Is it not as big of a deal as I thought?
You should be getting very excited when any of the magnetic fusion approaches achieve ignition, because unlike ICF they are much more straightforward to scale and capture energy from.
My point is that if the scheme that did step 1 is useless the scheme that can't even muster step 1 is even more so useless.
Modern IC production would have sounded absurd in the same way a mere lifetime ago. (It kind of does even now.) The first market for ICs was in the 60s space race (and I guess ICBMs) which could afford the initial milder absurdity.
I'm sure you're right about the rest; it's a pet peeve when people round off this kind of thing to "never".
I thought magnetic approaches to fusion have already achieved it, even if only for a few seconds. What does "ignition" mean for a magnetic fusion approach?
If you listen to an FM radio station for instance, you can easily get frustrated that they seem to play the same Doobie Brothers song every time you are in your car.
I read a book about programming for radio and how a large number of listeners listen to just a little bit here and there. If you want to expose the whole audience to a new song you have to play it a stupendous number of times, enough that a person who is listening all the time (me in high school) hears the song 50 times and is thoroughly sick of it by the time 95% of listeners have heard it.
I used to watch CNBC a lot and felt there were days when there was a lot of good news and the market went up or a lot of bad news and the market went down. I developed a "financial sentiment index" based on a few 1000 articles a day from Yahoo Finance and found not only that averaging sentiment from financial news with a generic commercial sentiment analysis tool was not at all predictive or retrodictive of major market indices, but that my impression of CNBC was certainly illusory. On TV you are going to see maybe 20 stories that get heavy rotation in a day and if these were independently sampled the exact choice of which 20 stories you run is going to determine the average sentiment more than changes in sentiment across the universe.
The moral is that your judgement of what is getting covered too much or too little is not based on enough information to be significant.
Do you remember the title?
It seems to me that the technical achievement is creating a fusion bomb that is small enough to be not destroy anything. What these little bombs are good for is unclear to me. But I would not have imagined blasting droplets of tin to get X-rays to etch microchips, either. Nor would I have thought that one could drive around at 60 mph by means of a bunch of discrete gasoline explosions, either. So who knows!
The question for me is why is it news at all?
It's not really relevant to anyone and is really a technical milestone more than anything meaningful.
Tin foil hat time. We're back in the cold war and every potential sign of being ahead of Russia will be lead news.
More like "We're in a new cold war and every potential sign of being ahead of China will be lead news."
The Guardian (UK): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/12/breakthr... : "Breakthrough in nuclear fusion could mean 'near-limitless energy'" -- which implies a pretty big deal, not?
Deutsche Welle (DE): https://www.dw.com/en/energy-breakthrough-can-nuclear-fusion... : "Energy breakthrough: Can nuclear fusion help fuel the world?" -- also a guaranteed click from anyone, regardless of interest level in the subject?
NRC (NL, in Dutch): https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/12/13/amerikanen-wekken-voor-... : "American breakthrough in nuclear fusion research" -- describes this as "an important step"
France24 (FR, echoing French-language publications): https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20221213-us-set-to-anno... : "US scientists announce historic nuclear fusion breakthrough" -- "historic" saying a lot here
So, while not above-the-fold headline material anywhere, it seems this is getting very decent coverage worldwide?
They do make it out to be a bigger deal than it actually is. If you read the press release as a layman you'd be convinced that we were generating electricity from nuclear fusion now and we'll see commercial fusion plants pretty soon.
However when you then look at the actual data it becomes clear that we're not there yet by a long shot, so if you first set expectations that high in the press release every reporter worth their salt is going to put some big caveats in their article. Which just makes this look like yet another case of over-promise, under-deliver.
I think they did a fine job describing what the achievement was without overpromising.
The press release makes no mention of the fact that we do not have efficient enough generators to turn the heat energy into net-positive electricity generation. And not for lack of investment, because more efficient generators would save millions in fossil fuel costs as well.
It also makes no mention of the fact that the laser system required somewhere between 100MJ and 300MJ for ignition on a reaction that only lasted a fraction of a second; with no clear path of scaling that reaction up so that it would actually produce more heat energy than was required for ignition.
I think that would be important information for a layman to understand what was and what wasn't achieved here.
Or, in other words, yes, this isn't as big a deal as you think, because they are... well... at least shading the truth. They've created a fairly arbitrary and practically useless measure for which this is "over unity". What's more, this isn't just me being negative; as many people observed in the HN comment chain there are ways in which it's kind of arbitrarily low too, like, we already apparently have lasers that would be more efficient and make the overall ratio of input to output look better. It's arbitrary in a lot of ways, not just self-serving ones.
It's not a huge breakthrough. It's an incremental step. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. We're going to see a lot of incremental steps between here and where even we finally land on with fusion. But there's been so many and will be so many more incremental steps that they aren't really newsworthy for a general audience.
The result achieved is the first moment the laseroutput energy has been eclipsed by the energy output.
But the energy input to the laser absolutely dwarfs the energy output still.
Think like, an order of magnitude more energy before it becomes equal to the actual energy needed to achieve fusion.
It is extremely far away from something really net energy positive that is, if you count efficiency of pumping the laser and efficiency of converting neutrons back to electricity. Currently it's about 1% overall efficiency with no clear path to >100%.
And even that is achieved, it's super far from economic viability. Because it will at the best case, amount to a coal power plant running on infinite free coal. Coal currently takes 20-30% of electricity price on coal plants. Getting a 20-30% cheaper electricity isn't a big deal.
BTW, it made front page on all of the news publications I regularly follow so I don't see this as being ignored so much as that it is merely one item in a huge stream of other important news.
I replied, "this will eventually result in nearly limitless energy that will fundamentally change humanity".
She responded, clearly disappointed, "oh, okay".
I think for the average person, unless it has an immediate impact on their life, it's difficult for them to visualize future potential benefits.
It's not. I don't get the hype here on HN. NIF didn't do anything that hadn't already been done, they just did it on a new facility. An that "more energy out than in" refers only to a very specific small part the power use, that of the actual laser. The total energy into the system as a whole is still orders of a magnitude more than generated.
It's also definitely not going to lead to any practical application in the foreseeable future, which is why the coverage isn't some week-long story. My own understanding of fusion is very limited but the breakthrough is about getting the actual fusion reaction to produce net positive energy. A big deal in physics but the amount of energy produced was tiny, it was far less than needed to power the equipment, the fuel capsules require extremely high-precision manufacturing that does not scale, we still don't know how to build an ignition chamber that could last with an active fusion reaction, and we don't know how to usefully capture energy from the reaction either.
To use a flight analogy, yesterday was the Wright Flyer covering a couple hundred meters before an unintended landing. From there, it's a long way to cross-continental passenger flights.
Not really. It was more like a story about how someone else made a successful short flight using a different design.
Neither solar nor wind can deliver the capacity needed for some high-intensity industries while also feeding the increased power demand from the grid without taking up an excessive amount of space without 'fixing the storage problem'. It may eventually be possible to cover part of the world's deserts in PV panels which produce power to create a transportable - solid, liquid or gaseous - energy storage medium which can be transported without excessive loss and stored locally to create a buffer to be used when supplies are low but this is mostly science fiction for now.
It's a big deal, but understanding why it's a big deal requires a fair bit of knowledge which can't easily be digested without time most news outlets are unwilling to devote to it.
https://www.tiktok.com/@hankgreen1/video/7176414313681292549...
In terms of practical benefit to eg carbon neutral electrical generation, it has no immediate impact and the long term impact is still very difficult to handicap.
This is Fusion Ignition; with Lasers or without Fission
So that's my take on it.
Plus everyone's too busy reading and writing about what Elon did today so you basically get the news that generates the most clicks these days...
Actual announcement was important but nuanced. HN comments had this tone. When you’re at that level the press and regular people move on.
But it's also the FIFA world cup nowadays, with Morocco over performing compared to expectancies
Christmas will be in a few days
Inflation and energy crisis and winter are settling in
So it's covered, but there is a limited bandwidth when is comes to news atm.
I have no idea why, it's going to be decades before it has any real impact on Canadians.
It's difficult to tell a news story that has more than 15 seconds of complexity.
I wait until they build the power plant and then we see.