I keep seeing lots of talks of nuclear energy being the next greatest form of energy, but ever since Chernobyl, it seems like people are afraid even though Chernobyl was a one-off incident that wasn't regulated well.
Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
371–380 of 833 posts
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#372Good write-up to temper expectations at https://twitter.com/wilson_ricks/status/1602088153577246721 My TLDR (from a layman): * The output is greater than the energy *in the lasers*, but the lasers deliver 1% of the energy required to power them. Need 100x improvement to break even. * Converting the generated energy into electricity would cut the output in half. We need a further 2x improvement here, so it's ~200x to…
The NIF is using old laser technology. Current tech can get above 20% efficiency. Sure, that still means more improvement is needed, but 200x is probably an overstatement by an order of magnitude. > So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always! I don't really get the cynicism here. This is a huge milestone that's been passed. Maybe with this, we actually will be 10-20 years away. Or maybe it's more like 30-…
Anyone have insight into how this new development differs from this article from back in 2014 about the NIF, entitled: "Fusion Leaps Forward: Surpasses Major Break-Even Goal"
https://www.livescience.com/43318-fusion-energy-reaches-mile...
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#373It’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.
Lotsa reasons. (1) We are used to the same "news" story being cycled again and again. I think a year ago we heard about a previous breakthrough in ignition. When I hear a story like this my first instinct is that the old story has been recycled and I'm not sure that there is any actual news. A few months back it was announced that scientists had discovered a black hole that was nearest to the earth and it still gets…
I'm just glad these scientists are working on something other than nuclear bombs.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#374I guess I don't really get it. Nobody doubts that you can get a tremendous output of energy from a fusion bomb with modest inputs. This thing they've ignited is a tiny fusion weapon without a fission blanket and with a huge, inconvenient optical primary. I mean I'm all for science but I don't see the road from this to civilian fusion power as people generally understand the term.
This is like a version 1.0 steam engine. Miniaturization and optimization can come next.
No, this is like research into TNT being presented as a potential way of creating a power plant by capturing the energy of the explosion. The real purpose is producing better explosives.
This is not some bizarre idea - Lawrence Livermore is officially a part of the DoE's research into maintaining and improving thermonuclear weapons. That there are some vaguely imaginable applications in energy generation is at the very best a bonus.
Remember that each shot of the lasers also destroys 10 million dollars or so of the highly precision engineered "housing" for the fuel pellet (called a hohlraum).
The lasers don't directly hit the pellet - they hit the metal walls of this hohlraum, causing it to grow so hot that it emits x-rays, and its shape is perfectly aligned so that those pellets hit the two sides of the pellet at exactly the same time, causing two "ripples" to compress it so much that they force the atoms to fuse in the middle and produce a chain reaction that has to consume the entire amount of fuel before the force of the implosion dissipates, at which time all of the matter violently explodes. The brunt of that explosion (and the neutron bombardment from the fusion process) is taken up by the hohlraum, which is ireedemably destroyed and can only be, at best, melted down as raw material for the next hohlraum.
Edit: tldr, this is exactly as useful for energy generation as an internal combustion engine whose pistons are destroyed every time the fuel ignites.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
That's because for 90% of new products, the old stuff performs better, uses fewer resources, and has been debugged in ways the new stuff has not.
All the new stuff, however, has marketing and looks shiny.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#376“The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory experiment shows that scientists can get more energy out than put in by the laser itself. This is great progress indeed, but still more is needed: first we need to get much more out that is put in so to account for losses in generating the laser light etc (although the technology for creating efficient lasers has also leapt forward in recent years). Secondly, the Lawrence L…
Not only that, but the capsules that are used for the experiment are expensive and difficult to produce. And you'd have to be continuously blasting new ones for each burst of energy you want to generate.
Taking those costs into account, being able to use this method to generate power seems really non-optimal.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#377It’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.
> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy. I don't know. Looking closely at the article reveals that the researchers achieved 1.2x energy gain from the lasers, which are about 1% efficient. Given the SOTA for such lasers is closer to 20% efficiency, this means that they achieved about 60% of break-even. But that's energy, no electricity. Even with the best current methods,…
> But that's energy, no electricity
as far as fusion viability is concerned net energy (over whats put in) is enough. the whole electricity is moving the goal post because there are plenty of other sources that primarily produce heat.
Now regarding efficiency of laser itself, sure they are inefficient but from just nuclear fusion pov net energy gain is a significant milestone in itself. lasers can get incrementally more efficient, at least there was not incentive to make them super efficient so far & there are no known fundamental problems with making them efficient.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#378It’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.
What I encourage people to do, and what I was encouraged to do by a professor, is to find the value in things. Yes the thing, any thing, has great flaws, risks, is an imperfect match, etc. That goes without saying, and is is in some respects pointless to say - we can stay in place without going through the effort of researching something. It's the value in things, and finding that value, that moves us forward.
I try to live my life this way. People think I’m an optimist, but really I think the world is mostly BS and I try to acknowledge the good things. It works for me.
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#379It’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.
I’m a physicist and it’s absurd how much career concerns push us to overhype even the most incremental research effort. I’m not surprised the public are sceptical
Re: Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab
#380It’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.
Maybe we paid attention when our parents told us the tale of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.