Wasn't this milestone reached sometime late last year? I remember writing about it: http://www.therefinedgeek.com.au/index.php/2013/10/08/fusion...
Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
11–20 of 194 posts
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#12"Strictly speaking, while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser's energy ever reached the fuel. Useful levels of fusion are still a long way off." The rest was lost to energy conversion losses. Yeah, not the best breakthrough I've heard today. Their best breakthrough was this CAD-flythrough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sp1sDpn_M0
Considering that they previously had to use way more energy than they got out: This is pretty awesome.
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#13This sentiment is interesting "Over the past few years, NIF has been getting a fat 'F.'" Perhaps now that 'grade' will change. Actually, I think framing it as a grade is beyond silly; it is irresponsible. Giving a letter grade to long-term scientific project makes little sense. It is not a one-shot thing with a predefined notion of correctness. What can we compare such a grade to? Instead, we should be asking what we…
Is this even basic science? It sounds more like an engineering problem, albeit a very hard one. I am not a physicist, but I would consider this more like the Manhattan project -- the science being done is not of the 'deeper under standing of nature' type, but rather 'how do you make a controllable explosion' type.
Given that, the way to evaluate the project is not on grants received, articles published or citations in premier journals, but rather 'Did you make a controlled explosion? If not when will you be able to?' And I think, so far an 'F' is fair.
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#14Wasn't this milestone reached sometime late last year? I remember writing about it: http://www.therefinedgeek.com.au/index.php/2013/10/08/fusion...
Yes, though NPR's reporting is less than clear on this. The Nature article referenced was submitted in early November.
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#15This sentiment is interesting "Over the past few years, NIF has been getting a fat 'F.'" Perhaps now that 'grade' will change. Actually, I think framing it as a grade is beyond silly; it is irresponsible. Giving a letter grade to long-term scientific project makes little sense. It is not a one-shot thing with a predefined notion of correctness. What can we compare such a grade to? Instead, we should be asking what we…
That's not enough. Learning what doesn't work is sort of useful, but only if it ever leads to something that DOES work. There's an infinite supply of dead ends out there. You need a higher bar than 'learned something' if that something is a negative.
Standing on the shoulders of giants is many times a means of saying that something that "DOES work" was derived from something that didn't work, or perhaps that it was derived from the difficult yet iterative steps of others.
Look at the Large Hadron Collider. Do you suppose they scrub from their data stores all tests that fail to produce a "working" result? Are you suggesting that trying and failing produces irrelevant knowledge?
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#16Wasn't this milestone reached sometime late last year? I remember writing about it: http://www.therefinedgeek.com.au/index.php/2013/10/08/fusion...
lessee:
refinedgeek, 10/8/2013: "However NIF has announced today that, for the first time ever for any fusion experiment, their reaction released more energy than what was pumped into it;" where there's a link to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24429621
which says (10/7/2013) "The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel - the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world."
meanwhile NPR on 2/12/2014 says: "Omar Hurricane, a researcher at, says that for the first time, they've produced significant amounts of fusion by zapping a target with their laser. "We've gotten more energy out of the fusion fuel than we put into the fusion fuel," he says."
We've always been at war with Eastasia.
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#17Oh please. That whole "fusion" thing from that facility is a trick to get taxpayers to fund more nuclear weapon research. We should have finished this instead, what a waste: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider Take a guess why congress only funded the one useful for weapons.
All research into nuclear energy can be used for nuclear weapons. A nuclear reactor is just a well-cooled bomb that isn't supposed to explode violently (so to speak).
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#18This is newsworthy despite "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser"?
After decades of work they are orders of magnitude away from break-even. Makes me wonder if the goal is actually break-even and/or power generation. Not really; but it's a revealing question.
I'm no great fan of the budgets these huge projects pull down; I think the bang-for-the-buck is greater elsewhere. But modelling nuclear weapons is an even greater waste of time. It's all kind of a sad epigraph about national science and technology initiatives.
Assuming the modest proposition that fusion energy is possible, why not make fusion energy a 'man on the moon' kind of national goal? It's hardly in doubt that we need a large source of clean energy. Is it a failure of imagination? Is it a failure of the political system - Can't get Bubba to vote for no fusion thing. Is the status quo energy system resistant to change? Whatever, the NIF thing just makes me depressed.
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#19It was always my understanding that achieving nuclear fusion wasn't the problem. You can do that with a tabletop device like a Farnsworth Fusor.
The hard part is getting more energy out of it than you put in.
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not enough. Learning what doesn't work is sort of useful, but only if it ever leads to something that DOES work. There's an infinite supply of dead ends out there. You need a higher bar than 'learned something' if that something is a negative.
It depends what question you are asking. If the question is "should we fund projects even if we don't know if or when they will have demonstrable results?" then I would argue that, yes, some portion of research should go towards that. How long is "long enough" to deem that a line of experimentation "didn't work out?" There is no period long enough. Sometimes a negative result is quite useful down the road. Some resea…
Without harsh assessments, a massive project will eventually dedicate some of its resources into self-perpetuation, that is justifying its existence rather than producing results.