Since 2022 Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough, US Researchers Have More Than Doubled Its Power Output (techcrunch.com) 67
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:2, Insightful)
20 years, give or take 5.
FIY (Score:2)
give or take 5.
I think you forgot a zero (or two).
Re:Very soon we'll have it. (Score:4, Informative)
It's been 20 years away for the last 50 years.
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:5, 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 fissile plutonium. Fusion produces tritium and deuterium, so don't pretend it is 100% clean. They decay fast, so as I said, less than 100 years to background radiation. Fission in a fast reactor with reprocessing is basically the same, different elements, about 100 years.
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> since the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment but Nixon tried to bury it to promote
> conventional reactor building in his home state of California
Oh balony. He was all-in and publicly stated his support for the breeder program through his entire term. Here is his statement to congress on the issue in 1973:
Most nuclear power plants now in operation utilize light water reactors. In the near future, some will use high temperature gas-cooled reactors. These techniques will be supplemented during the next dec
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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 am not a nuclear engineer but neither are you. Not all neutron sources are suitable for breeding more fissile material, not all isotopic separation tech is applicable to all fuel types, not all materials absorb neutron equally. When creating a list of reasons to cast shadow on a tech reading more would be in order. Here is just one mistake, I don't get paid to find them all. My bias on this, centrifuges probably work better on heavy atoms, diffusion on lighter ones.
The next generation of low tritium
net positive? utter bunk (Score:2, Informative)
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
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> In the 70s there were no lasers that could power this reaction
Well they certainly thought they did at the time. Shiva was expected to get close to breakeven, and Nova was expected to easily beat it. The calculations suggested only about 10 to 100 kJ would do it.
The calculations were wrong, of course, but they didn't know that at the time.
> Methinks you misunderestimate the potential for progress here
Well I've been following ICF since I was introduced to it by National Geographic in 1978. And given e
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Please repeat after me: (Score:1)
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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:Please repeat after me: (Score:5, Informative)
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 possible application to producing fusion power. This, despite LLNL's PR department constantly pushing that story.
And there is a very good reason for this. The idea of laser driven ICF which was proposed in 1972 had been shot down before 1990 as a result of work at multiple labs which showed that the laser energy required to drive fusion was orders of magnitude higher than originally thought. This made it clear that this path to fusion energy was a dead end. NIF actually proved that when it started up and under-performed predictions by an order of magnitude, taking 10 years of effort, a major laser energy upgrade (it can't go any higher now), and complex targets that cost millions of dollars and take a year to make to get to where they expected to be on start-up. Meanwhile magnetic confinement systems can show an actual engineering path to a power plant, and are currently dealing with real Q values -- power output against wall socket power -- while NIF uses a fake Q where only the laser input energy is counted. And no, there are no "better" laser technologies out there that can close the gap enough to get anywhere near Q=1.
There is a reason that only a few weapons labs around the world have bothered to build ICF systems over the last 30 years. No one interested in actual fusion power is going to pursue a known dead end. Well, there is that former NIF Director who just started a laser fusion "company" he is asking for VC money and is having Fluor both design and build his laboratory for him. I am sure he will pay himself very well for his expertise.
Re:Please repeat after me: (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet no vehicles anywhere are propelled by bullets.
Most heat engines are propelled by bullets. They are called something else in the engine (pistons), but they work exactly like a bullet in a barrel about half the time.
Re: Please repeat after me: (Score:2)
* quarter of the time
(Intake, compression, combustion (=gun), exhaust)
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And yet no vehicles anywhere are propelled by bullets.
Please tell me what the difference in physics is, if you use an explosion and resulting expanding gases to send a projectile out of an open cylinder, or push a projectile to the top of a closed cylinder that also has an exhaust valve timed to open with that projectile arriving at the top of it's designed throw?
You just call one projectile a "bullet" and the other a "piston" but it's still the same fucking thing, with the exact same principle of being pushed by expanding gases from a small detonation.
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.
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All the fusion people need to do is point to transmutation and whisper "all that clean coal could be turned into gold, YOUR gold!!" He'll lose his mind and shortly pronounce Fusion Power is the Future of American Industry.
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:5, Informative)
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 4 orders of magnitude faster) and actuall extract useful heat energy.
Doubling the energy output per shot is great but it is one, very small step on a very long road that has to be travelled to get to a viable fusion reactor. To be exciting we need to start seeing factors of 10, not 2..
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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.
...or they could use more efficient lasers.
-Physicsworld [physicsworld.com]
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Lasers have advanced significantly since NIF was built. The input power to the lasers would be lower in a newly-built equivalent.
Meanwhile, here is an actual picture of the target chamber at NIF:
https://lasers.llnl.gov/sites/... [llnl.gov]
Meh? (Score:5, 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.
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Seems like the NIF is trailing private enterprise.
The NIF is designed to simulate nuclear bombs, with the energy angle as PR. They are not "trailing private enterprise" because they are doing something entirely different.
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Then the PR is trailing the PR for private enterprise.
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Those are claims. What's the actual reality of the facts?
Hartmut Zohm, a german plasma physicist who's deep into fusion research, regularly provides updates on the status of fusion research. While not saying it in so many words, he is quite clearly giving impression that the claims by all those fusion startups are overly optimistic and basically a "give me all your venture money" call. They may have specific partial solutions for certain problems, but are nowhere near a full-scale operation.
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Private enterprise isn't going to tell you, other than to make public claims and show evidence privately to investors. They're just going to do it, or not. If you think it's a scam then so be it. It's easy to look at publicly-funded fusion efforts and dismiss the private efforts, given the state of public fusion research.
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It's extremely unlikely that Helion will have a working 50MW reactor in the next 3.5 years.
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That's the fun part, we get to watch it happen in realtime! And I might even agree with you, but General Fusion seems more likely to succeed.
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You aren't the only one aware of those factors.
If General Fusion doesn't come through, a lot of money will be flushed down the toilet and a number of careers will go with it. There's a lot riding on them not being full of shit. Lockheed Martin somehow got away with quietly hiding their reactor (conspiracy theory: it worked and the government took control of it for themselves, nixing the public version), but companies like Helion and General Fusion won't be able to do the same.
And then there's Commonwealth
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Fusion has missed commercial power train (Score:4, 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.
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You might want to show some evidence for that.
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At the very least, fusion will replace fission where high density matters. ie: Where energy needs way exceed what renewables can provide. eg: Japan/South Korea/Taiwan.
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Never is a really long time and you basically prove yourself wrong when you say it.
Sigh (Score:2)
Qin to Qout is nice and all, if you put in a megawatt of power into the device, and get a megawatt plus a watt out, that's nice. You've achieved gain.
But for all of the gushing over how we finally are on the way to the cleanest, safest almost unlimited power that we've been promised is right around the corner, there is a real problem.
Qtot.
Qout doesn't mean much if the total mount of power needed so far exceeds the output of the fusion device that
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We can gush about Qin to Qout of >1
We can when they gain another couple of orders of magnitude efficiency, anyway. They need that before they can claim to have gotten there, because they're counting the energy output from the lasers as the input to the system, but those lasers don't fire for free.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
We can gush about Qin to Qout of >1
We can when they gain another couple of orders of magnitude efficiency, anyway. They need that before they can claim to have gotten there, because they're counting the energy output from the lasers as the input to the system, but those lasers don't fire for free.
Exactly.
I think the best way to employ fusion power is using the source around 93 million miles away from us. It's unshielded, but pretty reliable and those solar panels we keep putting online seem to work pretty well.
The biggest problem that fusion, and indeed fission has to a smaller extent, is that as time goes on, other energy sources are making them superfluous. Deniers might say otherwise, but if we go back say 25 years to now, they have had to move the goalposts many times.
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Fusion - as least theoretically - has massive advantages over pretty much all other sources of renewable / green energy when it comes to powering a grid. It's compact, stable, and has no environmental impact worth speaking of.
Nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, tidal... they all have major issues in one critical category or another.
My personal favorite future energy tech is space-based solar power beamed to terrestrial rectenna farms. Several space-capable nations are actively pursuing it, but so far it remains
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Fusion - as least theoretically - has massive advantages over pretty much all other sources of renewable / green energy when it comes to powering a grid. It's compact, stable, and has no environmental impact worth speaking of.
Nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, tidal... they all have major issues in one critical category or another.
My personal favorite future energy tech is space-based solar power beamed to terrestrial rectenna farms. Several space-capable nations are actively pursuing it, but so far it remains economically non-viable due to launch costs.
And if I was at war with another country, their space based solar power would last about as long as it takes the missiles to reach it.
The idea is sound, humans are not.
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>And if I was at war with another country, their space based solar power would last about as long as it takes the missiles to reach it.
This applies to terrestrial power generation as well. Missiles to orbital targets are expensive and it's stupid to destroy infrastructure you don't need to destroy (especially in orbit, where you're creating a debris field that will affect a large region around the planet and likely include your own space-based assets).
You'd target your enemy's surface rectenna farms, no
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Because we can't drop explosive payloads on other power plants easier?
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Because we can't drop explosive payloads on other power plants easier?
Sure we can. But if you look at the history of warfare, things on the ground can be rebuilt after they get damaged.
But if a rogue country that doesn't depend on satellite provided power, decides that it is time to take out the power system of a country that does, Who pray tell has the advantage? But you perhaps think that they wouldn't?
Perhaps a lot of my career involved strategic issues of technology - It is a concern. And of course, my Cassandra nature is to tell people things they don't want to he
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Claiming over-unity in the core reaction when the only thing that matters for power generation is over-unity for the entire power generation system is extremely annoying.
What I want to know is this: if I could build one of these devices in my backyard, what percentage of the input power required to run the device is the output power that I could use to run my home?
Right now, that percentage remains firmly in the negatives. If they ever get that number into the positives, we can start to argue over the cost
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Claiming over-unity in the core reaction when the only thing that matters for power generation is over-unity for the entire power generation system is extremely annoying.
What I want to know is this: if I could build one of these devices in my backyard, what percentage of the input power required to run the device is the output power that I could use to run my home?
Right now, that percentage remains firmly in the negatives. If they ever get that number into the positives, we can start to argue over the cost per kWh compared to other energy sources.
It reminds me a little bit about CERN and their wailing about how we simply must build the FCC, after confirming the Higgs with the last mega collider and not much else.. Every Physicist has their favorite axe to grind, and they seem prone to histrionics at times.
To put it into perspective (Score:2)
A can of coke has about half a megajoule of energy in it. Scientists have just barely surpassed a 12 pack of soda.
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What is that in BTU?
power output does not equal power output (Score:2)
In fusion research, there is a funny definition of power output, which has nothing to do with what might come out of a wire at the delivery end.