Fusion breakthrough is a noteworthy step
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
At the press conference, they were pretty clear about what they achieved. They stated multiple times that it was the laser energy in, and not the wall plug energy. Also they also said that the lasers weren't designed to be efficient in the first place, because they want to maximize scientific output. And they were pretty clear that there are many many steps required until we have fusion energy.
It is a significant milestone, and people are trying to downplay that by stating fusion will never be feasible anyways, and this is why we shouldn't be excited.
> “The fusion reaction is heating the fusion reaction, which is making more fusions happen,” says Steven Cowley, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. “It’s like the fire has been lit. This is the first controlled fusion ignition that we’ve ever seen, and that’s spectacular.”
Well for me it's debatable whether this is such a huge achievement, because the distinction between controlled and uncontrolled fusion is a bit academic in this case. In uncontrolled fusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon), you are using a nuclear fission primary stage to generate enough energy to start the fusion reaction in the secondary stage. In the NIF, you are using lasers (that have to be aligned to trillionths of a meter and damage their own guiding optics everytime they fire) to start the fusion reaction in a smaller pellet (that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars). So the only real difference between the first and the second case is that the H-bomb is smaller, much more expensive per amount of energy released, and explodes inside a chamber. And it's obvious to pretty much everyone who is paying attention that transforming this setup into a working and cost-effective fusion power plant is a very tall order...
And well, this really doesn't seem like a very viable path to a power plant, though I'm all for more fusion research.
> As Lawrence Livermore director Kim Budil said during the announcement, this result is a necessary first step.
Correct. Has anybody even been claiming it's anything other than that?
They have certainly left the impression among many in the general public that we are close to commercializing this. Here's an example:
https://www.cbs58.com/news/wisconsin-reacts-to-breakthrough-... "In terms of the physics, we are basically there, and the rest of it, at some level, is just engineering," he said.
We need both engineering advances, and a better scientific understanding of plasma behaviors, new materials, etc.
> For that reason, and others, Chang says using this type of fusion as a clean energy source is likely decades away. But he says a fusion-powered future is coming.
It is not an engineering problem, they haven't solved half the physics still. You can't just tell the fuel pellets to burn hotter please, would you mind transferring your energy to this battery on the way out, they have none of the required steps to do this yet.
Once it's actually possible to get net positive energy, then yes by all means engineer away the inefficiencies, before that it's still as much a pipe dream.
We don't need to just solve fusion. We need to produce fusion in a manner that undercuts the price of fossil fuels. Then stack "renewable" on top of that. Sociologically, people operate on self interest and will in-group into team Fossil Fuels, Team Wind/Solar and we might even end up with Team Fossil Fuels and Team Wind/Solar forming an alliance to oppose Team Fusion.
Of course, outwardly and individually we play make believe that we are all impartial 3rd party observers that just want the best for Team Human. It is those self interested jerks on the other team that are the problem. Never you and I.
In reality though we are still far away from engineers being able to take over, even now. Because we need way more than 1.5x coming out of fusion in order to compensate for the inefficiencies in generating laser from electricity, and also the inefficiencies in converting heat output into electricity.
So that would be a "no".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnsQ_9EIRTk
The following is a partial transcription of what he said:
Neil: Right at this moment I don't think people know for sure what the announcement will be, but if the secretary of energy is giving the press conference, everyone I think is thinking that we finally can get out more energy than we put in, and that is the key..
(Neil describes fission versus fusion, and (weirdly) magnetic confinement fusion, even though NIF is inertial confinement. It really feels like he doesn't know anything about NIF.)
Host: alright so lets say we've overcome some of those challenges and finally created more energy than we put in to the experiment.
Neil: That's it.. you got it. so now it's up to the engineers. Once we get the physics figured out, which it seems like we have, then the engineers say can I make that smaller, can I make that portable, would it fit in to a car? or is it only the size that might power a city? there are places that don't have access to energy... either oil or sunlight for example... so this would be transformative to civilization, and I see it akin to the transition from horses to automobiles, which happened in a matter of a couple of years, because we got the physics figured out for engines, internal combustion engines, when that happened you couldn't give away a horse, yet we were riding horses for thousands of years, building civilization literally and figuratively on its back. so my analogy to that is, we've been digging fossil fuels out of the ground for 150 years...
Host: How long will it take to heal the planet from any harm that we've done to ourselves?
Neil: Yeah here we are harming a planet that was itself trying to sustain us. by doing that you've sewn the seeds of your own extinction. and so the planet will heal, slowly. a lot of the carbon is taken up in to the oceans, so if you start dropping the carbon in the atmosphere, the oceans will equilibrate with that, so it will take time. but now is better than any time later than now, so oh yeah... I'm giddy.
Host: I can't wait for my fusion engine.
Neil: It's a pivot in civilization.
"Now it's up to the engineers."
It's been that since the 50s.
I see so much negativity regarding fusion power when so much is happening it’s important to show all the positive things happening
I just really feel like NdT is really misrepresenting the importance of this specific announcement. In particular he’s conflating Q plasma with Q power plant. The NIF draws about 100x more power than it delivers to the target so if they actually tried to harvest the energy they generated they’d be losing 99.4% of what they’re putting in, at least according to comments I’ve read on HN about it. NdT makes it sound like they have actually gained energy when they are two orders of magnitude away from doing that at NIF.
He was very clear that it's speculative, and at no point did make it seem as if we had solved fusion. In fact, he goes to great length to talk about the challenges that have kept us from solving fusion.
One of the things about Tyson is that he will just bluff his way through stuff when he doesn’t really know about it. He has like a really friendly personality and he projects a lot of confidence, but he says a lot of inaccurate things for a science communicator. The fact that he talks about magnetic confinement and never mentions lasers for example makes me question if he even knows how NIF works. It’s not his field and he may literally not know. But that didn’t stop him from going on national TV to discuss it, while making sure to mention his latest book.
Don't forget that headline writers for media publications typically don't write nor (one imagines) read the articles.
If you watch the video it looks like it was shot earlier this year, but it is 10 years old. And yet, the video mentions 192 lasers (so that hasn't changed in 10 years), and they also mention that even after ignition is achieved, "laser fusion won't be able to power a city until a plant can fire 100s of shots a minute."
Interesting quote from a skeptic in the video: "We'll see pigs fly before we see ignition at the National Ignition Facility".
if this approach works, you'll see laser innovation over time to improve energy per shot. You'll also see engineering to contain the released neutrons so everything in there doesn't get made radioactive.
The problem doing this with fusion seems to be money. Their "big" grant of 600M wouldn't even buy a handful of those machines and wouldn't come close to the many billions it has cost in the past 30+ years of research to reach the point where they are finally viable (it had been "a few months away" ever since the early 2000s).
This video from Asianometry on EUV light sources is well worth the watch. It's pretty incredible.
The reality is that charging up the lasers takes about 400 MJ, then due to very large inefficiencies you only get 2 MJ directed to the target, and they got out 3 MJ from the fusion reaction.
So we did not get more energy than we put in. We started by using 400 MJ, and got 3 MJ in return. We're not net positive energy generation.
Nothing will change in our daily lives yet. And a lot of people that have been misled by the reports are going to be very disappointed. This is a problem, because we're overhyping results and we're setting ourselves up for disappointment. And this can lead to resentment and funding getting cut.
The results are unequivocally good. But they're being portrayed as something they're not. We are yet unable to generate more energy than we put in.
> and got 3 MJ in return
we didn't even "get" anything .. being able to catch and use released energy is whole other non trivial box of kittens.
(We've changed the title now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33996271)
> It’s not about to solve climate change ..
Well quite. Obviously no single measure 'solves' climate change, but even its logically possible contribution - decarbonising electricity production - isn't going to happen. We need to have thoroughly completed this project long before there's any realistic chance of fusion-generated electricity becoming widely available.
So if/when fusion power is to hand, it will add to or replace existing decarbonised power sources. It's not any less exciting for that - if it lives up to a fraction of its potential, it could be utterly transformative for human activities, as were newly discovered energy sources before it. Some of those uses could include future climate change mitigation and adaptation measures - you just can't predict what might be possible with vast cheap energy surpluses on tap.
But we have to get there first, which includes the formidable task of keeping a global technological society functional enough to be able to complete projects of this scope. A necessary condition for that is going to be to decarbonise while we can.
Transferring to renewable energy as we build up the infrastructure and retrofit our housing is the smart choice here. And when fusion finally becomes a reality, we’ll be ready to use all that abundant energy from day one. Maybe we could use all this extra energy for sucking carbon out of the atmosphere in a giant cleanup effort.
Re fusion power, the causality is the reverse of how it's normally expressed. We don't need fusion to fix the climate crisis (it comes too late). But we do need to fix the climate crisis to be able to create usable fusion power. The scale of research & implementation it relies on depends on a well-functioning global network of nations. If we collapse into multiple wars over who will take the hundreds of millions of mid-century refugees, who will and won't quit fossil fuels, not to mention the trivialities of Great Power politicking, then fusion power just won't happen.
There are a few misconceptions about energy I think it's important to clear up.
- New energy sources have never replaced older ones. Instead they were just added to the pile. We are currently burning more biomass and more coal than ever before. So-called decarbonized energy sources have never replaced fossil fuels.
- There is an interdependency, a symbiotic relationship if you will, between different energy sources. To pump oil you need steel, which means burning coal. To mine coal you need diesel-powered machines. To build solar panels you need to mine minerals with diesel-powered machines. To make wind turbines you need steel, and thus burn coal. To build nuclear reactors you need lots of steel, lots of cement, which also means burning coal. Even to be able to burn biomass (renewable, carbon-neutral, yay) on an industrial scale you need machines to cut all those trees, powered by fossil fuels. And so forth and so on...
- The mining activity related with so called "decarbonized energy" (solar, wind, nuclear, lithium batteries etc) is heavily based on fossil fuels. This, in addition to its multiple disastrous environmental impacts: destruction of ecosystems, water pollution, air pollution, aquifer poisoning.
- The global economy is still totally dependent on fossil fuels - for mining, global transport, food production and to a large degree manufacturing. Just about any object in your house or in your pocket was manufactured and delivered to you using fossil fuels. Those Teslas everybody is so enamored with won't exist without the coal burned to make the steel they contain, the oil burned to mine all the other metals (actually a substantial chunk of the periodic table), and also the oil burned getting them delivered to you. Not to mention the fact that you'll still need to burn some gas and coal in order to charge them.
For nuclear fusion, even if the technology is advanced enough to create a stable reaction that releases more energy than it consumes, personally I highly doubt it will be sufficient to ween us off fossil fuels. Nuclear fission (the most dense energy source we currently have) has never done that.
Meanwhile PV and wind turbines are getting cheaper.
In other words, in my view for fusion to have become useful at scale, I think we already must have decarbonised electricity production (with solar/wind/geo etc). If at that stage fusion is cheap enough to give our civilisation a boost, all the better. If not, we'll be in better shape than looks likely now anyway.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=1g_A5tEApa0&feature=shares
Very interesting nonetheless, especially for people interested in physics.
1.) This relies on using Tritium, which is one of the most expensive and rare materials on the planet.
2.) The measured energy output relative to the input given was a technicality, the real efficiency of the system was < 1%, they would need to improve the efficiency of lasers to bridge that gap somehow.
3.) This method of fusion has not been reproducible at any other labs in the world.
Not saying it isn't possible, I'm actually an optimist when it comes to things like this. However, looking at the physics, I think it's safe to say that it doesn't seem likely that this will be the type of fusion that becomes the reactor of the future. His conclusion, with which I agree, is that fusion is still at least 10 years away.
>Just one more step on the long road to commercialization
Road
noun
1. a wide way leading from one place to another
2. a series of events or a course of action that will lead to a particular outcome.
Source: google
And there’s the problem right there. Inertial confinement will never lead to electricity generation.
Lawrence Livermore director Kim Budil is being misleading in saying that this is necessary first step. Ignition will be a necessary step along the path to practical fusion power generation (if it can be achieved), but it is far from clear that inertial fusion is on that path.
Happy?
> Wright Brothers Plane Won't Lead to Practical Flight
> Rocket Engines Won't Lead to Human Spaceflight
> Mold Spore Cultivation Won't Lead to Penicillin Breakthrough
and so on.
I’m guessing the Wright Brothers (and the equivalent of media/intellectuals at the time) didn’t know they had a sure thing early on either.
Usually these “tipping points” are defined in retrospect aren’t they?
Sure. But watching a bird fly is a key step towards making a 747 too.
The energy that came out of the fusion reaction was more than the energy in the laser beam that ignited it. But the energy that went into the laser was about 100 times more than the energy that came out, so we've gone from -99.5% efficiency to -98.5% or something like that. Is that a key step? I suppose. Is it major progress? Maybe. Does it get us substantially closer to practical fusion? No. Not by a long shot.
You just need to read past the first sentence. They immediately qualify their statement. In the same font size as the headline...
Even if you fix all the other issues (laser efficiency, actually generating all the energy that was released - the blanket needs to absorb and produce more power than was put in and therefore will not be as efficient, waste disposal and fuel pellet replacement), the pellets themselves sound like they take MejaJoules to even make, in the form of extraction transportation, refinement, and housing.
Gold is a rare earth, diamond is not as rare as it once was but even CVD methods take 1000 deg f Temps, hydrogen is relatively cheap but still costly to produce and store.
Perhaps there is another combination of materials that are cheaper to produce/manufacture, but this is the first and largest question to be answered, energy ratio and mechanics questions aside.
Until then, it's far from inevitable that this can be done, the hidden costs are probably many order of magnitude higher than directly estimated.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/national-ignition-facility-mother-...
Perhaps it's not actually "weird."
Look, may I actually say the thing that is going carefully unsaid here without getting modded into the dirt? The suggestion, now apparently armed with distant glimmer of feasibility, that we might actually solve energy problems without adopting a greatly reduced consumption profile is extremely unwelcome to a lot of people. Energy policy and the present prescription of extreme conservation+renewables is the lever with which the entire consumption structure of our species can be altered in a desired direction, and events such as the NIF fusion breakthrough are seen as a setback to the requisite narrative. And so we're getting abundant amounts of FUD and downplaying about NIF, just as we have from day one.
I can't hold with this. NIF is fundamental Science. People are building things, solving problems, asking questions and measuring stuff no one anywhere has ever dealt with, and nobody, not Nature, not you and not me, know where this will lead. It may all be the giant boondoggle that Nature et al. have argued it is for going on 10 years now, or we might all have an iFusion Pro Model 3 in our pockets by 2040. We don't know. NIF and other attempts to find out are worth the cost and deserve a bit of room from everyone, despite whatever sacred narratives might be in jeopardy.
Yes at this point it's a totally impractical and the future is uncertain. Yet here we are with 20 hour flights across the globe.
Yes modern flight took over a century but given today's generally advanced technology you have to be much more optimistic about its practicality and timeline.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-01-677r
"The facility will allow scientists to evaluate the behavior of nuclear weapons without explosive testing."
...but now the media elite are throwing fear, uncertainty and doubt rather than urging for a Manhattan 2.0 style project to commercialize fusion technology.
Title is just clickbait and even contradicts itself. Everyone knows fusion reactors aren't going to start popping up all over the world tomorrow.
Literally a drop in the bucket compared to what the warmongers in Washington spend on killing and bombing and generally dominating the shit out of the entire world.
Of course, the rulers de jour prefer blood and gore over peace, philosophy, science and sustainability, like their Roman counterparts.
> “Our thermonuclear weapons have fusion ignition that takes place in our weapons, so studying fusion ignition is something we do to support the stockpile stewardship program,” Mark Herrmann, Lawrence Livermore’s program director for weapon physics and design, said during a technical panel on Dec. 13. “In addition, fusion ignition creates these very extreme environments that we have no other way to access on Earth. In this experiment, for the first time ever, we were able to put some samples of materials that are important for future stockpile modernization efforts that are going on at Lawrence Livermore today in very close to this intense neutron burst and then see how did they respond to that intense neutron burst.”
Most people are implicitly acknowledging all of this by avoiding boosters.
When I choose my medical options, my standards are not only implied here but I also look for 20 year studies on top.
In sum, I’m not sure a burst of funding incentivizes the behavior we need, most of the time. Perhaps when no one stands to immediately profit from the situation. In that case, this fusion breakthrough being one step in a long journey secures these advancements as not being reckless endeavors towards unbelievable profits.
People who are avoiding boosters are mostly being really stupid.
I think it’s more likely that all of those people intuitively have picked up some thing that you have missed.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm715152e1.htm?s_cid=...
Bivalent mRNA COVID-19 booster doses containing an Omicron BA.4/BA.5 sublineage component were recommended on September 1, 2022. The effectiveness of these updated vaccines against COVID-19–associated medical encounters has not been established.
The physics of thermonuclear burn is well-understood from nuclear weapons experiments.
The yield from burning DT fuel in an ICF target is just as nonlinear as striking a match. If you've never seen a matchbox before, you might watch someone fruitlessly swiping the match on the side of the box with no discernible result. One, twice, three times. Maybe at some point you see a spark, but clearly the spark is insufficient to do anything with. You might start laughing, and exclaim "Why do you keep doing the same thing, clearly nothing is going to happen! Why are you wasting your energy?" But as everyone knows - eventually the match will strike and burst into flame.