Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 833 posts

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#151

Post by Veen »

dylan604 wrote: post #130
soperj wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what people get out of repeating this on every single fusion article. It's not inventive or insightful, and it doesn't further the discussion in the slightest.

Because it's A) true, B) relevant to keep all of the hype in check. The year of Linux on the desktop is always right around the corner too. Yes, they are tropes, but they were not born out of nothing. Someone has to keep the bloviated PR campaigns checked with reality. Otherwise, some crazy fools might actually start believing that fusion is real and gets duped out of their money. If you can't stand a bit of real cri…

It's not a trope; it's a cliché. There's nothing wrong with poking holes in overinflated hype, but do they have to be so boring and repetitive about it.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#152

Post by VaxWithSex »

neonsunset wrote: post #143
VaxWithSex wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

What were the estimated damage and deaths caused by Fukushima incident? When was the reactor site built, when was the reactor designed? A few extra questions you may also be interested in: lithium, cobalt mining, costs of nanolitography for high efficiency photovoltaic cells. All that with tax breaks and heavy govt incentives vs insane regulatory burden on nuclear industry. Also nuclear scare in education that makes…

Why did people back then think it was save and then it exploded? Were they wrong in their assessment back then? Why were they wrong? Are you sure your assesment is correct today? Why is it better than their assessment back then? Are you sure you are not making the same mistakes that they made back then? Oh look, I can ask questions too, because I am a sealion.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#153

Post by Robotbeat »

VaxWithSex wrote: post #131
Robotbeat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it always is with new, unproven things.

or fusion. There are always these articles: net energy gain finally! and then: no not really.

Reminds me of solar. That took a century to get to where we are today where the net energy output is much greater than the energy needed to manufacture them.

It being hard and it requiring continual progress does not mean that progress does not occur.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#154

Post by Robotbeat »

VaxWithSex wrote: post #137
Robotbeat wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t the same; this hasn’t been done before. New things are hard. Nothing truly worthwhile is easy.

Presenting the progress of fusion in such a way to give the impression that commercialisation is right around the corner has been done before.

Nothing like commercialization happens without an insane amount of work. It’s easy to criticize, hard to actually help.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#155

Post by est31 »

danbruc wrote: post #144
sharikous wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on that? What do you mean that the lasers could require more energy? Is it that in a specific volume they got X EM energy coming in from the laser and Y thermal energy coming out, with Y>X BUT the electricity consumption of the lasers is Z>Y>X? If so that's sort of misleading, like the plethora of claims from ITER. I hoped this was different.

Exactly. Looking at the Wikipedia article [1] suggest that they start out with 422 MJ stored in capacitors, turn this into 4 MJ IR laser light, convert it into 1.8 MJ UV laser light, this into x-rays of which 0.15 MJ heat the target of which finally 0.015 MJ heat the fuel. Depending on what in this chain you consider the input energy, you can get orders of magnitude different numbers - 15 kJ of energy produced could…

From https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589...

> The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed.

They probably upgraded the rig since the Wikipedia article was written, so most likely the 2.1 MJ refers to the UV light numbers.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#156

Post by megaman821 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #145
megaman821 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you limit yourself to using solar generated with Minnesota's state borders. Solar, Wind, HVDC transmission lines, short-term battery storage get us most of the way there, and is all on the process of being built out now. Medium term storage is still up in the air (flow batteries? compressed air?). Long term storage looks like hydrogen or natural gas with carbon capture. All these things seem more achievable t…

> if you limit yourself to using solar generated with Minnesota's state borders I live in a cold state. The idea of relying on out-of-state power, regulated and controlled by people with zero accountability to you, for life-and-death energy is a tough sell.

Bad news then. You most assuredly rely on natural gas from Texas traveling through a long underground pipeline to heat your homes and businesses. Relying on solar electricity from Texas or Arizona traveling through a long wire isn't going to change the status quo much.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#157

Post by zackoverflow »

LatteLazy wrote: post #29
simiones wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> produce no long-lived radioactive waste It's important to note that while this is technically true, it's mostly irrelevant. Sure, there's no material that will remain radioactive for the next 10k years, but instead you get much more highly radioactive material that will emit high doses for a "short" hundred years or so.

It's worth noting that the last 2 generations of fission plants were guaranteed to produce no waste, to be cheap, efficient, reliable etc. The unpalatable truth here is that we have no idea what fusion power will look like until we have built a few. The quoted section made me laugh as it's easy to be zero carbon when you don't actually exist... :)

Can you elaborate more about the guarantees about no waste?

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#158

Post by deelowe »

0xbadc0de5 wrote: post #61
mgoetzke wrote: post #38

While I appreciate all the effort in nuclear fusion and do think we should continue to invest a little of each years global R&D budget, it seems these reactors (e.g ITER and this one) still require tritium which is rather hard to come by efficiently. Which means normal nuclear reactors will be needed to make it and minimising any economic viability of the dependent fusion rector for a long long time.

I believe the tritium issue is addressed through the inclusion of lithium in the reactor's inner blanket [1]. Something about the neutron interaction with the lithium results in some non-trivial production of tritium which is then freed into the reactor. tl;dr - they've thought of that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeding_blanket

My understanding is that this is proposed, but has not yet been tested. In fact, one of the goals of ITER is to test various breeder blanket designs.

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#159

Post by e1g »

yuuu wrote: post #115
e1g wrote: post #71

Good write-up to temper expectations at https://twitter.com/wilson_ricks/status/1602088153577246721 My TLDR (from a layman): * The output is greater than the energy *in the lasers*, but the lasers deliver 1% of the energy required to power them. Need 100x improvement to break even. * Converting the generated energy into electricity would cut the output in half. We need a further 2x improvement here, so it's ~200x to…

temper

What if my expectations are tamper-proof, can you still temper them? Thanks, edited ;)

Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

#160

Post by TrevorJ »

soperj wrote: post #103
PietdeVries wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think fusion-plants have always been "15 years away", and most likely will be so for quite a few years... Edit: I was wrong, fusion is always 30 years away: https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-fusi...

I don't know what people get out of repeating this on every single fusion article. It's not inventive or insightful, and it doesn't further the discussion in the slightest.

Because it is context that is rarely included in the article.
Post reply on HN