We already have a stable fusion going. It's 8 light minutes away. All you have to do is to point a solar panel at it to harvest the energy.
Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
121–130 of 289 posts
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not do a major announcement with the working prototype though, is what's ringing the alarm bells for me. Yeah sure they can promise the next prototype will do the magic thing but why not wait for that.
This one already does reliable aneutronic fusion using an unusual method. Why not announce that?
Because you can do reliable aneutronic fusion using usual methods? This seems explicitly commercial, therefore it needs to show value, which is in power generation, not making interesting gadgets.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#123It’s practical proof that in a single pulse we can get more energy out than we put in. We do spend a shit ton of energy setting up the pulse, and we haven’t figure out how to get that energy out and make electrons move, but it’s been proven possible. The “breakthrough” is the proof that it’s possible. Everything else is now optimisation and engineering, and needs mostly time, sweat and money.
Yea, and I wonder how much our need, at a cultural level, for progress will factor into this. If we feel like we need to progress and can't go "backward" with our energy technology, there may just be an irrational impetus to make it happen. Solar and wind etc may just feel too "primitive" and nuclear too old and toxic and Chernobyl. Fusion though, once there's enough buy in and enough of a sense of it being doable, w…
The practical reality is that solar and wind are still getting deployed en masse, people who want electricity don't really care what how science feels about progress etc. They just want their lights to turn on and for cheap. Since renewables are currently cheap, that's what we're deploying a decent amount of (depending on geography of course).
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the tech that you are hinting at would guarantee clean fusion power. If you could generate clean fusion explosions, detonate underground and use the heat to generate power. Nuclear bombs are currently the only net energy positive fusion devices we have.
It might guarantee clean fusion power, but there's no guarantee it would be in any way economic. Edward Teller proposed something along these lines with conventional two-stage nuclear explosives back in the 1970s, but it was rapidly abandoned as horribly inefficient and costly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER I know this stuff is fun to speculate about but the boring and unsexy option of more solar panels…
> solar panels, wind turbines, and transmission lines is likely to be both cheaper
Not to mention more practical and achievable in less wealthy countries.
And safe to use in politically unstable parts of the world.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#125Everything i have heard about this makes it sound more like a milestone than a breakthrough. I.e. its great it happened and an important step, but its not shocking that we eventually did it. When i hear breakthrough i think of something more unexpected. I.e. figuring out how to solve a problem we had no idea how to solve.
I feel like HN is being especially pedantic and jaded about this specifically and I don't really get why. Scientifically this is absolutely a breakthrough, just like the detection of the Higgs boson was despite them already having expected it or just like LIGO's detections of gravitational waves were despite that being entirely what it was built for or just as JWST's detections of galaxies much older than those seen…
Exactly. If you look closely enough, no breakthroughs appear completely out of nowhere.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
This one already does reliable aneutronic fusion using an unusual method. Why not announce that?
Because you can do reliable aneutronic fusion using usual methods? This seems explicitly commercial, therefore it needs to show value, which is in power generation, not making interesting gadgets.
Can you with any reliability and efficiency?
As I understood it, reliably igniting aneutronic fusion efficiently was an open research problem. Whereas, they can consistently get to aneutronic burning plasmas.
I’d love to read more about that.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> produce enough food to feed everyone? The soil crisis and the phosphorus crisis.... Are all ultimately problems of energy being too scarce (and therefore too expensive).
I don't think so. You can be doing the wrong (unsustainable thing), even if you could afford to do the right thing.
If we could afford doing the sustainable thing, but are doing the unsustainable thing anyway... that usually means we actually can't afford the right thing, or just can't do it.
Note: you have to account for costs of coordination and taking on risk - then you realize a lot of the "if only everyone would ${trivial thing}..." aren't done because they actually are prohibitively expensive or downright impossible.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#128Everything i have heard about this makes it sound more like a milestone than a breakthrough. I.e. its great it happened and an important step, but its not shocking that we eventually did it. When i hear breakthrough i think of something more unexpected. I.e. figuring out how to solve a problem we had no idea how to solve.
I feel like HN is being especially pedantic and jaded about this specifically and I don't really get why. Scientifically this is absolutely a breakthrough, just like the detection of the Higgs boson was despite them already having expected it or just like LIGO's detections of gravitational waves were despite that being entirely what it was built for or just as JWST's detections of galaxies much older than those seen…
I think after decades of fusion 'breakthroughs' people have become a bit jaded and would simply like to short-cut to the point where there is a fusion reactor in a box that produces more energy out than is put in.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#129I can tell you that regular people took the announcements as a sign that nuclear fusion as a real useful thing is imminent, and couldn't be convinced otherwise! But then if your announcements are completely rational you don't get as much funding. A lot of us nerds on HN don't like it when people do propaganda, but I assume we also like to win, right?
> But then if your announcements are completely rational you don't get as much funding.
If your goal is to gain funding, the rational announcement IS to sensationalize.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#130We already have a stable fusion going. It's 8 light minutes away. All you have to do is to point a solar panel at it to harvest the energy.
Korean reactor reached 7 times hotter than sun, when I was reading it made me laugh that humans said fuck the dyson sphere and skipped a step on Kardashev scale yet still I find it ironic that this one built with military support.
https://www.sciencealert.com/koreas-fusion-reactor-ran-7-tim...