Any opinions on the book mentioned: Star Builders by Arthur Turrel
Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
301–310 of 833 posts
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#302I have personally taken a tour of the NIF at Livermore. The guide was an old hand, who constantly remarked about the efforts of NIF towards "stockpile stewardship," ie the maintenance of the US arsenal of nuclear weapons. It seemed like NIF was all about the stockpile stewardship first, and fusion research was a secondary consideration. The capability of the NIF to get positive energy from the energy that they impart…
Seems like energy extraction would be similar to other D-T designs: surround the reaction chamber with molten FLiBe or lead-lithium and run some coolant pipes through it.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#303It’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.
> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians No it's not.
Yes it is.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#304It’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.
People have been burned time and time again by scientists over hyping stuff in the last 10 years, then combine that with the replication failures over nearly every single scientific field.
Then look at the extreme amount of business fraud in the last 10 years with places like Theranos and FTX
Hackernews is not infested with reflexive contrarians.
Hackernews has healthy amounts of skepticism and doubt. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#305It’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.
> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians No it's not.
Comment of the year.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#306“The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment shows that scientists can get more energy out than put in by the laser itself. This is great progress indeed, but still more is needed: first we need to get much more out that is put in so to account for losses in generating the laser light etc (although the technology for creating efficient lasers has also leapt forward in recent years). Secondly, the Lawrence L…
The loss just on the lasers is 100x (i.e. delivered power is 1% of the input energy). Add in a combined cycle effeciency of only 50%, you're looking at needing a 200x improvement to have commercially relevant "net gain"
>Add in a combined cycle effeciency of only 50%
Some reactor designs let you harvest electricity directly from charged ions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#307How does something like this produce power? With tomamoks etc., it seems like they draw out some of the heat (somehow) but how does this work with a pellet that has to be hit by a laser? I'm confused about what the working fluid is, if you will. Is there some kind of plasma chamber that the laser has to go through, that heat is then extracted from?
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians No it's not.
Yes it is.
No, it isn't
Yes, it is. You just contradicted me
No, I didn't
Yes, you did
No, no, no
You did just then
That's ludicrous
Oh, this is futile
No, it isn't
I came in here for a good argument
No, you didn't. You came in here for an argument
Well, argument isn't the same as contradiction
Can be
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#309First flight 1903
Moon landing 1969
It took 63 years of progress in flight technology. Not counting earlier experiments and R&D time.
First fusion experiment was 1933 Fusion seems a lot more complex to a layman (me) than spaceflight.
Excited for what's to come