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Power

US Scientists Repeat Fusion Power Breakthrough For a Second Time (afr.com) 98

Posted by EditorDavid from the warmth-of-the-sun dept.
The Financial Times reports: U.S. government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time, a result that is set to fuel optimism that progress is being made towards the dream of limitless, zero-carbon power... "In an experiment conducted on July 30, we repeated ignition at NIF," the laboratory said. "As is our standard practice, we plan on reporting those results at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications..."

Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are still decades away, the technology's potential is hard to ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years...

[T]he improved result at NIF, coming "only eight months" after the initial breakthrough, was a further sign that the pace of progress was increasing, said one of the people with knowledge of the results.
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US Scientists Repeat Fusion Power Breakthrough For a Second Time More

US Scientists Repeat Fusion Power Breakthrough For a Second Time

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    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Neuroelectronic ( 643221 )

      London/Brussels | US government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time, a result that is set to fuel optimism that progress is being made towards the dream of limitless, zero-carbon power.

      Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but until December no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes â" a condition also known as ignition.

      A nuclear fusion research reactor in Germany. S

      • It's still not real because they are only measuring the energy directly supplied to the reaction, not the electrical power it took to produce that particular energy. In reality they are at least a couple of orders of magnitude away from actual break even.

        It's also a more bullshit than usual headline because you literally can't make a breakthrough twice. The first time would be the breakthrough, the second time is just confirmation.

        But they are in fact NOWHERE NEAR the claimed breakthrough.

  • The Jackpot (Score:3, Interesting)

    by EnsilZah ( 575600 ) <EnsilZah.Gmail@com> on Sunday August 06, 2023 @07:33PM (#63745382)

    This, the AI stuff, the superconductor, a bunch of other stuff, all reminds me of this quote from William Gibson's The Peripheral.

    No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they'd changed things just by being there. ... But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. She felt him stretch past that, to the future where he lived, then pull himself there, quick, unwilling to describe the worst of what had happened, would happen. She looked at the moon. It would look the same, she guessed, through the decades he'd sketched for her. None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever there was. Constant crisis had provided constant opportunity...

  • ... to tout this for potential electricity generation.

    I'm totally pro-fusion but the lasers aren't even close to efficient, right? Unless they also invent a super-efficient confinement method that can compete with super-conducting magnetic confinement then inertial confinement is never going to be anything more than research for bombs.

  • Sans digital wall (Score:5, Informative)

    by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @07:58PM (#63745468)

    https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]

  • Every source I've seen for this article has been from a financial publication. I haven't seen it anywhere from the usual science news places.

    • That's because it's a scam. There's a dozen or so startups that are running moonshots promising fusion power too cheap to meter. (Absolutely none of them use laser inertial confinement fusion like NIF. And NIF is a weapons research lab, not a power generation lab.) They're using these articles to hype up the sense that progress on fusion power generation is happening fast to generate more VC funds for them to burn through. Because most venture capitalists don't understand the technical differences between t

  • So, we have fusion and AI, so when can we have a Mister Handy [fandom.com] (or even better Curie [fandom.com])?

  • Repeated (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When did they repeat it the first time? Shouldn't that have made news?

  • Inertial confinement fusion experiments have only one purpose - nuclear weapon test simulation. Nothing they are doing has anything to do with generating electricity with a sustained fusion reactor.

  • Not About Power (Score:4, Informative)

    by sudonim2 ( 2073156 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @10:13PM (#63745706)

    Everytime this bullshit comes up I have to point this out again. The NIF is not researching fusion power. They were founded after the test ban treaty was signed in the 90s to study high energy fusion events to better model new designs for nuclear warheads without a live detonation testing regime. They're about nukes, not watts. The technology they use will never be used to generate fusion power and that was never the point. In theory, someday in the far future, aspects of this technology could be used to build a fusion rocket but not a power plant.

    In contrast, ITER, which was built to demonstrate the technology for power generation, has hit a major roadblock that will likely end up delaying the project by another decade. Fusion power is hard. Fusion power is always 20 years away. Don't pin any of your hopes to fusion.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rossdee ( 243626 )

      "aspects of this technology could be used to build a fusion rocket but not a power plant"

      Well we are going to need a fusion rocket eventually. This planet isn't going to sustain us for that much longer.

      • You're not exactly wrong when you say the Earth won't sustain us much longer. The human population is increasing at the same time the planet is becoming less habitable. Large tracks of South Asia, Central Africa, the Amazon basin, and the Southwestern United States are going to have more than 40 days of wet bulb temperatures a year by mid-century, rendering them effectively uninhabitable for weeks out of the year. If a place is uninhabitable for that length of time, permanent habitation is essentially impos

  • So, infinite energy? Did someone change the dictionary while I wasn't looking?

  • ...could not power a home for hundreds of years. FULL STOP

    A lot more could power a city for the lifetime of the plant. You can't just scale it down to home sized units, that's nonsense and bad effing math and use of statistics.

  • For something that, if it is ever going to be of practical usefulness, must be done multiple times per second.

    The road ahead remains long and uncertain.

  • This is laser based fusion. What this means is that they slamming atoms with an extremely strong laser for an extremely short period of time.

    Required advances for becoming a power source:
    - harnessing the energy released
    - generate enough energy to exceed the inefficiencies of energy harnessing
    - continuous operation

    This type of fusion seems to be at least a century off. However, I would love to be proven wrong.

  • Was the first ignition a fluke and they really don't know why it happened? Did they destroy some important components that need to get made again and they're being stymied by supply chain problems like everyone else is? Do they need to synthesize something and that process takes a long time? I'm just wondering why they wouldn't try it again a week after the first one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      Was the first ignition a fluke and they really don't know why it happened? Did they destroy some important components that need to get made again and they're being stymied by supply chain problems like everyone else is? Do they need to synthesize something and that process takes a long time? I'm just wondering why they wouldn't try it again a week after the first one.

      No and no, although it's experimental and they're learning. A little and no, they fabricate their own hohlraums and test fixtures, and they build and maintain the lasers themselves. Yes and yes.

      This is experimental, laboratory stuff. They've been at it for years and only recently hit on the workable configuration, which should give some indication as to the complexity. There is also a lot of secrecy; it's a weapons lab, after all.

      • It all seems to be hampered by some byzantine methodology. Say what you will about Elon Musk and SpaceX but they've managed to accomplish more in the last 15 years than NASA, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Rocket Lab, and a bunch of others combined. Not that it's an apples-to-apples comparison but space is hard too yet they've managed to keep things moving along. I've worked in the defense industry and their pace is glacial.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )

      >Did they destroy some important components t

      "Damn it, Jones, you missed and hit the CPU again!

      "And why is my secretary face down on the floor, with a scorched hole in the back of her blouse?"

      hawk

  • Didn't I read this same story in 1969?

  • Does anybody know the q of this system ?

  • Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years...

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