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It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
Fusion plants have exorbitant feedstock price volatility and are only marginally smaller than a fission planet, despite square footage not being the scope of the worlds' energy problems today.
It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
No it's not.
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…
> So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always!
I don't really get the cynicism here. This is a huge milestone that's been passed. Maybe with this, we actually will be 10-20 years away. Or maybe it's more like 30-40, who knows. But this experiment shows that net-positive energy is actually possible to do with our current understanding and technology; before this, I believe much of the skepticism was based on a belief that it may not actually be possible to get more energy out than put in, at least not without technology that's significantly out of reach.
It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
My very uninformed opinion (nuclear physicist by training, but not specialized in fusion, lasers, or plasma physics) is that we’re still 20 years (haha) away from fusion energy making its way into the power grid. And that is assuming this result (or other things, like the relative instability of global energy markets lately) causes an increase in funding for the field so that they can solve all the pesky engineering issues related to efficiency, reactor lifespan, reliability, cycling speed, etc.
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…
No, not as always. The laser confinement mechanism works, it has been shown, lasers that are more than 20 times as efficient as these NID lasers are now available, so the improvement needed to scale and "commercialize it," whatever that really means looks more like 10x than 200x. In the world of fusion, that counts as really good progress. For one thing, perhaps a lot of the research money will move to lasers now.
It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
Reflexive contrarianism is far healthier than blind credulity. Skepticism should be the default state, especially for claims of amazing scientific breakthroughs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The exact numbers depend on the form of fusion in question, but fusion does have some several places where it has quite substantial x^n growth possibilities, where "n" is definitely greater than one and can be greater than two at times, sometimes even substantially so. This means that there is some real, concrete hope for improvement in a way that, say, solar could never improve more than 4-5x where it is now because…
This is laser based fusion, which is super cool, but it might be a stretch to expect 200x more efficient lasers. Still maybe there's other things you could do, like make a bigger fusion reaction. Hydrogen bombs do it, so maybe.
Because of the physics of fusion (or ICF) returns on power are non linear. It's very much possible research here results in a path to a "net gain facility".
Would anyone knowledgeable about the field update their priors about whether we’ll see commercial fusion in the next 30 years, after seeing these results? If not, is there a big milestone we’re waiting for? Or will fusion advancement be a slow grind with many small improvements over decades?
Meanwhile the VC money is quietly piling into tokamak and stellarator magnetic confinement designs, driven by high expectations from real breakthroughs in ReBCO tape manufacturing technology. These superconducting tapes can be manufactured like semiconductors and can develop magnetic fields that were previously impossible, which is a key manufacturability enabler in a design whose path to commercialization is far better de-risked overall. There are still concerns with the durability of equipment needed to capture the neutrons in these designs too, but ReBCO tapes were the real prior changer.