This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
I don't know. Looking closely at the article reveals that the researchers achieved 1.2x energy gain from the lasers, which are about 1% efficient. Given the SOTA for such lasers is closer to 20% efficiency, this means that they achieved about 60% of break-even. But that's energy, no electricity. Even with the best current methods, about 60% efficiency is the best we can hope for in terms of getting actual electricity from this. So in practical terms they achieved 30% of break-even.
Is that good progress? I'd say so, for sure. Is this a breakthrough? I don't know, especially since the article itself says the data is still being analysed and the actual results aren't published yet. 95% of the article is just fluff about the potential and quoting 3rd parties who celebrate a result that hasn't even been officially confirmed yet.
So, no I don't think it's cynicism, I don't think it's contrarianism, and I do think it's VERY healthy to approach sensationalist headlines with a level-headed and down to Earth attitude instead.
Now regarding efficiency of laser itself, sure they are inefficient but from just nuclear fusion pov net energy gain is a significant milestone in itself. lasers can get incrementally more efficient, at least there was not incentive to make them super efficient so far & there are no known fundamental problems with making them efficient.
It’s silly to blame a facility not designed for power production for using inefficient lasers.
This is an important and necessary step to getting resources to go further. Imagine how dumb it would’ve been to build a fusion power plant before we could even do 1.2x energy gain. A complete waste of resources.
There's no industrial processes that make use of plasma in the 10s of megakelvins. It's also not moving the goal post at all, since generating electricity is the literal goal of nuclear fusion. If it's just heat you're after, we've solved that problem over 70 years ago. There's hundreds if not thousands of thermonuclear fusion devices readily available literally at the push of a button. But for some odd reason we try hard not to use them and focus on electricity instead...
Sadly, however, the article doesn't seem interested in answering that question and providing the necessary context. Instead it quotes authors of books, who seem ecstatic about the possibilities.
You'd be correct in calling me a cynic when I say that I've heard the "too cheap to meter"-slogan from back in the 50s when nuclear fission was the future.
But I try hard not to be that guy and genuinely want the same question answered - is this an actual breakthrough and a significant milestone in the big picture? Up to this point it's been hit-and-miss and many so called "breakthroughs" turned out to be small steps in the right direction, but not exactly quantum leaps.
Secondly, your attempt at being pithy about nuclear bombs is a complete loss. We previously only knew how to achieve an inertial confinement based fusion reaction with a positive Q factor by first setting off a fission bomb, and this was only done for the neutron generation to increase the amount of fissionable material exploded (which is why they are called fission-fusion-fission bombs).
We can now generate fusion energy in a way that is obviously confine-able. That's a major step, and it's not THAT hard to imagine many mechanisms of turning a hot droplet into energy. For example the hohlraum itself in an indirect system will obviously be heated by the reaction and could be used to generate steam. Engineering that makes no sense though if you can't get a high Q factor out of the ignition itself, hence the focus.
This four sentence post is a perfect example of OP's point. No insight, no though process, just a pithy negative reply.
Only an order of magnitude off, but yeah, physicists and spherical cows and all that.
> Secondly, your attempt at being pithy about nuclear bombs is a complete loss.
A little sense of humour is lost on so many bitter souls these days, it's kind of sad. Lighten up, mate!
> Engineering that makes no sense though if you can't get a high Q factor out of the ignition itself, hence the focus.
You do realise that the fusion reaction we're talking about lasted for less than a trillionth of a second in a miniscule area, while other practical designs are aiming for continuous operation in the half hour range to examine practical engineering challenges of particular reactor configurations?
A high Q-factor may be completely useless if the underlying concept doesn't work for actual power generation and one might be easier to achieve than the other (i.e. getting a continuously working reactor first and tweaking it to improve Qp). The question therefore becomes, what's the actual value of the result. The article doesn't even touch on that, while even some C-grade online publications provided context like that.
Didn't we get to that milestone when they detonated a fusion-based bomb back in 1952?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike
Anyway, I'm not sure it's a significant milestone. It's just a number along a scale. If you were to tell me they've achieved a _sustained_ reaction which yields more energy than goes into it, for a period of, say, a day or so - then you could claim a significant milestone has been reached.
And even with that, some people argue that given how there's basically no sustainable source of tritium for large-scale electricity generation, the whole exercise is pointless unless the process uses other combinations of elements.
My experience on HN is there is a bias for critical thinking. If it's traditional nuclear power or climate change, the bias is for it. If it's new battery tech or fusion power the bias is against.
Does it only feel "very healthy" to be critical because you are being critical of the idea?
I have been called "contrarian" to my face. I understand the deep seated need to be "absolutely certain", but maybe there _is_ something going here other than that?
Who's critical of the idea? I literally said it's good progress. What 's not good, however, is exaggeration, sensationalism that puts potential views and hype before substance, and raising expectations for something that's still essentially just basic research.
This has nothing to do with bias of any kind. It's just poor journalism, bad form, and misrepresentation of genuinely great work. I simply expect better from a publication like FT. If that's the level of reporting we get from what I thought to be a somewhat reputable source, why even bother taking any publication serious anymore? It's not criticising the researchers or downplaying their work.
It's a critique of the media preventing the public from actually getting a realistic picture. I'd like to be educated and kept up-to-date, not mislead and hyped up.
I will try to be really positive here. The researchers managed to achieve ignition on an area less than the width of a human hair for 100 trillionths of a second.
The resulting fusion may have gotten scientific break-even (again - no officially published results yet). This is great progress in terms of basic research, for sure.
On the other hand, we have experiments like Wendelstein 7-X, an experimental reactor that already can hold a stable plasma for seconds and is planned to go up 30 minutes of continuous operation early next year (construction is already finished).
The researchers state that they want to test, whether continuous operation is possible, how the plasma can be handled, how the materials and magnetic fields can be optimised and whether their approach is practical.
So on the one hand we have a theoretical result that may or may not be a scientific break even and is hailed as a major breakthrough that will open the door for commercial fusion reactors and lasts for trillionths of a second within a miniscule aera. No continuous plasma, no work on practical reactor design, just good old fashioned basic research at its best.
On the other hand we have working, practical fusion reactor experiments that are already able to hold a stable plasma for seconds and are tackling the engineering challenges of actually producing electricity. Some are designed for engineering break-even and Qp > 1 (e.g. ITER) and not ready yet, while others "simply" examine the practicality of a particular design (e.g. Wendelstein 7-X) and actually worked and continue to improve by orders of magnitude (in terms of operation time), pushing continuous operation time up to 30 minutes.
Now that I gave some context, how much of a breakthrough are we talking about? I don't know. All these experiments are important, of course and are required for the end goal of achieving economically viable stable power generation using nuclear fusion. I'd just like to wait for an official publication and a proper subsumption by other experts in the field.
Maybe we are just arguing about semantics and what constitutes a breakthrough but in my mind, the hardest challenge of fusion has been getting scientific gain over 1. There are still OTHER hard problem like continuous operation, capturing energy, but ultimately, getting scientific gain over 1 is/was the most challenging. You can say it isn't but the fact is, none of the MCF concepts have achieved a scientific gain over ~.64 and have not improved since the 1990s (JET). Look, if the 7-X or ITER or JET achieves a similar scientific gain, they will get similarly applauded.
I'm not saying that fusion will become a economically viable power source now. It is just that NIF de-risked the hardest challenge of fusion from a pure physics standpoint: more energy out than in.
It's a bad criterion for judging something noteworthy.
15 years after whatever this breakthrough is will anything have changed outside of the lab? That remains to be seen, but I'll believe it when we see the data.
The newspapers didn't cover it until random people started asking why the feats they'd seen with their own eyes weren't being written about.
https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Aviations_Attic...
It's a bit like with Elon Musk (re-)inventing the electric car. Those popular names that went down in history are usually not the original inventors. These people were first of all successful entrepreneurs that understood business and ultimately won the patent war. But in the early 20th century, the idea of flight was already firmly established, why would any "respected scientist" have doubted what could already be observed in action around the Western world?
A few years back I read David McCullough's biography of the Wright Brothers which told the same story: https://www.amazon.com/Wright-Brothers-David-McCullough/dp/1...
This site cites a couple of the pre-Wright naysayers: https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp...
It certainly sounds like just another Monday to me.
These may seem like tiny steps forward, but once the genie is out of the bottle it's going to be nuts.
Also this laser tech is ancient, once there's a major economic driver behind it I expect they'll rapidly advance.
Everyone formed their opinion about eg. Blockchain a long time ago.
But they do admit that eg. Gpt-3 is pretty advanced, but has it's own flaws.
I think the criticism comes mostly from people with just a little knowledge, trying to sound and feel like they know more. Just a few talking points or principles enable you to criticize, but not seriously analyze (much less create).
All the new stuff, however, has marketing and looks shiny.
In fusion research, pessimism is realism. Especially in laser powered fusion.
This experiment is producing 2.5 MJ of output for 500 MJ of input.
Roughly once a day.
After decades of basic research.
It's a scientific breakthrough in the sense that the rocks are now being banged together hard enough to make sparks. And a little more is known about rock banging than was known ten years ago.
But it's clearly not going to be producing power on a commercial scale any time soon.
Instead, I'd like to suggest, in addition to having with cumulative exposure developed a severe hype allergy, a lot of us are burnt with respect to that so-called progress. There's been a fair bit of outright corrupted delivery on the promise of new technology, not least IT, and many people here are savvy enough to see the costs of wrongheaded changes.
'Move fast or not, we don't care much, but back off breaking things we liked and leaving the rest of us picking up the shards.'
Cars, TVs, phones, take your pick.
When demonstrable, measure progress is achieved, visitors of this site get very excited and positive, from things like the Rust language all the way to solar power and reusable rockets.
A breakthrough is a qualitative change, not (merely) quantitative. 95% to 96% of reaction energy output is a nice but quantitative advance. 99% to 101% is a qualitative breakthrough: suddenly, it's a surplus, actual generation.
We are still far away from the latter, alas.
I think it’s just the Zeitgeist. Social media has trained us that a certain reasoning style is rewarded, quick takes that don’t dig into the first principles and instead serve as shibboleths that you’re not one of THOSE types of unintellectual pseudo tech bros who bought NFTs or whatever.
[0] The saying is true IME: First they laugh at it (ridicule it), then they say it's not in the Bible (conflicts with the norm), then they say they believed it all along.
If you read "breakthrough", you can be almost sure that it's an exaggeration from the press or the marketing team of the university (and in some rare cases, from the research team).
Showing a room full of problem solvers an unfinished problem that lacks critical supporting evidence will no doubt elicit a general response in the skeptical-to-cynical range.
I would respectfully argue that is is a health and normal response given the audience, and should be an expected bias on HN.
This is a “show me the evidence don’t tell me about the possibilities” crowd.
I for one and deeply excited if the data proves out, but my bias is “wait and see.” This could be a massive leap towards proof it will work.
No it's not.
"No it isn't!"
My very uninformed opinion (nuclear physicist by training, but not specialized in fusion, lasers, or plasma physics) is that we’re still 20 years (haha) away from fusion energy making its way into the power grid. And that is assuming this result (or other things, like the relative instability of global energy markets lately) causes an increase in funding for the field so that they can solve all the pesky engineering issues related to efficiency, reactor lifespan, reliability, cycling speed, etc.
It wouldn't happen overnight, but I can think of few things that would kickstart the electrification of everything better than functional fusion power plants.
But building out solar, wind, and storage will very predictably achieve energy independence, for radically less expense. No breakthroughs needed, but gratefully applied where found.
Can fusion power generation be made to work cheaply? Each day the question becomes less relevant.
Hackernews is not infested with reflexive contrarians.
Hackernews has healthy amounts of skepticism and doubt. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Bringing FTX into a discussion of nuclear fusion to justify skepticism is parody-worthy.
FTX is simply the latest in a series of media empowered EXTREMELY high profile scams. You can easily put a thousand other different high profile companies or claims in there.
The scientists are like 10% to blame here.
The problem is that fusion "breakthroughs" have been hyped by the press for many decades now. After a few such articles gets people excited and then reality crushes the hype, people learn to dismiss every new story as yet another inconsequential thing blown out of proportion.
I'm commenting about the coverage of fusion in general, not about this particular thing. If it is actually a big deal, great!
When I read what USDOE announces, I hope to be less skeptical.
The basis of my skepticism rests on having written a term paper titled ’Nuclear Fusion, Infinite Energy for the Future’ in 1982, and after the semester sharing my ‘it’s only 20 years away’ enthusiasm with my father -a PhD scientist working for the DoD. Hence it’s forty years since I first heard ‘fusion is always 20 years away.’
Of course I don’t know any LLNL scientists but don’t question their or your sincerity or motivation.
The difference between those and the incentives of financially oriented news reporting, doesn’t make me less skeptical. Their mandate is to present potentially market moving ideas before the market can move.
And because I lived through Pons-Fleischman. Which is to say I have forty years of experience with reports…I mean I see excitement for Tokamaks and I wrote about them in 1982.
No one has any idea how that would ever be viable; other fusion alternatives at least have a way to accomplish thermal transfer from the reactor. Then you somehow have to figure out how to build a financially viable power plant. Oh, by the way, the lasers need to fire 1000x more for that. No one has any idea how that would work either.
There is a reason no one but a national lab interested in fusion reactions with massive financial resources has done this before; its interesting but doesn't produce any kind of viable power source.
Edit: The INF was proposed and designed as means to ensure the viabilty of the nuclear stockpile. It and the French equivalent were never understood as somehow prototyping a fusion power plant for the reasons laid out above. The press reporting here is just not accurate.
I'm excited for both for reference.
1. Energy output != power generation. At the end of every fusion reactor is boiling water to turn a turbine to generate electricity. There's a limit on efficiency and we still aren't there yet;
2. Much like all of nuclear power (fission included) we brush over capital costs and focus on operating costs because that tells a much better story.
3. We still have energy loss from neutron loss;
4. We still have container damage to content with due to neutron embrittlement.
Even the article claims (and this is optimistic) that commercial fusion power generation is "decades away".
Much like FTL travel, we get suckered into unwarranted optimism because we want it to be tru, particularly with the fuel abundance and (no) waste issues. We also fall into th enaive trap of thinking if stars can do it, it must work. But what contains stellar nuclear fusion is gravity.
I'd argue there's still way too much optimism. Pointing out these issues doesn't make you a contrarian. It makes you a realist.
I think that's true. But I also think there is a lot in the way of breathless PR around science topics both from university press offices and lower-end science news outlets. Especially around fusion, which has been 20 years away for a lifetime. So I get why people are going to be particularly skeptical.
I can't imagine what it is like to be in their heads. Even for things I am skeptical about, I still want them to be true if they are truly transformative. My worst case scenario is being cautious, but never, ever, negative.
(1) We are used to the same "news" story being cycled again and again. I think a year ago we heard about a previous breakthrough in ignition. When I hear a story like this my first instinct is that the old story has been recycled and I'm not sure that there is any actual news.
A few months back it was announced that scientists had discovered a black hole that was nearest to the earth and it still gets posted to HN which makes me wonder if they discovered a closer one.
(2) For a while there have been two parallel tracks, one of very slow development efforts at LLNL and IETF which might yield a power source in 50 years and another about firms from Lockheed Martin to scrappy startups who are promising to build a "Mr Fusion" tomorrow. There are still memories of the Pons & Fleischman affair from the 1980s and a strange subculture of LENR activists who claim they will sell you a fusion power source today. One could easily assume "fusion is the new blockchain" in this climate
(3) Fusion research has proceeded with no direct line to a practical power source for a long time, the sharpest critique you hear is "the point of the NIF is to do subthreshold tests of nuclear weapons, not develop a power source"
(4) Fusion is really hard. They might have to get the energy output up 100 times and increase the shot rate 500,000 times to build a real power source, even if 1-3 aren't enough to make you dismiss the whole thing. People will point out that ignition is a big threshold and it might not be so hard to increase the energy output from here out, but we have a long ways to go.
What could be done about that aside from expecting people to just... be better? I think the shape of these forums induces those kinds of comments, even if the community and moderators make a real effort to uphold higher standards. And I think if I encountered the same people in a different kind of forum then I might have a higher quality conversation. Heck, my own comments would probably be a lot more constructive!
Real world example of what I'm thinking: I have a neighbor over one fence who has very different political views to mine. We have perfectly civil conversations in which we're both actually really engaged and trying to understand each others' perspectives and experiences, and not just keeping the peace by avoiding difficult topics. It feels like effort we put into the conversation is rewarded.
I can't shake the idea that there might be "one weird trick" (okay, maybe a handful used together) that could make it more rewarding to put more effort into online conversations on forums like Hacker News or Reddit. One I've wanted to try for a while is to recreate something along the lines of Slashdot's moderation system, but with room for a meta-conversation to take place in "moderation space" (in which all community members could participate) and for there to be opportunities for people to refine their comments in response to feedback — and for doing so to be the norm.
Maybe it's not that simple. That's okay, too. But I've seen different moderation strategies around the web produce very different results, so it seems to me that there should be plenty of room for experimentation, and a lot to learn from doing so.
Online discussions "between two people" merely mimic a conversation so the audience (of potentially thousands+ of people) can learn and be swayed.
Online conversations are inherently broadcast so the stakes are too high to acquiesce or make concessions for whomever's willing to actually take the bait and engage on "important" topics.
You get more content out of a discussion with your neighbor in 30s than that. Those comments are genuinely worthless, they don't talk about things like:
1) What are the parts of an inertial confinement fusion based system which are difficult and which are missing today and would need serious investment
2) What is the likelyhood that the power output observed here could double, or more with other scale factors?
3) What's the net system costs once a plant is made. Is the fuel cheap or expensive?
Etc. It's fine to be contrarian, but most of the contrariness on this most internet forums is of the most basic, shallow kind that is defeated in a moment by any serious thinking.
The short answer to being better? Posts with more in depth content. I seriously think HN should consider banning pithy one or two sentence posts "they still would only get 1/4 the power" you find all over the place.
Overall, I'm glad there are still points of excitement and we haven't come to a halt.
I think the best way to increase the quality of discussion for research results is to avoid posting misleading and hype driven coverage, so the discussion can then focus on the actual research results and their implications, rather than on the poor coverage.
If you don’t push and help the many small steps that come before the big leap, many big leaps will never become feasible.
When it was all on the upside, inflating the bubble, there was a fair amount of hero worship here for Zuck and others. People were talking about self driving cars being leased by the minute and changing the world, all with a straight face. Google paid an engineer over $110million because he was going to lead the effort to build a fully autonomous self driving car... As an industry, we've sort of failed on that one. AI/ML was going to lead to mass layoffs of people as we "automated" everything, there were companies just pouring money in to anything related to it to avoid being left behind. I think I heard at a conference over the summer that 90+% of all ML/AI project fail to make it to production; that's brutal, like half I could see but 9 of 10?!? Even if you're getting paid tons of money to do that stuff, wouldn't you want to actually achieve some success? Social media has sort of failed us too, the real media got involved and sort of took it away and then the Russians and Chinese have been using it to tamper with our elections and our ability to practice democracy. The internet is "decentralized" but just try to do that without Google or Facebook or Amazon or other... Since everyone seems to be convinced a recession is going to happen, it's going to take one to sort of get things righted and start the next bubble cycle. Or maybe how the gig-economy was going to change it all. Or everyone was going to learn to cook gourmet meals from blue apron and all the carbon used to move boxes of ingredients around was never going to be a big deal...
It's always based in hype. Every handful of years the geeks and nerds think they're going to take over the world again, maybe we'll do it next time.
In the mean time, any and every break through with fusion is awesome. I'm a geek/nerd so don't believe my hype, but when we crack the fusion nut, we will change the world.
The initial flood of comments is always like that, because they are low-effort dismissals. The first 5 comments on every story could probably be auto-flagged.
The better stuff usually rises to the top eventually.
The first one I see is along the lines of "This was only net energy gain in the plasma and not overall so it shouldn't be called a breakthrough". The net energy gain in the plasma is still a huge step and rightfully called a breakthrough.
The second one is along the lines of "These are just intial results and the article says the data is still under review". This one I totally get. Replication of scientific results and accounting for all sources of errors is real big deal. The NIF had an experiment last year where they we able to achieve an ignition reaction but were unable to replicate it.
Don't get me wrong I respect all the effort it takes to do something truly new, inventing technologies that previously didn't exist with the height of what we can produce today, and every step forward is a triumph. But is tomorrow's announcement going to lead to a step-change in anyone's life before my infant daughter goes to college? I doubt it, and I have work to do. I'm happy to be proven wrong though!
Just because they're excited doesn't mean it's a big deal, nor any guarantee that it works or ends up being practical.
I've heard 'exciting' news about fusion many, many times over my entire life and essentially all of them have come to nought. Or after the excitement settles down over said development we still find that fusion ends up being that magic number of 40 years into the future.
I've even worked in the nuclear game but I don't expect to see my home powered by fusion energy in my lifetime, unfortunately.
People laugh at Russian TV, but to a lesser extent all western governments do the same kind of thing.
The LLNL has one job: research nuclear physics for maintaining the bomb stockpile without actually blowing any up in life fire tests.
Anything else they say is just there to make the public feel good about the billions being spent on weapons research.
There is zero — repeat — ZERO chance that the fusion approach used by LLNL will ever be used in any sort of energy production.
That’s not what their setup is for.
I think scientists are humans after all and they (much like people who rejected bitcoin when it was at $3 and now have to justify their pre-held beliefs) have to justify why they didnt think it was possible or "real" even in the face of multiple fusion breakthroughs.
hey, at least all of them are highly educated and extremely correct about things. read about it on their blogs. (sarcasm enabled for this reply)
We are not 'reflexive contrarians' for going "I don't believe it until a lot of separate research groups show the same results". The whole point of the scientific method is to not believe somebody just because you personally know them or they are "respected". Their work has to be replicated for Science to take it seriously.
no it's not
( /s but also many of us have seen enough 'fusion breakthrough' and 'battery tech breakthrough' and 'medical breakthrough' and 'AI breakthrough' announcements that it's difficult to give anything much credence without at least a production prototype showing real world performance.)
But yeah, certainly seems like this time is different. Really hope we start seeing more breakthroughs after this as it’s great news.
Hacker News is a good source for interesting posts and idea. The comments are mostly worthwhile for watching how a social machine produces very weird stuff. It is not the people who are contrarians, it a function of the machine.
Zeynep Tufekci talked about how twitter affords outrage and the Arab Spring, but did not afford a way to do anything constructive with that outrage. (Twitter and Tear Gas, available as a pdf). HN commenting system affords .... what you see here.
Who else in their minds eye see smoke and sparks in the experimental facility and control room, and scientists and engineer wooping with joy ;)
It is very interesting, but in the same way that advances in particle physics are interesting.
> SCOOP: Net energy gain in a fusion reaction has been a holy grail in science for decades. Now I’m told US scientists have done it. A massive breakthrough with revolutionary potential for clean power. US Energy Secretary to hold a press conference Tuesday: https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589...
Instead of particle physics, perhaps a better comparison would be to quantum computing "breakthroughs" that come out from time to time. Within the field I'm sure there are breakthroughs that inch us closer to something useful (useful in the way it is described in these articles, solving currently unsolvable problems, etc.), sure, but we are so far away from something useful that these inches are ultimately quite underwhelming to the general public (people like me).
By all means, I will occasionally read and enjoy great science reporting on these topics, but I have been conditioned to massively downplay the general significance of such news, and I think it's quite well justified, and not mere cynicism (cast as a negative).
From the article!!!