Is overcoming fission's political problems harder than fusions technical problems?
Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
351–360 of 833 posts
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's just the difference in expectations between scientists and laypeople. "Major fusion breakthrough" to a scientist could mean one step out of 200, over 3 decades, towards functional fusion power. Scientists understand the long arc of progress. But these labs need to market to the public as well who invariably end up expecting a SimCity Fusion Power Plant within 18 months.
Many on HN have the same response to many things in every domain, not just research.
For being a tech entrepreneur forum people here are strangely very anti science and technology. The top voted responses to every new product announcement are essentially "why do we need this? Pen and paper work just fine".
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#353It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
We're hackers, engineers. We poke around for problems before there are problems and we pry open the black box to make sure it's not just filled with Bullshit. If you want to unquestioningly lap up everything that's offered to you, then I've got some ocean-front property in Afghanistan I'd like to sell you.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many on HN have the same response to many things in every domain, not just research.
On fusion energy and battery technology I see plenty of cynicism, but given the history of wildly over-stated "advances" in both fields I think people are justified in leaning towards pessimism.
The reality of course falls short of the most optimistic projections, but e.g. for batteries: look around! Wealthy countries at least are now full of little gadgets that couldn't have existed even a few years ago due to the battery demands. A walk down any street in NYC you'll see probably 5-8 different personal transportation systems that are pretty close to sci-fi.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice. I just looked up last February's bill for my ~1700sqft detached SFH in Saint Paul. It was apparently 6.8 therms/day (12 deg F average temp for the month). That maths out to about 5916 kWh for the coldest month (6.8 therms * 29 kwh/therm * 30 days), or a little more than double your estimate. March was 5.9 therms/day and Jan was 5.4 therms/day. So I think your costs are on the conservative side of things... or p…
Yes, I pulled the estimate for really efficient heat pumps. To convert to all electric heat like that estimate, we'd have to replace a lot of gas heat with electric. Might as well go for the most efficient thing. Compared to the nearly $200B in infra investment that I was estimating, that looks easy, lol.
I realize this isn't relevant for a discussion about future investment, but the current "value" of the whole energy infrastructure for a state is probably in the hundreds of billions of dollars, right? It's been built out over decades, of course, so the actual costs per year are much lower.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#356It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
Part of it is that we read about "breakthroughs" in diverse fields only to see nothing come of them. Past experience creates valid doubt. Also, as exciting as this might be, we are nowhere near a practical application.
Overall, I'm glad there are still points of excitement and we haven't come to a halt.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, but then if the funding has decreased, what hasn't the "years away" increased? No, that wouldn't sound good in a press release now would it. So they keep saying it is just around the corner. It's like the religious people saying that the second coming is right around the corner for over a thousand years now. I know, I know, religious zealots and science (zealots?) are different. Or are they?
Show me a fusion scientist saying fusion is 30 years away. No one in the article is even saying that. It's people in the comments repeating the same thing from the 80s.
What article? It's people speculating on the announcement that another announcement is coming. It just feeds into the hype machine. With this level of hype, watch them come out and show off the Segway!
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#358It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
"Exciting" for individuals within the field often does not translate to "exciting" for everyone else. It's quite reasonable to think there's a good chance this is not the beginning of a "practical for energy generation" fusion revolution. It is very interesting, but in the same way that advances in particle physics are interesting.
An example of the context in which I want to tamper excitement comes from a post by a journalist writing for the FT, an outlet that is (relative to its peers) usually quite matter-of-fact: https://twitter.com/thomas_m_wilson/status/16020118886526320...
> SCOOP: Net energy gain in a fusion reaction has been a holy grail in science for decades. Now I’m told US scientists have done it. A massive breakthrough with revolutionary potential for clean power. US Energy Secretary to hold a press conference Tuesday: https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589...
Instead of particle physics, perhaps a better comparison would be to quantum computing "breakthroughs" that come out from time to time. Within the field I'm sure there are breakthroughs that inch us closer to something useful (useful in the way it is described in these articles, solving currently unsolvable problems, etc.), sure, but we are so far away from something useful that these inches are ultimately quite underwhelming to the general public (people like me).
By all means, I will occasionally read and enjoy great science reporting on these topics, but I have been conditioned to massively downplay the general significance of such news, and I think it's quite well justified, and not mere cynicism (cast as a negative).
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#359When you consider the power that big oil and gas have worldwide, and all they've already done to sabotage adoption of clean energy, it just seems improbable to me that one day tech will arrive that provides unlimited clean energy without some kind of big ugly fight. Big. Like I can see these guys doing everything from run of the mill regulatory capture to kill it all the way up to supporting right wing (or communist) conspiracy theories or movements to destabilize democracies (all things that have been done in the past). I seriously wouldn't put anything past them. Maybe I'm being too paranoid but I have a hard time believing in any future that involves yanking away trillions of $$ in power from a small group of unscrupulous people.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#360Usual caveat about all fusion "got more energy out than we put in" stories: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nucle... From a quick skimming it seems only one of the experts quoted here even mentions that (Tony Roulstone). (Update: i wrote this comment in response to another story and the comment got moved here, so it lost a bit of context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33958678&ref=upstrac…
> all fusion "got more energy out than we put in" I'm curious - given that this is the first time we have ever done this (even with the constrained definition as discussed in this article), how there can be a '"usual caveat" about all of the "got more energy out than we put in" stories'? AFAICT, this is the first such "story" to have ever happened artificially in history.
Because people like to shit on fusion, sometimes understandably so, after decades of over-promising and under-delivering. It's annoying and tiring, but there we have it.
Yes, it's true that in this case we didn't actually "get more energy out than we put in" when considering the full closed system, but the point of this research was to see if they could get more energy out of the reaction itself than was put into it by the lasers themselves. Presumably the next step is to see how far they can push this, still without bothering to think about the energy needed to power the lasers themselves, because, again, that is not the purpose of this research. There are other people working on making lasers more efficient, and the overall project will benefit from that research (and so will the NIF, if they decide it's worthwhile to upgrade their 90s-era lasers to something modern).
I think a lot of people here are having knee-jerk reactions and didn't read the article where they very clearly explain the caveat and what the researchers actually did.