On a scale of 1 to invention of fire/wheel/smelting/electricity/computers, how relevant is this? I have trouble comprehending the historical impact.
US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s only because they’re using old school flash pumped lasers, not the new solid state lasers you’d use today if you wanted to make a power plant demo.
Why are they using these "flash pumped" lasers if more efficient ones are available?
It’s a proof of concept. Upgrading lasers that already work is not necessarily the best use of limited funds.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#313This is some of the most incredible and inspiring scientific news in my lifetime. I am overcome with excitement right now.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
money is always the bottleneck in some sense. There are diminishing returns but in general more money will make it happen faster.
This is like saying thread count is always the bottle neck in computation. More money allows more parallelism as you can pay for more people and more equipment for more research. As in computing, there are diminishing marginal returns and surely a version of Amdahl's Law for human endeavors.
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Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
[0] provides economic analysis for this type of power plant. They conclude it would not be unreasonable to get levelized cost of energy could get as low as $25/MWh. For this one really needs a high gain of 1000, although gains of 400 are a bit more reasonable, and a gain of around 100 may be economically competitive in some cases. While the gain NIF achieved was about 1.5, there is good reason to expect it can be sca…
Thanks a ton for that! $25/MWh is great but not the 10x economic impact I expected. Especially since [1] we see PV at $50/MWh currently. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
The economic impact doesn't just come from the fuel to energy ratio. One of the biggest differences is also in the space required. Nuclear fusion reactors could eventually end up being very small - like smaller than an SUV.
Imagine the cost savings in miniaturizing electrical grids.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#316I hate to ask this, but have to ... is there any danger of these discoveries being weaponized easily by hostile countries? i.e. does this make unconventional weapons more accessible to countries who otherwise have embargoes on technology and material to make atomic weapons?
from my layman understanding I believe fusion reactions are unlike fission reactions in that if they escape the confines of their environment they fizzle out as opposed to runaway like a nuclear explosion.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> they're working on getting you to click on an ad
They're not, and there's zero evidence to back that frequently floated premise up. That's a particularly laughable myth created by those same industry people to feel better about their terrible life choices. If you can't do something meaningful, at least you can pretend to be a genius doing nothing meaningful. It turns out that both things are false, they're not brilliant and they're wasting their lives.
No, the brilliant people are working at TSMC, Intel, AMD, nVidia, Applied Materials, ASML, Illumina, ARM, TI, et al.
They're working on CRISPR. They're working on mRNA vaccines. They're working on stem cells. They're trying to cure HIV just as the same type of people cured hepatitis C. They're working for Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech, Roche, Novartis, Amgen, Regeneron, Sanofi, Gilead, Merck, Glaxo, et al. They're trying to figure out how to roll back or cure Alzheimer's. They're dedicating a lifetime of work into exploring the human genome, so that future generations have a much better, much more useful map.
They're working on robotics at Intuitive Surgical or Boston Dynamics. They're working on self-driving tech. They've been building out the massive, global cloud infrastructure. They're at NASA, or SpaceX, or ESA and they're doing the work to get us a base on the moon or to Mars. They just got done building rockets that can land upright. They're building a massive, extraordinary, global satellite system in Starlink.
They're working on fusion.
And so on and so forth.
Ad clicks? Yeah right. They're not even in the room.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#318Calling this "ignition" is a misnomer. The correct term, as given in the article (as opposed to the headline) is exceeding breakeven: more fusion energy output than energy input to the target. "Ignition" means the reaction becomes self-sustaining and does not require any further input of energy to continue.
No, this is ignition. However, the reason why this is a big deal is because it is scientific break-even.
The first time they achieved ignition was in August of 2021. See paper below:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused by this. Does the US have the productive forces and resources to replace petrolium with solar panels (and the required energy storage)? Does it have the nuclear fuel to replace petrolium with fission reactors? What alternatives to petrolium does the US have that it does not rely on others for?
What scheme do you imagine that fusion could be used to replace petroleum that would not also work when powered by solar? Production of synfuels using hydrogen, for example, would also deal with solar's intermittency, leaving the energy sources to compete on the basis of levelized cost. The levelized cost of solar has become quite low, and it's very difficult to see how any fusion scheme, and DT fusion in particular,…
I specifically asked about the production of solar panels. Are you assuming that we already have all the panels we need to replace petrolium sitting in a warehouse? What good is solar in an energy independence plan if we can't build our own panels?
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every breakthrough starts from government funded initiatives? Wilbur and Orville Wright disagree.
I don't think they do, since they started with research done by the Smithsonian Institution.
Do you have any source information for this? As far as I understood, the Wright brothers started out by building hobbyist gliders in consultation with fellow aviation pioneer Octave Chanute.
I checked the Wikipedia entry, but the only reference it maintains for the Smithsonian having helped the Wright brothers is that they apparently gave Wilbur an award in 1910, after having tried unsuccessfully to steal credit from him for building the first heavier than air flyer. Somehow I doubt that's the kind of government contribution to innovation to which the previous poster intended to refer.