Secretary Granholm to announce major scientific breakthrough by DOE [video]

If they have a good result, they should publish it in a peer reviewed journal with all the details.

There were quite a few results in the last two decades that were announced by a press conference and turned out to be completely false.

And I'm not even taking about the details of this specific result.

Press conferences are not

Also two observations to be optimistic: it seems that the sensors were damaged because it exceeded its specifications (so we only know the lower bound of the produced power), and the NIF laser is old (which means it's inefficient). The only (skeptical) worry is that this announcement might lead to another fraud positive investigation event a la Ninov or Schön. I honestly hope not.

Basically, the very big and undeniable shit hits you, immediately, right now, with regularity, while the hypothetical bits of maybe good news always are touted as breakthrough even though they will just be "for some times later".

Also, if I read the few cheerful comments correctly, this type of fusion basically means that ITER is a waste of time (so the lesson is, even in science, "internationnal cooperation ? shmooperation".)

Also, it's depressing to know that I'm too dumb to really help in any of the good fights, but that I'm constantly contributing to the shit.

So, yeah, kudos to the researchers, let them keep up the good work, but, maybe, only call it a "breakthrough" and have the press conference when it lights a bulb somewhere ?)

- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition

And additional news source:

- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/12/breakthr...

Lawrence Livermore national lab was working on this problem (under the LIFE project, including developing much more efficient solid state lasers, etc) but was correctly chastised for it being a waste of money because they had not yet achieved ignition or break even. The engineering challenges to make a commercial power plant can distract from the task of actually achieving break even and ignition. (And they still need to increase the gain to about 25-50 to get enough energy out to make useful electricity without heroic efficiency efforts… although since they have achieved ignition in a repeatable way, this should be doable.)

There’s so much lazy criticism about NIF that could be addressed just by perusing the Wikipedia article on the topic and the proposed successor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#M...

I think by most definitions that means, "closer". Proof of concept is a huge deal.

POC doesn't mean it will be viable, even once they manage to make it net-positive. Let's say they get the lasers to be more efficient - there are other inefficiencies in the system further upstream you have to account for.

So, yes, there is a long way to go still, and there's no way to be sure it will be economically viable at the end of it. As an example - look at algae biofuel. That was a working example, not just proof of concept but working at scale - but it couldn't compete on price with petroleum when it was below 4-5 dollars or so.

We won't know until we get there. But the promise it holds (easily obtainable fuel, which won't blight the land if the plant fails) is worth the investment.

They're not creating energy, they're basically releasing energy stored over from the Big Bang. Triggering that release with less input energy than output energy is an engineering problem.

Consume a small amount of mass, release a very large amount of energy due to the huge conversion factor. The first law isn't violated because the energy being released is coming from the annihilation of matter.

Mass and energy can in principle be converted given the right process. LLNL consumed the mass that produced the energy.

In this specific case, hydrogen atoms are fused together, which is a reaction that releases energy because the resulting combined atomic nucleus is at a lower energy state than the atoms that went in. This technically holds true for fusion up until you get iron nuclei, with heavier atoms than iron requiring energy to be put into the reaction when fusing. This is the other side of the equation, which we are already using for nuclear fission plants.

Bashing nuclei together hard enough to overcome their innate repulsion is where most of the input energy is going in fusion reactors. It is comparable to the concept of activation energy in chemical reactions.

Keep in mind that this announcement does not cover the total energy cost of running the reactor, "only" the theoretical amount of energy released into the chamber by the ignition laser. So we're a long, long way off from achieving what they call "unity" (an input/output ratio of 1:1) in practical terms. In theory, fusion reactions achieving practical unity can be self-sustaining. Although this specific way of triggering a fusion reaction is not continuous, it could theoretically be re-worked into a permanently running reactor that is pulse-driven in the same way an internal combustion engine is.

At this point it sounds like the actual energy they put in is less than they get out, but the energy it takes to put the energy in still makes it a loss overall.

For every 1 deuterium nucleus involved, it fuses with 1 tritium nucleus => producing 1 helium nucleus, 1 free neutron, and 17.6 MeV of energy.

The energy released then causes more deuterium and tritium to fuse, producing more energy, and so on, in a chain reaction.

The goal, in order for this to be used to produce electricity for consumption, is for us to be able to kick start this process by introducing less than 17.6 MeV of energy per deuterium-tritium pair, so that after you account for the energy spent to fuse those atoms, there's a net energy left over for us to use.

Put even more simply, we're throwing heat/pressure at atoms, to cause them to fuse, and in the process convert some of that mass to energy.

Obviously causing a nuclear explosion is not a very good way to generate energy. :)

We are developing literally a new way of making nuclear fire, a method which previously required an atomic bomb to produce. The first small kindled flame is definitely a triumph, even if we haven’t yet built a power plant for it.

I agree about the part of them giving credit to the current administration. While that maybe true to some extent it is not entirely true.

I disagree that this is a complete farce. This is a real breakthrough.

Just a note, no one (really, no one) is doing ICF outside of national labs because no one has the resources to fund ICF other than governments. If you're wondering why your fusion friends aren't excited about this, it's because now the pendulum will swing and people will abandon MCF in droves, because ICF actually achieved ignition whereas MCF hasn't yet.

A lot of fools who poured their money into all the trendy start ups are soon to realize they made their bets wrong. Everyone else is playing defense now.

[0] I said MCF hasn't "gotten close" but it has, that was a bit harsh. It's just NIF beat them.

Political hoopla in exchange for further research into fusion? (Especially now that ignition has been achieved?) I'll make that trade every time.

Bonus points if they want to trumpet the heroic effort in the schools to get more kids interested in the science?

This nation has to get there first. If that causes liberals and conservatives to snipe at each other and compete to advance the frontier then that's nothing but a win for the US. I hope conservatives are mad. I want you to be butthurt.

You're complaining like I care about your cause. I don't. Neither do I care about the liberal cause. I only care about how I can manipulate the both of you and your fellow political fuzzy wuzzies to the benefit of this republic using your pseudo-religious polito-babble.

However it will still take decades (if ever) to turn this into a working electric power system.

To me the major question is if once fusion is viable (assuming we get there) if it can compete on a cost basis with renewables (yes, base load etc).

NIF is a scientific demonstration facility, not in any way designed to be a power plant, nor should it be. it’s wasteful to build a steam turbine and boiler and efficient lasers when you haven’t even demonstrated ignition yet. Now that they have ignition, they can start thinking about the power plant a little bit more. But they still need to increase the gain to like 25-50 by leveraging ignition.

Article on an actual power plant demo follow on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy#M...

Fusion promises the energy density of fission (traditional nuclear power) with very-little/none of nuclear waste and dirty bomb problems. Compared to oil/coal, fusion is free and clean energy. Compared to traditional nuclear, fusion is ~99.99% free and clean energy.

This is the first little ember of that promise of fusion power. It's going to take a lot more research and time, but they have proved that it is possible. It's all 'just' engineering from here. Think 1-4 decades.

It's not a working plant by any means. But if this continues apace, your children are likely to spend most of their lives in a world with free and clean energy for all the nations of the Earth. Energy so abundant and clean that your children will be able to reverse climate change by powering machines to filter out all the excess CO2, for starters. After that, who knows?

For wind and hydro, the fluid motion is directly coupled to the rotor of a generator. Coal, gas, and nukes produce only heat, that must drive a heat engine to drive the generator. The lossy step is the heat engine. The turbine is incidental.

That said, the steam turbines used with coal and nukes require frequent expensive maintenance, a thing not true of water or air turbines. This is why coal and nukes are today uncompetitive, and daily fall further behind.

This is a great video explaining (and showing) what Helion is up to at the moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GJtGpvE1sQ

[1] For those not familiar, aneutronic fusion releases charged particles from which energy can be captured directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Energy_captu...

ICF targets don't absorb neutrons.

Direct conversion is well understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator We use steam turbines because they're both efficient and convenient engineering wise. They aren't bad at what they do by any means, so I don't understand why you're saying all these generation technologies using steam is some sort of big criticism.

Thermionic generators are an option when you want to minimize size and complexity however. The reactors the USSR launched on radar satellites used them for example. NASA is considering similar designs for Mars and deep space missions (no, I'm not talking about RTGs, but rather single digit Megawatt scale mini reactors under the MegaPower program).

From some quick googling, apparently the overall efficiency of a steam power station is around 29% (https://www.eeeguide.com/steam-turbine-efficiency/), measured by heat-in vs heat-equivalent-electricity-out. So once we get past the laser inefficiencies, we get 29% of net power.

From my completely lay-person understanding, the "hard part" was getting more energy out of the reaction than was put in. Now it's an optimization problem, unless there's a hard constraint on the design of these lasers that can't be improved beyond a certain point

> I’m also proud to announce today that 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

There is even a second-level scam, collecting money from the first level to build fraudulent demos. It is all perfectly legal.

Fusion is at the point Fission was in the 1940s. It works pretty well in a lab using extremely expensive equipment, makes a net loss of energy, and isn't ready for grid-scale production. But that will change if we continue to invest heavily in the commercialization of the technology.

The biggest advantages of fusion energy are its safety and non-proliferation aspects. You can very easily produce Plutonium using a commercial nuclear fission reactor plus some reprocessing facilities. That's not possible with Fusion since it uses non-fissile materials that can't be processed into a weapon. There are very few nations that should be trusted with fissile materials, and therefore very few that should be trusted with fission reactors.