input to the experiment in question, and the power output, we see a 99% energy loss: the total output power was only 1% of the total input power. That means we're 100 times, two orders of magnitude, away from achieving an actual energy gain.
On HN there is probably a good amount of awareness of this, but I bet there are some people reading this comment who were not aware of it, and were misled by the reporting. Here's an article for the unfamiliar: https://whyy.org/segments/why-the-nuclear-fusion-net-energy-...
So I think the headline could be generalized: science communication has a high degree of dishonesty in general, and that makes good science communication hard.