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The funding does seem miniscule given we spend 100x more on funding military excursions in the name of energy security
Is the bottleneck for fusion money though?
"LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output"
From newscientist, the same info followed by a rider:
"generated a power output of 3.15 megajoules from a laser power output of 2.05 megajoules – a gain of around 150 per cent. However, this is far outweighed by the roughly 300 megajoules drawn from the electrical grid to power the lasers in the first place"
I know this is from the DOE but is this real real or this is wormhole "real"?
It's not like the "wormhole" thing where what was produced isn't really what can plausibly be described as a wormhole. In this case, fusion really did happen, and the amount of energy produced by the fusion reaction was about half again what the energy put into the fusion reaction was. That said, there are two pretty important caveats about how big a deal it is macroscopically: 1. In order to have useful fusion power…
Thank you, that is the kind of caveat I was expecting.
"NIF, the world’s largest and most energetic laser system...-located at LLNL in Livermore, Calif.—is the size of a sports stadium" That's an important piece of information - the thing is gigantic!
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It’s potentially just a much better version of fission. Fusion won’t cause a runaway reaction — in fact it’s brutally difficult to get it to react at all, hence why this is an achievement. It also doesn’t use materials that can be used for a bomb, again unlike fission. As a result it has the potential to be cheaper to implement, cheaper to fuel, with no meltdown risk.
Depending on the scale and reactor design, we have really good examples of run away fusion reactions. Run away reactions are easy, controlled ones are hard. And whilst I won’t doubt that if fusion ever becomes commercially viable the reactors would be walk away safe it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to account for that in your design.
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Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam?
> Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam? they're working on getting you to click on an ad
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Because sustainable positive energy out has never been achieved before in 60 years of research. This is gigantic. It’s potential to decarbonize the world is massive, and now it became a whole lot less theoretical. It’s an incredible milestone, not a solved problem.
That's a circular argument. It's big because the people doing it call it big. Why should I, an outsider, care about their internal goals, their egoes, or their status in their field? What does it do or imply for me?
What’s the circle or not big milestone here?
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The B-21 isn't unmanned, the nuclear-capable B-2 already existed, and we've had fusion bombs since the 1950s.
The B-21 is stated to be capable of uncrewed operation.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/12/03/air-force-rev...
> The service has not fully delivered on, or explained what, that unmanned concept or capability would look like. Defense experts told Military.com prior to the rollout that it is unlikely we’d see a fully autonomous bomber anywhere in the near future.
They also canceled the drone wingman:
> In 2021, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall publicly discussed the idea of having a drone counterpart to the B-21 that would essentially act as a wingman alongside the bomber. But Kendall later backtracked, telling Breaking Defense in July that the concept was not as “cost-effective” and “less attractive” than previously thought.
> LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE) Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05. With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% ef…
This is a stupid question but I don't know anything about fusion: How is it possible for X energy to create X+Y energy in output? Doesn't that violate some fundamental law of physics?