Since 2022 Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough, US Researchers Have More Than Doubled Its Power Output (techcrunch.com) 21
TechCrunch reports:
The world's only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned.
In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then again to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment. The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the first controlled fusion reaction to generate more energy than the it consumed. The 2022 shot generated 3.15 megajoules, a small bump over the 2.05 megajoules that the lasers delivered to the BB-sized fuel pellet.
None of the shots to date have been effective enough to feed electrons back into the grid, let alone to offset the energy required to power the entire facility — the facility wasn't designed to do that. The first net-positive shot, for example, required 300 megajoules to power the laser system alone. But they are continued proof that controlled nuclear fusion is more than hypothetical.
In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then again to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment. The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the first controlled fusion reaction to generate more energy than the it consumed. The 2022 shot generated 3.15 megajoules, a small bump over the 2.05 megajoules that the lasers delivered to the BB-sized fuel pellet.
None of the shots to date have been effective enough to feed electrons back into the grid, let alone to offset the energy required to power the entire facility — the facility wasn't designed to do that. The first net-positive shot, for example, required 300 megajoules to power the laser system alone. But they are continued proof that controlled nuclear fusion is more than hypothetical.
Very soon we'll have it. (Score:1)
20 years, give or take 5.
Doubled energy output? Not even close. (Score:5, Interesting)
To have a practical power plant that uses nuclear fusion as an energy source the power output must exceed the power input by a large factor. This threshold would be considered "engineering breakeven" and they are a long way off from that. Even further yet is "commercial breakeven" where the costs of running the reactor is offset by the sale of energy produced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
From the fine article:
The first net-positive shot, for example, required 300 megajoules to power the laser system alone. But they are continued proof that controlled nuclear fusion is more than hypothetical.
We've known that controlled nuclear fusion is "more than hypothetical" for a very long time now. High school students have been known to build a fusion reactor for science fairs. I suspect most every university in the USA has at least one fusion reactor sitting in a store room somewhere to be dusted off once or twice a year for physics demonstrations or something. Controlled fusion is not all that difficult any more, it's quite mundane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I suspect that many people in the world have a design for a nuclear fusion reactor that could reach commercial breakeven. The engineering may not be all that difficult given that we have computers and software that can make it nearly trivial to generate drawings and run simulations. The hard part would be in the size of the reactor and how to fund its construction. What I'm seeing is not so much an attempt to get energy out of fusion, it is finding ways to bring down the size of a fusion reactor such that it would be practical to build one that could reach commercial breakeven.
Nuclear fusion is not likely to solve the problems we have with nuclear fission. One problem that is often brought up about nuclear fission is what to do with the radioactive waste that would be produced. Nuclear fusion would be producing neutrons that would bombard the structures containing it, this would transmute the materials in this structure into radioactive elements. As the structure is slowly transmuted into different elements the structural integrity would be eroded, which means at some point this reactor would have to be dismantled and disposed of somehow.
I'm confused on what problems nuclear fusion is supposed to solve for us. Is fusion energy supposed to reduce the risk of weaponizing energy? If there's a potent neutron source like a fusion reactor then it can be used to transmute natural uranium into weapon grade plutonium. If there's centrifuges to separate out different isotopes of hydrogen, helium, or whatever else is used for fuel then those same centrifuges could be used to enrich uranium or plutonium into something weapon grade.
I'm sure a lot of people will be proud for this scientific achievement, just don't expect this to be some kind of demonstration of being some huge leap forward in utilizing nuclear fusion for producing energy.
Re: Doubled energy output? Not even close. (Score:1)
Aw did the bad man shred your fantasy with facts?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I think fusion with recent developments has potential, but fast fission has had potential as well, since the 1960s as well, since the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment but Nixon tried to bury it to promote conventional reactor building in his home state of California. With reprocessing (and the potential proliferation concerns), both are pretty much 99.5% fuel efficient and leave highly radioactive waste for ~100 years instead of thousands. Nuclear waste is called fertile because fast neutrons can breed it to
net positive? utter bunk (Score:1)
it takes 400MJ to power those 192 lasers. Getting 8.5MJ out is a massive net negative. We are almost as far from a fusion power plant as we were in 1970
Please repeat after me: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
You mean to say that heat engine theory exists solely for the development of more efficient means to propel a bullet through a firearm barrel and that we're never going to get a practical application of something that can, say, drive a vehicle, which is based on heat cycles from a series of explosions?
Re: (Score:3)
And yet no vehicles anywhere are propelled by bullets.
Read The American Lab: An Insider’s History of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by C. Bruce Tarter, former LLNL Director and the guy who got NIF funded and pushed it through the start of construction. No person has a greater role or responsibility for the creation of NIF that Tarter. And he makes it absolutely clear that intended purpose of NIF from the beginning was to support weapons research. He never once in the book mentions any poss
Not Steady State (Score:2)
If you want practical fusion energy it will come from a steady state device
Probably not. Some designs, like General Fussion's, are shot based and even the tokamak designs will probably only run for a few minutes before losing containment as fusion products build up and have to be flushed. The difference is that these designs can quickly reset and fire again while my understanding is that resets at NIF take many hours. As long as you can refire quickly the thermal capacity of whatever coolant you are using to extract the heat should smooth over the gaps.
Nowhere near commercially viable, but... (Score:1)
I think we can rest assured that even though this project is nowhere near commercial viability, you can bet Trump's oil buddies in the Middle East will demand that the facility be nuked from orbit, and the radioactive ruin sown with salt.
3.15MJ, 5.2MJ, 8.6MJ (Score:2)
That is awesome. They're climbing a curve as they figure out how to build hohlraums. A couple more improvements and they'll have one order of magnitude power gain. Inertial confinement is amenable to large gains because the targets (tiny "pellets" of fuel) can be enlarged as the design of the hohlraum is improved to focus laser power. Obviously there is some ceiling, but until you approach that limit, the same laser is gives you ever larger increases in gain.
Long, long way to go (Score:3)
A couple more improvements and they'll have one order of magnitude power gain.
Yes, and when they get to a power gain of two orders of magnitude they will have generated (but not extracted) as much energy as it took to fire the lasers that created the implosion since these use 300MJ/shot only delivering ~2MJ to the pellet. To become useful for generating power they probably need about another 2 orders of magnitude above that given the likely efficiency of heat extraction and power generation. Then they also need to figure out how to re-fire the device in seconds not hours (i.e. about
Meh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Helion is claiming to have reactors online by 2028. They're under contract to sell 50MW to Microsoft by that point:
https://www.helionenergy.com/a... [helionenergy.com]
General Fusion claims they'll be at breakeven in 2026 and net positive by 2027:
https://www.biv.com/news/bc-co... [biv.com]
Seems like the NIF is trailing private enterprise.
Fusion has missed commercial power train (Score:3, Interesting)
Fusion power is not there yet. But that is not the biggest issue. The biggest issue is that the most optimistic commercial calculation (assuming the technology will work perfectly) do not show any profitability. Earlier, there was some indirect benefit in terms of clean power, but now solar/wind/nuclear/hydro can provide almost all the electricity needs.
So in summary, fusion as a commercial power will never be a reality. Most scientists that I know working on plasma physics agree on this. However, it is a beautiful science and they need research money, so publicly they cheer such achievements.
Re: (Score:2)
You might want to show some evidence for that.