Happy Ignition Day everyone. I can hardly believe we really made it here.
Happy Ignition Day everyone. I can hardly believe we really made it here.
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.
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.
See how pedantic and not helpful that is?
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.
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.
Seems like an overcorrection to something I haven't even seen anyone here say.
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.
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).
"In terms of the physics, we are basically there, and the rest of it, at some level, is just engineering," he said.
[1] https://www.cbs58.com/news/wisconsin-reacts-to-breakthrough-...
(Sent from my ENIAC)
Allegedly ignition was achieved a year ago. How is this different?
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.
> 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.
Fluke or measurement error, it seems.
If these are the same thing, why didn't they make a big deal about it before? What's the material difference?
But it is weapons work, first, last, and always.
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.
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
> 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?
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.
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).
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.
Unless you're in your early teens and don't plan on having kids until you're in your 30's this proba
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.
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.