When i hear breakthrough i think of something more unexpected. I.e. figuring out how to solve a problem we had no idea how to solve.
Scientifically this is absolutely a breakthrough, just like the detection of the Higgs boson was despite them already having expected it or just like LIGO's detections of gravitational waves were despite that being entirely what it was built for or just as JWST's detections of galaxies much older than those seen from other telescopes was despite that being part of the entire point of dumping billions into it. Ingenuity's first flight was also hailed as a breakthrough despite that being exactly what it was designed to do.
In every case we had an idea of how to solve a problem and the outcome was generally expected. All that had changed was that the data had been collected of the solution working, just as it has been in this case.
To put it differently, it's a breakthrough because after decades of work, the National Ignition Facility can actually achieve the thing in its name.
NIF previously tied to use the hot spot energy instead of target energy in 2013, which they were criticized for, and rightfully so. But this definition of Q is analogous to the definition of Q used by MCF.
Fusion is not useful until Q>1, and for NIF to claim that when it obviously isn't true is, IMO, a bad look. They invented Qplasma where they arbitrarily get to ignore over 99% of the energy that actually went in, and don't need to worry about capturing any of the energy actually coming out. They got Qplasma>1, which is a great milestone, but the overwhelming narrative in the media is that they got more energy out than they put in, which is simply not true.
Someone, and almost certainly someone *ELSE* will get to Q>1 very soon. Lots of groups are targeting 2024-2025. That will be a major breakthrough, but in the public mind, NIF already did it, and I guarantee that's going to cause a lot of confusion.
It just feels like a marathon race where a bunch of competitors are competing honestly, and one participant jumps in a scooter, and blasts through the finish line, and the crowd is cheering, and they're doing interviews about how great it was to win the race, and people are going home, but the actual race is still happening, and getting super interesting, but no one cares anymore because that milestone was already claimed by someone who didn't even accomplish it.
Iirc most engineers use a different Q, which refers to all in energy, so Q > 1.5 ish is enough
So yeah, when people are told fusion is around the corner but all they hear are small improvements that to them mean nothing, its easy to see why. Now obviously not everyone is that way, there are communities of laymen and amateurs online who are interested and do care. But you don't need public press conferences to get to them. A press conference is for Joe Sixpack. And Joe Sixpack assumes when you come calling about Fusion its to say that it works, global warming has been solved and his electric bill will be next to nothing.
Even if you take the most breathless headlines about NIF at face value, we are obviously still decades away from a commercial fusion power plant. Let's say laser fusion is great and perfect, all we need to do is design a commercial facility that uses modern lasers and then construct it, with commercial turbines/etc, as well as commercial production of the fuel pellets. Just that will take decades. Even basic bitch coal power plants take several years to construct and there's nothing novel about those.
But the reality is that even with the best lasers available today, they wouldn't get enough energy out to make this commercially viable. Decades more development time is needed before they can even think about designing a commercial power plant.
No sooner than 50 years.
Milestone, yes. You have to get Q above one if you're starting at .01, and need to get to 100 and 1 is a great mile marker. But, But breakhrough - I don't think so.
See below for previous yields of NIF shots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#/me...
The other point that has been mentioned to me is when you in the self heating regime, there are exponential returns on increasing "quality" of a shot.
What does "component sizes" and "fill-tube size" refer to, BTW? And the quality of a shot thing you mention in the last line? Sorry for all the questions, just curious
https://www.orau.gov/support_files/2022ssap/presentations/Da...
Haven't H-bomb tests already proven that beyond all doubt?
> The fuel and canister get vaporized within a few billionths of a second during the experiment. Researchers then hope their equipment survived the heat and accurately measured the energy released by the fusion reaction.
It didn't necessarily blow up like a fusion bomb, but the energy was hardly produced in any sort of sustainable, ongoing form that we can harvest.
Worse - it's not even just the chamber that essentially destroys itself - the lasers that create the event also damage themselves: https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/controlling-backscatter-damage-...
Isn't the Qplasma > 1 the most important one here, by a very wide margin? Maybe the only important one at this point in time. That fusion begets more fusion, in a positive-feedback way. That's the breakthrough here. All the other efficiency factors are secondary in nature. That is step 1, and the next step is to scale this up so that eventually Qplasma >> 1. And only then the hand wringing about efficiency of the lasers becomes something to address. It seems like the baby was just born, and people are concerned about which colleges to apply to.
And, most significantly to me, there is no argument being made anywhere that this milestone is on the path to anything other than a dead end, local optima. That is, that you can further optimized the shape, quality and size of the hohlraum, and shape of the laser pulse to get to a Q that actually has something to do with power generation. (I have no doubt that achieving combustion/ignition is useful for NIF's real purpose, which is to simulate H-bomb physics to aid in maintaining our stockpile of city-destroying weapons - they have in fact created a nano H-bomb).
It reminds us how pointless our Javascript-based existence is.
I think the distinction is that with a breakthrough there is something new to learn, where a milestone you basically say "good job, keep up the good work". With a breakthrough there is more content to engage with because you can try and understand what is new. A milestone is great, but there isn't anything new to really engage with, so it has a shorter news cycle.
As a comparison - stable diffusion is a breakthrough - we are still trying to figure out what it all means and how it will or wont change society. its been months now and we are still talking about it. We wont be talking about this fusion thing months from now. That doesn't mean its less important only a different type of event.
The problem with celebrating "fake victories" (and being scolded for calling them out) is that when there really is a breakthrough (i.e. something so big it fundamentally changes our perception of the problem), people are going to think you are making just another over-hyped publicity stunt. I am definitely of the opinion that such media attention focused advertising of (otherwise perfectly valid) fundamental research is doing no one favors (not the researches nor the public.)
I've seen quite a few people arguing in (a European context) that we shouldn't build out nuclear in the "short term", "since we can just get fusion without any of the downsides of fission".
What I want to say is that bad faith arguments will always exist, and calling this a breakthrough won't significantly increase the number of people using bad faith arguments, because they would just find another excuse instead of the fusion one.
I share your skepticism towards commercial impact — but this is certainly a breakthrough in their technology. Just look at the chart.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#/...
But breakthrough, or milestone, I fear it may all be for naught. The improvements over the last two years are essentially all due to changes in the hohlraum geometry and preparation. All good, if your goal is to get burning plasmas to study. But NIF is orders of magnitude away from anything useful for power production. They have a Q of 1.5, but need something more like 100. They have a cycle time of, maybe, .1 shot/hour, and need something like 10,000/hour. Some real breakthroughs in the lasers (or maybe particle beams instead), coupling, and scale, not fine tuning of hohlraum shape, are needed.
I guess milestone assume you already know you will reach it.
I also think breakthrough as a lot of meaning and people would assume there is a few years before a real application.
In a sense it's probably a breakthrough within the scientific ring rather than from the people perspective.
1. a sudden advance especially in knowledge or technique
2. an act or instance of moving through or beyond an obstacle
Milestone:
1. an action or event marking a significant change or stage in development.
I'm failing to see why labeling it one or the other even matters.