Scientists Successfully Replicate Historic Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Three Times (cnn.com) 124
After producing a nuclear fusion reaction last year that released more energy than it used, scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (LLNL) say they have successfully replicated the process at least three times this year. "This marks another significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels," reports CNN. The announcement appears in a December report (PDF) from the LLNL. From the report: After making their historic net energy gain last year, the next important step was to prove the process could be replicated. Brian Appelbe, a research fellow from the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said the ability to replicate demonstrates the "robustness" of the process, showing it can be achieved even when conditions such as the laser or fuel pellet are varied. Each experiment also offers an opportunity to study the physics of ignition in detail, Appelbe told CNN. "This provides valuable information to the scientists in addressing the next challenge to be overcome: how to maximize the energy that can be obtained."
There are different ways of creating energy from fusion, but at NIF, scientists fire an array of nearly 200 lasers at a pellet of hydrogen fuel inside a diamond capsule the size of a peppercorn, itself inside a gold cylinder. The lasers heat up the cylinder's outside, creating a series of very fast explosions, generating large amounts of energy collected as heat. The energy produced in December 2022 was small -- it took around 2 megajoules to power the reaction, which released a total of 3.15 megajoules, enough to boil around 10 kettles of water. But it was sufficient to make it a successful ignition and to prove that laser fusion could create energy.
Since then, the scientists have done it several more times. On July 30, the NIF laser delivered a little over 2 megajoules to the target, which resulted in 3.88 megajoules of energy -- their highest yield achieved to date, according to the report. Two subsequent experiments in October also delivered net gains. "These results demonstrated NIF's ability to consistently produce fusion energy at multi-megajoule levels," the report said. There is still a very long way to go, however, until nuclear fusion reaches the scale needed to power electric grids and heating systems. The focus now is on building on the progress made and figuring out how to dramatically scale up fusion projects and significantly bring down costs.
There are different ways of creating energy from fusion, but at NIF, scientists fire an array of nearly 200 lasers at a pellet of hydrogen fuel inside a diamond capsule the size of a peppercorn, itself inside a gold cylinder. The lasers heat up the cylinder's outside, creating a series of very fast explosions, generating large amounts of energy collected as heat. The energy produced in December 2022 was small -- it took around 2 megajoules to power the reaction, which released a total of 3.15 megajoules, enough to boil around 10 kettles of water. But it was sufficient to make it a successful ignition and to prove that laser fusion could create energy.
Since then, the scientists have done it several more times. On July 30, the NIF laser delivered a little over 2 megajoules to the target, which resulted in 3.88 megajoules of energy -- their highest yield achieved to date, according to the report. Two subsequent experiments in October also delivered net gains. "These results demonstrated NIF's ability to consistently produce fusion energy at multi-megajoule levels," the report said. There is still a very long way to go, however, until nuclear fusion reaches the scale needed to power electric grids and heating systems. The focus now is on building on the progress made and figuring out how to dramatically scale up fusion projects and significantly bring down costs.
How far away is engineering break even? (Score:5, Informative)
This is physics break even. Do they still have to increase the efficiency of the lasers by two orders of magnitude to get close to breaking even on actual energy used to power the lasers vs energy released from fusion, or is it closer than that?
I hate to sound negative about such a momentous achievement, but I feel the statement
"This marks another significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels,"
might be a little overly optomistic.
Re:How far away is engineering break even? (Score:5, Insightful)
I will be extremely surprised if fusion is the answer to becoming carbon-neutral in time to make a difference to the carbon budget. We're going to have to resolve that the way we've been going.
However, once fusion comes along it'll be nice to be able to go back to a power source that doesn't require epic amounts of storage to compensate for highly variable generation capacity.
Re: How far away is engineering break even? (Score:3)
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Bullshit. They may have a proof-of-concept by 2025. That is in no way a prototype. A prototype requires a _lot_ more R&D.
Re: How far away is engineering break even? (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc... [mit.edu]
Will we then have fusion electric power plants?
No, not yet. Even though SPARC will, if successful, yield net energy and large amounts of power from fusion, it is intentionally designed as a pulsed experiment and would not convert its fusion energy into electricity. The next step would be to build a net-electricity producing fusion power plant, based on this new magnet technology — while its details are to be determined, we call this device ARC.
On this path, how long would it take before fusion energy is on the grid?
MIT scientists and their collaborators believe that ARC — a fusion power plant that would produce electricity continuously — could be built and operating by early 2030.
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7 years! Shortest prediction I've seen for a while in fusion tech.
Re: How far away is engineering break even? (Score:3)
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I will mark your words as "yet another person clueless about R&D realities" and about the realities of actually doing a large-scale deployment of a technology.
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I will mark your words as "yet another person clueless about R&D realities" and about the realities of actually doing a large-scale deployment of a technology.
Maybe the clueless folks think it is similar to fission power. Only took a few years until we could generate power from them.
Well, fusion isn't as simple as putting radioactive elements together in a reactor to fission and generate heat.
And here we are all these years later with a Qtotal of .01 for an extremely short amount of time, and people telling us to "mark" their words.
And here we are with bullshit dispensers who appear to cherry pick the information they feed us with things like virtually un
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An apt response (Score:2)
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The current tag line at the bottom of the page is: There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom. -- Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923
Things change - after controlled fission, the possible uses for fission based devices became interesting. Fission could generate heat to be used for running turbines, and Oh Noes! if all that energy was released at once, things could go boom! Then we figured out that if we fused two elements together, we could make even bigger booms from the energy released.
Okay. But there was a hella lot of energy needed to fuse elements - the nookyaler fusion bombs used a fission bomb to start their nasty work. Fusion
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Tesla will have it available next year!
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MIT scientists and their collaborators believe that ARC â" a fusion power plant that would produce electricity continuously â" could be built and operating by early 2030.
I like the use of the word "collaborators" there because in the public's mind (the subset of people that have even heard the word before that is) it implies wrongdoing. And telling lies like this is that.
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https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc... [mit.edu]
Will we then have fusion electric power plants? No, not yet. Even though SPARC will, if successful, yield net energy and large amounts of power from fusion, it is intentionally designed as a pulsed experiment and would not convert its fusion energy into electricity. The next step would be to build a net-electricity producing fusion power plant, based on this new magnet technology — while its details are to be determined, we call this device ARC.
On this path, how long would it take before fusion energy is on the grid? MIT scientists and their collaborators believe that ARC — a fusion power plant that would produce electricity continuously — could be built and operating by early 2030.
Amazing that we already know when Fusion power-up will happen from experiments that haven't even happened yet.
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We already have that and it's nuclear - but fission not fusion. Reliable, safe, predictable but, unfortunately, fairly expensive.
However, "environmentalists" in the US pretty much killed the domestic industry because they preferred to burn coal, pollute the air, and accelerate global climate change because "nuclear scary, sc
Re: How far away is engineering break even? (Score:4, Informative)
They put their ignorance before saving the planet and are now paying the price.
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At 60% renewables they are still the second largest CO2 emitter per kWh in the EU (after 30 years of trying to deploy more and more renewables, and actively killing their other low-emission energy source, nuclear). Their energy bill is amongst the highest in Europe, and they have been net importer of electricity for the past 50 years (mainly from their french neighbors). ...).
Their domestic industry is collapsing and fleeing their country (BASF,
Good luck getting to 80% renewables by 2030. Physical laws have
Re:How far away is engineering break even? (Score:5, Insightful)
For myself, what we need is a grid that responds to demand. Whether the way to achieve that is with intermittent generation and storage (solar and wind), highly dispatchable generation (gas) or fixed generation with storage (nuclear), or something in between is not a big moral question, but an engineering one. If intermittent generation and storage is cheapest, and provides the fastest route to decarbonisation, then that does not seem to be a issue to me.
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We already have that and it's nuclear - but fission not fusion. Reliable, safe, predictable but, unfortunately, fairly expensive.
However, "environmentalists" in the US pretty much killed the domestic industry because they preferred to burn coal, pollute the air, and accelerate global climate change because "nuclear scary, scary, scary".
Well, fusion reactors will need fission reactors to generate the Tritium. After ITER starts it's fantasy research, the world's supply of Tritium will be just about gone. So the fusion holy grail won't eliminate fission reactors. We'll need many more.
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Bang on.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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You will not be surprised. Even if we had the full plans for a well-working fusion plant now, it would come too late. Industrialization alone will take something like 20-30 years and wide-scale deployment another 20-50 years. Hence to change this will solve the problem. It may be critical for survival of the human race when things get really nasty in 100 years or so.
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You will not be surprised. Even if we had the full plans for a well-working fusion plant now, it would come too late. Industrialization alone will take something like 20-30 years and wide-scale deployment another 20-50 years. Hence to change this will solve the problem. It may be critical for survival of the human race when things get really nasty in 100 years or so.
Sure. So when China announces the first engineering model, and after that builds out its fusion fleet in five years, we can all bitch about China "stealing" "our" technology.
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China is not going to do that. They are just as limited by what engineering can and cannot do in a specific amount of time.
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You will not be surprised. Even if we had the full plans for a well-working fusion plant now, it would come too late. Industrialization alone will take something like 20-30 years and wide-scale deployment another 20-50 years. Hence to change this will solve the problem. It may be critical for survival of the human race when things get really nasty in 100 years or so.
Sure. So when China announces the first engineering model, and after that builds out its fusion fleet in five years, we can all bitch about China "stealing" "our" technology.
Sounds like they use different laws of physics to do that. Thes 'Murrican and European physics are having trouble with this fusion power thingy.
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Humanity generally avoids proactive intelligence and when we don't, we rarely execute said intelligence in the most foolish manor.
We are a reactive species. If we see a meteor barreling through space to destroy earth, we we'll invest all human resources toward building massive rockets to move earth almost completely out of the way. This impressive human achievement occurs moments before someone realizes the meteor was just a bug on the telescope lens.
I predict we'll become far more skilled
Re: How far away is engineering break even? (Score:2)
Carbon capture doesn't work in China or anywhere else.
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Fact Check: Carbon capture doesn't work in China or anywhere else.
I keep trying to tell people that anything that will re-sequester carbon on a global scale will introduce problems as bad or worse than what is going to happen, with wide ranging problems from extincting a lot of species, needing a thousand plus year of accepting acid rain and all of its health and environmental problems. A review of the physics involved tells us that a huge global effort to inject aerosols or sort of re-create the middle precambrian oceans by dumping iron into them to cause algae blooms -
Re: How far away is engineering break even? (Score:2)
What a bunch of dumb nonsense that post was.
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I will be extremely surprised if fusion is the answer to becoming carbon-neutral in time to make a difference to the carbon budget. We're going to have to resolve that the way we've been going.
However, once fusion comes along it'll be nice to be able to go back to a power source that doesn't require epic amounts of storage to compensate for highly variable generation capacity.
A couple points.
The carbon in the atmosphere isn't going away any time soon, so it's already too late for fusion.
The other thing is that old school fission reactors will need to be built to supply tritium. The world's supply of tritium will go away as soon as the ITER people star their quixotic quest. At that point, we probably need to build many more reactors to produce the tritium needed.
While a lot of people have achieved orgasm over the so called break even point, the Qtot figure is where the Rub
This is like putting a man on the Moon... (Score:2, Insightful)
This is like putting a rocket 41 feet in the air (Score:2)
This is like Robert Goddard putting his liquid-fueled rocket 41 feet in the air.
The moon is a long way yet to go, much less alpha centauri.
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it took around 2 megajoules to power the reaction, which released a total of 3.15 megajoules, enough to boil around 10 kettles of water
So, more than break even. But not really if you consider all the energy consumed keeping the lights on in the facility and running the microwaves in the lunchroom. Even if we figure that these parasitic loads don't scale up with the device output, what is the capital investment needed to boil 10 kettles of water (can we get that in Olympic swimming pools)? And how will that scale?
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It's worse than that. The lasers are about 1% efficient. Possibly less.
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That bad? I think I read the microwave heaters on the X7 are a lot more efficient and they are only needed initially and possibly for control. If the lasers are at 1% at the moment, then this may still take half a century or more to become viable or may fail to become viable. Laser research is slow.
Re: How far away is engineering break even? (Score:2)
There are more efficient lasers and other ways to provide the energy.
This fusion reaction can't even be harnessed. It's just a small, immobile bomb at the moment. Other techs are working on harnessing fusion reactions.
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But not really if you consider all the energy consumed keeping the lights on in the facility and running the microwaves in the lunchroom.
If only they could have powered the experiment with the lights and microwave ovens off.
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Think less like a scientist, more like an engineer. Just because we haven't achieved the required efficiencies in the past does not mean it can't be done. I believe we will get there, and industry people are optimistic.
Re:How far away is engineering break even? (Score:5, Interesting)
If we had people immediately give up because something wasn't immediately marketable, we wouldn't have any real technological advances. Fusion will solve many problems of today, and it can ensure that countries can feed their populations, be it easier access to desalination plants, chemically expensive processes with what energy availability we have now, which will be inexpensive with fusion, this can go a long way to clean up our mess as a species. Trash floating in the ocean? A ship with a fusion reactor and thermal depolymerization can come back to shore with a lot of short-chain mineral oil and a dent in the Pacific Gyre garbage patch. Easier fixing of nitrogen for fertilizer so otherwise infertile regions can be used for crop growing. Using electrolysis to cause minerals to precipitate from seawater to shore up islands from rising tides.
Energy is wealth.
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If we had people immediately give up because something wasn't immediately marketable, we wouldn't have any real technological advances. Fusion will solve many problems of today, and it can ensure that countries can feed their populations, be it easier access to desalination plants, chemically expensive processes with what energy availability we have now, which will be inexpensive with fusion, this can go a long way to clean up our mess as a species. Trash floating in the ocean? A ship with a fusion reactor and thermal depolymerization can come back to shore with a lot of short-chain mineral oil and a dent in the Pacific Gyre garbage patch. Easier fixing of nitrogen for fertilizer so otherwise infertile regions can be used for crop growing. Using electrolysis to cause minerals to precipitate from seawater to shore up islands from rising tides.
Energy is wealth.
Oh my gawd. You are adorable! For you, IGY by Donald Fagen of Steely Dan:
Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from NewYork to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there's time
The fix is in
You'll
Re:How far away is engineering break even? (Score:5, Insightful)
To give you an idea of the efficiencies involved, here's approximately what they did:
A capacitor bank is charged with about 110 kwh (400MJ) to drive flash tubes to optically pump the lasers, producing 2.05 MJ of laser light that has peak energy of 500TW for a few nanoseconds.
electricity -> laser energy 0.51% (This is not a typo - about half a percent)
The laser energy is focused onto a fuel capsule chilled to 18 Kelvin, compressing it, absorbing about 15kJ of laser light to do so.
Laser energy -> capsule compression efficiency: 0.1%
Capsule fusion ignition energy released: 3.15 MJ ( about 0.875 KWh)
So the laser energy in to nuclear power released is indeed about 1.5, and well above scientific break even. Unfortunately it once you include the losses in generating laser light from electricity, and converting heat from the nuclear reaction into steam to drive a turbine ( which is about 50% efficient for a good one), overall you are looking at less than half a percent efficiency for electrical energy in to electrical energy out.
even worse, this whole huge facility is only capable of generating less than 1kwh of heat energy per pulse, which would end up being 0.5kwh per pulse if it was converted to electricity using a very efficient steam turbine.
You would have to run this at two pulses per second just to generate a measly 1MW of continuous power, or a completely unrealistic 2000 pulses per second to generate 1GW of power continuously. The fuel capsule can't be scaled up to produce more energy - it needs to be small for this ignition method to work.
The other missing steps:
Energy needed to chill capsule to 18 Kelvin (-255 C) and pre-chill the lasers to prevent them being damaged during each pulse. this previously took days - now they can do it in hours, so they can generate up to 700 pulses per year.
This is important research, to help understand fusion better - both for weapons and for understanding the fission process better so that knowledge can be incorporated in other nuclear fission reactors, and I by no means intend to belittle the achievement of all those working on this project, or it's importance.
I seriously doubt that it can ever be a practical source of energy though.
What it will most likely lead to is development of more efficient high energy lasers, which will probably find their way into both industrial uses, and weapons systems.
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The danger of saying "ever" is that you can't predict what other technologies we'll invent along the way.
Your statement is like a scientist from the 40's saying, "I doubt we'll ever fly to the moon, because we'd need computers to do that, and there's no way you can fit all those vacuum tubes, punch card readers, and refrigeration units on a spacecraft."
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The danger of saying "ever" is that you can't predict what other technologies we'll invent along the way.
Your statement is like a scientist from the 40's saying, "I doubt we'll ever fly to the moon, because we'd need computers to do that, and there's no way you can fit all those vacuum tubes, punch card readers, and refrigeration units on a spacecraft."
True because we might discover zero point energy and implement it.
Of course, that will make fusion power completely redundant.
Same with the efficiencies needed.
The concept of willing something into reality - somehow manifesting it - does not mean that it can be done. Even fusion weapons need a fission weapon to pump the energy into it. So we're seeing the issues of trying to control it.
Enough energy to fuse the elements involved, enough energy to do it continuously, and more energy out of the fusion
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Sure. But engineering new stuff is a _slow_ process when you need to do a lot of things from scratch. This may well mean 50 years to the efficient and durable lasers that are needed here.
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Think less like a scientist, more like an engineer. Just because we haven't achieved the required efficiencies in the past does not mean it can't be done. I believe we will get there, and industry people are optimistic.
Oh - so it's a done deal! 8^)
There's a saying down south "Wish in one hand, and shit in the other. See which one fills up first."
When we are at .01 efficiency, it is really hard to envision that getting to the point where it's at 200 percent of total break even so it can bootstrap itself.
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Question your premises, then.
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Question your premises, then.
Some things are possible, some are not. We have some real issues with efficiencies here, and maximum efficiencies are not always very changeable.
There might be some tweaking her or there maybe gain a small fraction of a percent ot if we're lucky, a percent.
But the immense efficiencies needed to take this whole fusion game from Qtot .01 to at minimum Qtot 200 in itself requires a physics breakthrough not related to fusion based power.
And here's where the issue lies. What is the path forward? What is
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So...you're an engineer working on related project? Cuz either billions are being blown by incredibly intelligent, super knowledgeable people who know it's both that simple and utterly impossible, or just maybe you're suffering from the Dunning Kreuger Effect.
One clue it's the latter is that you've brought in the "just gimme money!" explanation. Some might call it a conspiracy!
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So...you're an engineer working on related project? Cuz either billions are being blown by incredibly intelligent, super knowledgeable people who know it's both that simple and utterly impossible, or just maybe you're suffering from the Dunning Kreuger Effect.
One clue it's the latter is that you've brought in the "just gimme money!" explanation. Some might call it a conspiracy!
At various times in my career, I worked with NucE's. So I do have some experience - What are your bona fides.
Also noted that you refused to answer my question of where the other Qtot .9999 os going to come from.
What is your fiewld of research anyhow? MOst researchers know that the solutions exist, and the technology catches up as it improves. One project I was working on in the 1980's had its conceptualization happen in the 1920's.
I see nothing about the incredible innovations in the current litera
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But have you specifically worked on these fusion projects, as a creative? Not a technician or safety officer, but building something totally new?
I'm trying to avoid talking about the specific question you're asking, as I am pretty sure you're right on that. What I suspect is that if you took several steps and approached the entire question from another angle, the solution might have less to do with increasing laser efficiency. Perhaps sustaining the reaction is the more attainable goal.
Right now, what yo
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But have you specifically worked on these fusion projects, as a creative?
Okay homie - here we go. { stretching, doing a neck crunch}
Which ongoing fusion projects have you worked on? I keep asking for some points, but get none. Your claim that I am not able to make a valid statement since I have not worked directly with the present fusion project and that is some sort of disqualification is at first amusing, then I realize I'm dealing with either a very poor version of a troll, or someone that believes rules for thee, none for me, amirite, homie?
Well, my friend - you obviou
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There IS such a thing as Dunning Kreuger, even within disciplines!
But I see you're still talking about lasers. Can you consider that currently unforseen advancements in other areas may result in novel approaches to providing the energy? Or that the energy requirement might fall?
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Probably 30-50 years. One thing with fusion is that a lot of material science and equipment R&D still needs to be done to make it work longer-time. For example, the lasers used in this experiment may need a decade or two to be fit for continuous use.
The main achievement here is reaching a milestone, but progress will continue to be slow. This does tell us that it is worthwhile to pursue this line of research though, same as developments with the X7. Anybody expecting practical useful plants in the next
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It sounds like they lost energy when you consider the amount of energy stored in the ultracompressed hydrogen in the middle of a diamond and gold encased fuel pellet.
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Hold on let me fire up my 3d holographic storage disk drive and find out.
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Two orders of magnitude is about right. It takes something north of 400 MJ to run the experiment, for 3.x MJ output. This doesn't really have a path toward making practical fusion power, at least not through incremental efficiency improvements.
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Two orders of magnitude is about right. It takes something north of 400 MJ to run the experiment, for 3.x MJ output. This doesn't really have a path toward making practical fusion power, at least not through incremental efficiency improvements.
We always have to remember that Fusion warheads are triggered by fission devices. If nothing else, that gives a big clue of the energy needed, and the only way we know how to generate a lot of it.
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This is physics break even. Do they still have to increase the efficiency of the lasers by two orders of magnitude to get close to breaking even on actual energy used to power the lasers vs energy released from fusion, or is it closer than that?
I hate to sound negative about such a momentous achievement, but I feel the statement "This marks another significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels," might be a little overly optomistic.
Way optimistic. You are so right.
For all of the breathless orgasming over this so called break even point, it's not much more than came before it. It ignores the immense amount of energy needed to hit that break even point. Like powering the lasers, the cooling system power needs, all of that incidental stuff. Then there is the mechanical aspects of going from a tiny fraction of a second to a constantly running device, spewing out neutrons like there was no tomorrow.
It won't be clean - those neutrons
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As a retired physicist, I can say that usable fusion power has been predicted as a decade away for over 50 years. I can't see it working except in space or on the moon, due to neutron embrittlement of the containment vessel. They still haven't gotten the materials problems solved after all this time.
Ah ye of little faith! (just kidding) Yah, those neutrons are an issue. I understand that some propose a meter thick ss sphere containing molten lithium encasing the capsule to absorb them. Of course, we don't want that getting broken via embrittlement. Lithium fires aren't anything to be trifled with - although the flames are kind of a pretty pink/magenta. If one of those things goes south your day is kinda messed up.
I have some literature of all the materials work they had to create for the Manhattan
Xeno's Fusion (Score:5, Insightful)
While it's (massive) progress that's been promised '10 years from now' for longer than I've been alive... this is over-unity at the point of fusion, according to the math.
They're deliberately ignoring conversion efficiencies involved in converting that fusion heat into electrical power - this device is nowhere near over-unity in terms of taking the output heat and generating enough electrical power from it to maintain the reaction. We're still '10 years away' from that. And once that happens, it'll be another '10 years away' before the excess power is anywhere near enough to justify building a power plant.
Not that we should stop the science and engineering attempts to do so - just that we should also be aware we're not getting our mobile Mr. Fusion units next Christmas.
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We need fusion bad. The alternatives are weak. (Score:3, Interesting)
Please be true, and not take 10 years. Please
Re:We need fusion bad. The alternatives are weak. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Do folks realize how bad ass it would be to pump pure freshwater into unproductive land? The Sahara Desert used to be a rainforest and could be again, along with many other deserts."
What a terrible idea! Do you have any idea what kind of terrible changes you'll cause to global weather if you suddenly start artificially adding that kind of moisture to large arid regions? Nope and neither does anyone else but I very much doubt you can do so without causing harm for someone else.
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I'm pro-nuclear but nuclear isn't the be all and end all as it cant scale up and down with daily demand
After you said that, you lost all credibility.
Nuclear load-following is exactly what France has been doing for the past 50 years. You can look it up on the IEA documentation: takes ~30 mins to go from 100% power output to 30%. Couple that with some storage (mainly hydro for France) and it is more than enough to do load-following at the minute-scale. This is also how they are able to bring renewables so easily into their electricity mix. Fun fact: they use actually a higher percentage of renewables in their
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Not sure what the GP was talking about but suspect it might be more along the lines of the responsiveness of gas peakers and batteries, which is much much faster than nuclear's load following ability. We have grid batteries that can respond in (IIRC) tens of milliseconds in response to demand changes.
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Not sure what the GP was talking about but suspect it might be more along the lines of the responsiveness of gas peakers and batteries
You do know you don't have to suspect anything: you can just look at the thread history if you want to participate. You don't get bonus points by guessing, especially when you guess wrong.
GP was talking about nuclear not able to do scale up and down with daily demand (his exact words, no need to second guess anything). This is incorrect, as shown by some countries who are doing exactly that (France being my main example in the response I gave).
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I read "daily demand" as something that fluctuates during the day - there's no such thing as "daily demand" as some sort of discrete object that matters in energy production - but if you're going to be a dick about it I'll cheerfully walk away from the conversation. I won't read further replies.
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I read "daily demand" as something that fluctuates during the day - there's no such thing as "daily demand" as some sort of discrete object that matters in energy production - but if you're going to be a dick about it I'll cheerfully walk away from the conversation. I won't read further replies.
Thank you...
His credibility went when he decided to be a dick about it and pretend he knew better than everyone else.
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"Do folks realize how bad ass it would be to pump pure freshwater into unproductive land? The Sahara Desert used to be a rainforest and could be again, along with many other deserts."
What a terrible idea! Do you have any idea what kind of terrible changes you'll cause to global weather if you suddenly start artificially adding that kind of moisture to large arid regions? Nope and neither does anyone else but I very much doubt you can do so without causing harm for someone else.
After he said "Solar and Wind are intermittent and require dangerous/complicated/expensive/space-consuming storage" he lost all credibility.
Yes, renewables benefit from storage, but it's not dangerous, expensive, complicated or even space consuming compared to a nuclear or even gas plant. Only Tesla has produced a battery system that I'd call dangerous and that's because Tesla are a bunch of cowboys. Other battery system (be they lithium, chemical or flywheel based) are perfectly safe.
I'm pro-nuclear but nuclear isn't the be all and end all as it cant scale up and down with daily demand. Sure it's good for a baseline but we need other sources to handle the differences in load. Traditionally we've used fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) but renewables and storage are a perfectly fine substitute. Nuclear also benefits from storage for the times where generation exceeds consumption and has been used this way for decades, storage, like Nuclear needs to be built safely from the word go and maintained properly throughout it's lifespan, you only get problems when you get cowboys doing the maintenance or construction (sadly doing things properly can be expensive compared to having the government bail you out when things go wrong).
For smaller nations, I can imagine renewables and storage can meet the needs of the entire nation, already some have a very high percentage of renewables like the Nordic nations.
Not sure who I pissed off to get a flamebait mod for this, could be the Tesla fanboys, the petrochem fanboys or just one of the usual trolls who follow me about.
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Doubtful. Moisture and heat are what drives weather. The Sahara has PLENTY of one of those already, add the other and you can be sure it will have a significant impact.
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Re: We need fusion bad. The alternatives are weak. (Score:2)
H owever, imagine if we could produce so much free power in a nuclear reactor we could simply convert the excess carbon in the atmosphere to common liquid fuels
Who will be paying for all that capacity? Would we expect those companies with now-obsolete fission, gas and oil power plants to spend money for generating more electricity than what the grid currently demands?
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Aside from the problems of achieving net positive output, there are practical problems that are far from being solved. The laser ignition demonstrated here has no practical path to producing power. Neither does magnetic confinement used in the Z-machine. The tokamak designs that are the primary focus use tritium, which is far more rare than most people realize. There are ideas for doing tritium generation on-site using lithium-6 blankets that capture neutrons and generate tritium (L6 + n -> He4 + T), but
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You forgot the best part. No longer having to rely on the Middle East.
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So massive amounts of nearly free (fusion or whatever) energy would be a win for humanity. What an excellent observation!
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When you get down to it molten salt is really just another form of battery and there is nothing solar specific about it.
Yes yes we get it (Score:3, Informative)
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People who don't do for a living always see how it's done in the past and can't see past that. The engineers with prove us all wrong.
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I can't tell you how much it pleases me that NIF and the headlines it makes gets under the skin of so many people. Self righteous greenies that simply can't tolerate the slightest suggestion, yet still only a distant and speculative hope, that we might solve our energy problems with anything other than energy poverty. The Blame America Firsters that lose their minds because a US weapons lab could be worthy of anything other than derision.
Go NIF!
Free Electricity! (Score:2)
I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. I'm so excited my wait is over!
It won't be long between now, and an 'always on' laser, fed by a stream of fusion spherals by a hopper. I've got my money on 20 years.
I can taste the future already. Its tastes kinda like a billion volt battery that never drains.
--
Fraternity without absorption, union without fusion. - Wilfrid Laurier
More about Money (Score:3)
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And meanwhile, from Ludditestan (Score:2)
The tiresome "Twenty years away, and always will be..." comment will be repeated three times. Because it's magic, you know.
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author of sensarionalist article and you don't seem to realize 400 MJ powered the lasers so of course whole thing is net loss as not even 1 percent that energy resulted by fusion, and zero percent of that energy used to make electricity.
so yes, 20 years and billions of dollars out and always will be.
This is not the solution you wish existed.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:3)
THIS.
https://xkcd.com/678/ [xkcd.com]
How many kettles? (Score:2)
That's very good (Score:2)
Numbers are better than metaphors (Score:2)
"There are different ways of creating energy from fusion, but at NIF, scientists fire an array of nearly 200 lasers at a pellet of hydrogen fuel inside a diamond capsule the size of a peppercorn, itself inside a gold cylinder"
Let us put actual numbers to this.
The fuel capsules take something like 500 man-hours to prepare. Assuming minimum wage, the assembly time alone runs around $7500.
The explosions create about 15 MJ of energy. This creates heat, which in a power plant would be used to create steam and ru
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Anyone see the problem?
It was, is, and forever will be a nuclear weapons design facility. The reason it seems stupid is because no scientist could justify such a device for generating power or even learning how to generate power. But, given the treaty on weapons testing, and given the $$$ spent on nuclear weapons, this provided a very good return yielding the most powerful fusion bombs in the world by a long shot. This is like designing a belt fed machine gun to understand how to build an internal combustion engine, the fuel,
Radioactive Tea (Score:3)
Does not matter.
Your friend would die from drinking this radioactive tea anyway.
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> Commercial fusion has been 10 years away for 70 years.
85 years.
The first real attempt at a fusion reactor was in 1938. Yes, really. At NACA no less.