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.
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Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
201–210 of 289 posts
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This news shows that practical fusion is now only an engineering problem, not a fundamental physics one..." Yes, I'd agree with that statement that it's only an engineering problem, but with a laser energy of 2 million joules and a fusion yield of only 3 million joules and an overall input of nearly 300 million joules to produce the lasers then I've no expectation of ever seeing a total net positive output in my lif…
The 300 million joules to produce 2 million joules was almost entirely due to 2->3” implies. Some labs are already working with 20% efficient lasers, so hypothetically, Fusion is closer to “10->2->3” which is just amazing.
Can you point me to somewhere to read more about this? Also from wikipedia: "NIF hosts the world's most energetic laser."[0] Is that true and if so can many less powerful but more efficient lasers make up for it?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#203Still unconvinced why this is such a major breakthrough - it may be the first net-positive controlled fusion, but the distinction between controlled and uncontrolled fusion is a bit academic in this case. In uncontrolled fusion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon ), you are using a nuclear fission primary stage to generate enough energy to start the fusion reaction in the secondary stage. In the NIF,…
It's not even close to net positive. It's more energy out than the lasers put in. But the lasers take in WAAAAY more than they put in.
What are you talking about? They put in 2MJs of energy in, and got back 3.5MJs out?
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#204Everything 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.
Breakthrough: 1. a sudden advance especially in knowledge or technique 2. an act or instance of moving through or beyond an obstacle Milestone: 1. an action or event marking a significant change or stage in development. I'm failing to see why labeling it one or the other even matters.
Some people think semantics is a good spend of time... These same people tend to amount to nothing, so I just ignore nowadays.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
No it's not a breakthrough. It is only net positive because the NIF has an exquisitely stupid and convenient place where they are defining "energy in" which let's them cheat how good it looks. If you could take other types of fusion and draw a clever line around where you start tallying energy in, then they would have had "breakthroughs" long ago.
The definition of Q that is being used was established by the National Academy of Sciences not NIF.
NIF previously tied to use the hot spot energy instead of target energy in 2013, which they were criticized for, and rightfully so. But this definition of Q is analogous to the definition of Q used by MCF.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#206Still unconvinced why this is such a major breakthrough - it may be the first net-positive controlled fusion, but the distinction between controlled and uncontrolled fusion is a bit academic in this case. In uncontrolled fusion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon ), you are using a nuclear fission primary stage to generate enough energy to start the fusion reaction in the secondary stage. In the NIF,…
This comment sums up HN beautifully: "Here's an article from a subject matter expert on this topic, but I'm going to go ahead and ignore everything that was said because it doesn't fit my narrative."
You find us a subject matter expert in building production fusion power plants and we’ll get back to you.
What we have are a bunch of R&D people, some of which are using ingredients for which the entire world combined possesses enough fuel to run a single power plant for only two months, and then we’re out.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
With regards to NIF being a military facility, I'd very much think that energy production (cheap, safe, limitless?) is very much a military needs as much as a civilian need. Even if said energy goes further to power laser weapons or other exotic power hungry systems; energy is energy, and something has to produce it.
The internet was a military need from what I remember. The military said something like: "Telephone routing is point to point and inflexible, if the enemy cuts out 1-2 lines of communication, an entire section is completely cut off. We need something better." That something better turned out to be packed switching where you just throw stuff along a network and the network ensures that the packet reaches the destinati…
There’s about ten years’ of NSF funding between The Internet and the dotcom boom. So yes, but actually no.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but that is still a breakthrough.
No, it's not. If you get to arbitrarily define at what point you count "energy in" (as the NIF people are), you could also define a clever spot for MCF to be net positive.
NIF's definition of Q was defined by the National Academy of Sciences and is analogous to the Q that MCF uses.
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Actually, I think the pedanticism is on the part of the people announcing this "breakthrough." The definition of "break even" used here (that is, Q>1) is highly technical, and but one factor in the actual "break even" equation. This experiment didn't prove you could get more energy out of a fusion burn than you put in (which is the notion they want to evoke), but rather that they could raise the ratio of energy absor…
I mean NIF has spent a majority of its life (11 years) seeing yields below 200 kj. Only in 2021 did it jump above 1 mj and in 2022 above 3 mj. If your definition of breakthrough is rapid improvement, I think this demonstrates it:
See below for previous yields of NIF shots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#/me...
Re: Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough
#210Real Engineering published a video about Helion Energy company. I don't have the tools to filter out commercial BS, still it seems to me to be most promising effort. The idea to get electricity directly from magnetic fields instead of boiling water is very intriguing.
What made me super skeptical about the project is that I could not find out any numbers regarding economic viability:
1) How much energy per pulse is a commercial device expected to achieve?
2) How many pulses per second are realistic?
3) How many tons of copper/steel/capacitors per MW of power capacity are expected?
Because if you're gonna need a warehouse full of capacitors, several big turbogenerators worth of high quality steel and copper PLUS all the vacuum/plasma tech just to hit a few 100MW of continuous electrical power-output, then I frankly do not see how that would EVER be viable/attractive ANYWHERE, and NO amount of scientific progress might be able to change that...
But the concept to me at least looks more attractive than big magnetic-confinement plants, where the problems are even bigger (unaffordable plasmachamber + cryo-infra, super problematic neutron-flux, AND STILL needing all the heat => motion => electricity circus from a conventional plant).