US Scientists Repeat Fusion Power Breakthrough For a Second Time (afr.com) 98
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.
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.
Re:Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:4, Informative)
So a long way to go. Shall we say, oh, two decades in the future...
Re:Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:5, Interesting)
They are making progress, which is a good sign. If they were hitting a brick wall, that would be a different story .. it may take 10 times longer than the predicted .. so what .. we need it. Humans were trying to build flying machines for hundreds of years until it finally happened, because we kept trying and making progress.
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Not only did you take bait, but you're both probably wrong.
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Let's be real, even an unlimited supply of fusion reactors couldn't power Fox News' war on woke.
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Indeed. Fusion may well become the difference between survival of the human race or not if renewables do not pan out opr do not pan out enough. (Forget conventional nukes. In 50 years, you will be unable to even cool them. France already has massive problems each summer doing it.) And by estimates from actual scientists, this stuff is not even delayed. The "30 years" estimates come from the press and from non-scientist managers. Realistically, after all the physics has been worked out, it will still take 3
Re:Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is, without a completely new way to extract electrical power from the reaction, we're still stuck with a ton of waste heat that needs to be dealt with and a gigantic steam plant. Ultimately, it's still a huge, complicated, expensive machine whose purpose is ultimately to spin a turbine/generator. It turns out that you can take a similar turbine/generator, put fan blades on it and stick it on a tower and it will spin and generate power without needing that giant, complicated steam plant. That leads me to believe that it's going to be hard for any form of nuclear power to ultimately compete with renewables.
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The problem is, without a completely new way to extract electrical power from the reaction, we're still stuck with a ton of waste heat that needs to be dealt with and a gigantic steam plant.
Direct conversion [wikipedia.org] from ionised 4He.
Re:Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is, without a completely new way to extract electrical power from the reaction ...
Direct conversion [wikipedia.org] from ionised 4He.
Unfortunately, only a small amount of the reaction energy is in the heavier helium nucleus. Most of the energy of the reaction is in the lighter neutron (3.5 MeV in the 4He, 14.1 MeV in the neutron).
(easy to calculate this. conservation of momentum says that equal momentum is transfered to each particle. So the neutron must be going four times as fast, and energy is 1/2 mV^2).
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Re:Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:2)
P-B has the benefit of not needing tritium, which is a very limited resource. We might be able to feed it off of a lithium blanket on the reactor walls, but that initial seeding is going to be difficult.
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You can make the Tritium you need from Lithium and the neutrons produced in D-T fusion.
Some, but you can't breed it all. The DT reaction produces one neutron. Producing Tritium requires one neutron. To produce all the Tritium you need, you would have have 100% efficiency in capturing neutrons, and that's not possible.
Re: Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:2)
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When it actually returns more electricity than it consumes, it will have a real gain. Neutrons are not electricity, and they are a long way from real breakeven.
Re:Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:4, Insightful)
I’m a big fan of the gravitationally-confined thermonuclear reactor. Simple design, too. Lots of ways to convert the EM radiation it gives off into electricity.
Re: Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:1)
Gravitationally confined dihydrogenmonoxide tends to block the energy transfer though, so it needs gravitationally grounded energy reservoirs for conistent power supply.
Re:Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:4, Insightful)
Another nuclear with a *lot* of potential is thorium molten salt. Not under pressure so far less engineering in the facility. The chemical engineering to keep the caustic salts contained for a couple decades isn't quite there yet.
But the real golden feature is it can literally eat parts of our current fission waste as fuel.
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Molten salt reactors are a dead end. Too expensive to develop, and too risky because if you screw up the design Very Bad Things happen.
Molten salt is corrosive. It also becomes radioactive, so you can end up with corroded parts that are now high level nuclear waste and extremely difficult to replace. The reactor vessel itself is impossible to repair.
Emergency cooling is a problem too, because molten salt explodes on contact with water. In fact it can have a violent reaction on contact with humid air too. Wh
Re: Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:2)
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Actually, the good thing is that thermal runaway is not an issue with Thorium. It is a very bad problem with water-cooled reactors and the main reason that design cannot be safe, no matter what. With Thorium in gas-cooled and molten salt, apparently thermal runaway is directly impossible. Of course, reactors based on Thorium can still turn into costly radioactive ruins (as the Germans already discovered with _both_ test reactors they had) but they will do it without a "boom", and hence a much cheaper cleanu
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The chemical engineering to keep the caustic salts contained for a couple decades isn't quite there yet.
Actually that is a long solved problem. More than 50 years - if you google a bit I'm sure you find the relevant alloys which are used for that.
The problem is how to start and shut down a molten salt reactor, and: restart it. The most common idea is, that you do not shut it down, so no need for restarting, but: how to refuel it? Or more precisely: how to get the used fuel - aka waste - out?
Re: Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:2)
You say it's a solved problem but it wasn't solved in the research reactor, which in fact suffered from unexpected corrosion. Show us a working prototype without this problem if you want us to believe it's solved.
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Why do I need to show a working prototype?
Are you now also on the idiot bad wagon?
Corrosion problems in molten salt things: regardless what they are, are solved since decades.
No idea about molten salt nuclear reactors. I do not follow those topics, unless some moron mentions them on /.
You are wrong about the alloys. That is all. The alloys exist since ages. And for that I only would have needed to show you a link to such an alloy, and not to a working molten salt prototype reactor.
But as you suddenly are so
Re: Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:2)
"No idea about molten salt nuclear reactors"
Yes, you've made that very very clear. Yet you keep posting in defense of them. Why not talk about things you know about instead? Oh right, you'd have nothing to say.
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I did not post in "defense of them"
I posted because you think there is an alloy problem, which there is not since the 1950s.
Seriously: learn to read!
Re: Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:2)
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A breeder does not need refueling ... well, that makes no sense.
All Thorium reactors are breeders. They breed Uranium, which they then fission. When the Thorium is used up, it needs refueling. Ofc. you could argue a perfect planned reactor runs 50 years ++ and then you just retire the whole thing.
Liquid form makes both refueling and waste extraction fairly trivial even while operating.
Waste extraction: no. Unless you want to completely empty the reactor. The "waste" is not accumulating at a point where you
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Well, I tend to agree if anybody can make it work reliably and economically (and that includes everything, I am sick and tired of the nuclear mafia lying about the real cost of things). So far Thorium has been a dead end though even if only in gas-cooled. The Germans needed to scrap one reactor after it became damaged beyond repair and still have one highly radioactive ruin for the other one. The Chinese are currently making a new attempt based on the German Patents, but nobody knows whether material scienc
Re: Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:2)
Fusion vs Wind (Score:3)
It turns out that you can take a similar turbine/generator, put fan blades on it and stick it on a tower and it will spin and generate power without needing that giant, complicated steam plant
That's fine if you only want 2-3MW of power and are fine with the weather choosing when you get it. However, if you want ~500 times as much power at any time, even if there is no wind, and you don't want to pump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere then that complicated steam plant is a great choice.
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Fortunately we have more than one windmill generating electricity. The grid is not like your farm with a little turbine.
Turns out there is always wind. Maybe not right where you are, but electricity is easy to transport over very long distances.
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Indeed. Some planning required, but what does not?
Re:Fusion vs Wind (Score:4, Interesting)
That's fine if you only want 2-3MW of power and are fine with the weather choosing when you get it. However, if you want ~500 times as much power at any time, even if there is no wind, and you don't want to pump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere then that complicated steam plant is a great choice.
If you want ~500 times as much power, you build ~500 wind towers. They're about $1.3 million per MegaWatt. Vogtle was 34 billion in capital costs for 2200 MegaWatts. So that would be $2.86 billion for the same nameplate. When you account for capacity factors, the capacity factor for nuclear power is about 92% and the capacity factor for wind is about 36%. So, that would be about $7.31 billion in capital costs for the same amount of power from wind turbines that you get from nuclear power plants. Now, some will point out that a nuclear plant can last a long time relative to a wind turbine so you have to use the relative longevity as a multiplier as well. The trouble with that reasoning is that a wind tower has virtually the same parts as a nuclear plant, the nuclear plant just has more. The turbines and generators in a nuclear plant wear out, just like the ones in a wind tower and will need to be replaced on a similar schedule. The tower itself is just a big steel tower on a big concrete pad. Those parts can theoretically last centuries with basic maintenance.
So, ultimately, it looks like wind is just cheaper, faster to install, more flexible, simpler, etc. Some may point to potential future advances that will make then cheaper, but the kinds of advances that will make nuclear power cheaper will also tend to make renewable power cheaper too. In the end, renewables just seem to be a much better deal financially.
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we're still stuck with a ton of waste heat that needs to be dealt with and a gigantic steam plant.
sure, but it is still, or has the potentially to be, a whole helluva lot better then running that "gigantic steam plant" off methane or coal, and a lot more reliable than wind.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/05/uk-offshore-wind-at-tipping-point-as-funding-crisis-threatens-industry
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sure, but it is still, or has the potentially to be, a whole helluva lot better then running that "gigantic steam plant" off methane or coal, and a lot more reliable than wind.
Yes, it is better than running a gigantic steam plant off methane or coal. It does not seem to be significantly more reliable than wind, however, especially in combination with other renewables as well as a power storage scheme.
The article you link to is about how offshore wind in the UK is having financial trouble due to inflation with prices capped at $44 per MWh. It's worth noting that power from new nuclear power plants in the UK costs $87 per MWh and rising. That's with all kinds of subsidies on the nu
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Forget conventional nukes. In 50 years, you will be unable to even cool them.
That's pretty nonsensical.
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That is pretty factual. Look at what happens in France every summer.
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Let's see how scientifically honest you are with yourself.
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The cooling problems France has atm, are mostly "technical" problems.
Aka, the current reactors are at rivers.
Thy get cooled by letting water into the secondary, or tertiary cooling system, from the river a little bit uphill
And they dumb it behind the power plant back into the river a little bit downhill..
Technically: all plants will have enough water in the future, besides the droughts we have.
But: the used water is to hot to let it go back into the river. And: most places with a plant have no option (atm)
N-year estimate (Score:2)
I read an article (I think) by one of the early scientists working on fusion research a while back. The "20-years" or "30-year" estimate was based on the research funding keeping up in proportion to the size of the economy. e.g. N-years if 0.05% of GDP continued to be spent on fusion research every year.
Needless to say, nothing of the sort happened.
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That does make sense. Fusion is too long-term for power-hungry politicos to be really interested.
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I read about the latest one that output is now 3x "input" compared to 2x the first time, but it needs to be 30x to be useful.
So a long way to go. Shall we say, oh, two decades in the future...
More than that. I recently heard a podcast with some Wendelstein X7 people. As far as I remember, they estimate 50 to 100 years to practical applicabiolity. Still very much worth it, even if most people are unable to think in these time-spans. These "in 30 years" estimates usually come from journalists, not from the actual scientists. And other than some other tech, fusion has made steady progress all the time. It just takes a lot of new physics, material science, computer capabilities, etc. and each of tho
Re:Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, considering LLNL is a weapons lab....
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Well, considering LLNL is a weapons lab....
This is yet another humble brag that US fusion bombs are the superior technology, greenwashed so as to remain couth.
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Re:Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah but until just the last few years .. Laser ICF was over 1/1,000,000 short of what's needed. So the progress is happening non-linearly. We do need a new facility and probably 10 to 20 megajoule of laser power (DPSSL this time, please).
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The predictions for commercially viable fusion power remind me of psychic predictions. Fusion is always "only 20 yrs from now", psychics always say "within a year or two".
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If I remember correctly the "net positive" aspect of this is only measured at the testing vessel, all of the energy dumped into the equipment to generate the ignition is ignored. I think NIF uses a bunch of lasers, they start out with some pretty benign "seed" lasers which are then ran through a vast array of boosting banks that turn each low power laser beam into a high power one. It is apparently a VERY inefficient system requiring something like 200-300 times more energy than actually makes it to the t
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Here we go "Whereas NIF's 1990s-era technology is only 0.5% efficient, Campbell says that modern lasers can get as high as 20%."
https://physicsworld.com/a/nat... [physicsworld.com]
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Well .. there's multiple "breakevens" to overcome. First the following is how energy is generated in a (hypothetical) fusion power plant:
Wall power to facility -----> energy used to create laser beam --> energy from laser beam deposited on hohlraum --> energy deposited on hohlraum converted to X-rays ---> energy of X-rays deposited on fuel pellet --> energy of X-rays causing atoms to fuse ++> energy producing by fusing atoms used to fuse other atoms ++> energy of fusing atoms heating
Re:Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hm.. I'll clarify this more [Note: we are currently at the third breakeven point listed below]:
First breakeven: The fusing fuel pellet produces more than 50% of its energy by atoms that were fused because of energy released by the fusion of other atoms (instead of the igniting energy deposited on the fuel itself). Think of it like you have a box of matches and you lit say three the matches in the box, breakeven is if three other matches in the box caught on fire because of the heat from those first three matches you lit.
Second breakeven: The fusing fuel pellet produces more energy than the sum of X-ray energy that falls on the pellet.
Third breakeven [NIF has achieved this]: The fusing fuel pellet produces more energy than the sum of the laser energy that was deposited on the fuel pellet's enclosure (called a hohlraum). The job of the enclosure is that when it is heated by a laser it turns into a plasma that produces X rays, a lot of which falls on the pellet (hopefully).
Fourth breakeven (yet unachieved): The fusing fuel pellet produces more energy than the amount of energy used to produce the laser beam (note: the NIF uses an obsolete and inefficient laser system but a newer facility would use more efficient lasers called DPSSL).
Fifth breakeven (yet unachieved): The fusing fuel pellet produces more energy than the amount of energy used by entire the NIF facility.
Re:Wasn't the 1st announcement debunked? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry I forgot the sixth and seventh breakeven.
Sixth breakeven: The fusing fuel pellet produces more energy than is required to actually generate electricity to power the entire NIF facility (generating electricity from heat and/or neutrons is not efficient).
Seventh breakeven: The fusing fuel pellet produces more energy than is required to produce an economically viable amount of electricity that covers the capital and operating cost of the facility.
8th breakeven (Score:4, Insightful)
Eighth breakeven: the market price of the power sold more than pays for the capital and operating costs of the plant.
I'm thinking this eighth breakeven will NEVER happen. The cost of renewables like wind and solar has been dropping by factors of two every hear. The latest Levelized Cost of Electricity chart I saw had the cost of electricity from wind, solar, and natural gas in a dead heat for lowest cost per kwh produced. So much so that you could install solar/wind and back it with natural gas 100% and still beat the cost of a coal plant, much less the cost of an exquisite tour-de-force of technology like a laser driven inertial confinement fusion plant would be. Remember, in addition to the lasers and fusion chamber, you'd *also* have to build a huge steam generator to convert the heat into electricity.
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I'm thinking this eighth breakeven will NEVER happen. The cost of renewables like wind and solar has been dropping by factors of two every hear.
I suspect you are being a bit short sighted here kind sir. Civilization has been evolving technologies and processes that demand more power than ever before.
How much energy does it take to chop down a tree and stack the branches to make a shelter? Compare that to the amount of energy needed to build a microchip. As civilization and technology progresses, the need for more and more concentrated energy becomes stronger.
TL;DR, I don't think Star Trek style replicators and teleportation devices are going to hav
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Show Non-Paywalled Source Or It's Not Real (Score:2, Insightful)
Enough said.
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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
Re: Show Non-Paywalled Source Or It's Not Real (Score:2)
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)
This, the AI stuff, the superconductor, a bunch of other stuff, all reminds me of this quote from William Gibson's The Peripheral.
Re: The Jackpot (Score:2)
That's Gibson in a nutshell. Brilliant ideas, limp execution. I wish he would just do collaborations with someone who can write, maybe Bruce Sterling for example
It seems disingenuous ... (Score:2)
... 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.
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Not for this design. All the fuel is contained in a small container made of a gold-tantalum alloy with a copper wire wrapped around it to create a magnetic field. The lasers hit the container (called a hohlraum), which generates X-rays that compress the fuel and start the fusion process. The fuel is consumed in a fraction of a second, and then there's no more fuel (and also no more hohlraum, and the copper wire is presumably also destroyed).
A reactor using this concept would have to feed hohlraums in one af
Sans digital wall (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
Financial News? (Score:2)
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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
Mister Handy! (Score:2)
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)
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Second time they repeated, that is, it's the fourth time they do it.
Nuclear weapons testing (Score:2)
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)
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.
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"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.
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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
limitless? (Score:1)
So, infinite energy? Did someone change the dictionary while I wasn't looking?
"a small cup..." (Score:1)
...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.
Twice in eight months (Score:2)
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.
Laser-based fusion* (Score:2)
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.
Why is this taking so long? (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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.
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>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
Ho hum (Score:2)
Didn't I read this same story in 1969?
Total powere used (Score:2)
Heres why it will never be allowed to happen. (Score:2)
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...