It's a weird scientific annoncement, punctuated with quotes from politicians...
US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
381–390 of 1001 posts
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#382I know this is from the DOE but is this real real or this is wormhole "real"?
More real than the wormhole. Real enough to get Chuck Shumer to increase next year’s budget, which is why you’re hearing about this at all.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was discussed a lot in the threads about this yesterday, but apparently the lab had relatively inefficient lasers. Newer ones are an order of magnitude more efficient
This is what I captured from the press conference: 300 megajoules was used to generate the laser (this is also captured in [1]). They also mentioned that newer lasers have 20% wall plug efficiency. If so, they need to improve the energy output by 5x in order to break even relative to wall plug energy consumption. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/world-record-fusion-experi...
“Wall plug energy consumption”
I don’t know why but this caused me to picture Alec from Tech Connections in a few years time, showing off his fusion laser plugged in to a kill-a—watt, while he explains carefully, through the magic of buying two of them, why you can get more power out than you put in, and why these old inertial confinement fusors were pretty neat actually.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the bottleneck for fusion money though?
money is always the bottleneck in some sense. There are diminishing returns but in general more money will make it happen faster.
I would have to agree. The "in general" though is carrying an enormous amount of weight in that statement.
I think what other commentors may be getting at is that in many cases the simple analogy of asking how 9 women can have a baby in 1 month is instructive here. You could throw trillions at that problem, a need to have a baby in 1 month. Sometimes there are hard limits that money has a hard time addressing.
A case could be made that with enough money put towards advanced technology, like gene therapy to force a fetus to maturity in 1 month vs 9, it could be done with horrendous side effects.
So to your point money does solve all problems, but I think diminishing returns is putting it very lightly.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/wright-brothers/onlin...
Wilbur Wright asked for the Smithsonian's aeronautical research. They still have the letter. The very Wikipedia article you're referencing, in the exact paragraph you're talking about, contains the words "Orville Wright, whose brother had received help from the Smithsonian when beginning his own quest for flight." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Smithsonian_fe...
Sure, the Smithsonian people were assholes about it. That doesn't negate their contribution to the Wright brother's work. Incedentally, in modern timesif you visit the Air and Space Museum you can see the exhibit where they own up to the shabby attempt to promote their late leader over the Wrights. They cover the feud pretty thoroughly -- including having both aircraft.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#386Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without the accessibility of their public library, and public workers to guide them, they would have never been able to acquire the required knowledge in aeronautics
Isn't that a bit like saying that every innovation depends upon milk? I guess, technically, every innovation does begin with a baby drinking milk, but it seems like a stretch to attribute the innovation to the milk, rather than to the mind of the individual who may or may not have been fueled by milk?
> it seems like a stretch to attribute the innovation to the milk, rather than to the mind of the individual who may or may not have been fueled by milk?
What ever it been fueled with, knowledge wasn't created at an individual's birth, it's an accumulation of a collective and shared effort
The point i was trying to make in my post is; it always starts from the people, for the people to continue, for the people to achieve a civilizational ascension
If we build the means to generate infinite energy for free, then we'll have to ask ourselves if giving that much power to the individual a safe endeavor, or if we should make sure the prospect is for the collective to ascend
Thanks to this achievement, many will learn from it and acquire knowledge to pursue that goal, would it be the case if it was a solo for profit effort? i doubt it greatly
The open source tech industry thrives because it's a collective and shared effort, funding issue persists but that's due to us, individuals, living civilization's transition, it'll be a solved problem shortly
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#388> 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…
"Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05." What is the difference between todays announcement and yesterdays ? I thought we were just getting re-submitted headlines, but apparently this news is different than yesterday ?
Speculation.
People believed that X:Y was 2.2:2.0, but it's now 3.15:2.05.
The 10% EROI apparently wasn't impressive enough, it's now 54% EROI on paper (assuming less because of capture inefficiencies).
I'm no expert, but theoretically my understanding is that this ratio should scale along this same pattern for higher values of Y.
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very apt analogy, as both this and Manhattan are weapons research programs. I'm not very excited in hearing we'll get even more powerful thermo-nuclear bombs.
Fusion bombs have existed since the early 1950s. Technology rapidly developed to the point that they can essentially be built to be arbitrarily large, far beyond any practical war purpose. There is no need for any larger bomb than what was built many decades ago. None of this research is necessary for bombs. All of the difficult problems fusion power generation faces with long-term plasma confinement go away when you…
It is necessary since they banned the testing of nuclear weapons. Before they would do this kind of research by imploding a cylinder of uranium encasing a hydrogen core with X-rays produced by a "Fat Man" style bomb. Now they implode a cylindrical casing full of hydrogen by x-rays caused by a laser vaporizing an outer layer.
“It’s a big milestone, but NIF is not a fusion-energy device,” says Dave Hammer, a nuclear engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Herrmann acknowledges as much, saying that there are many steps on the path to laser fusion energy. “NIF was not designed to be efficient,” he says. “It was designed to be the biggest laser we could possibly build to give us the data we need for the [nuclear] stockpile research programme.”
Re: US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved
#390So for my entire lifetime Fusion has been 30-50 years away. Now it's 29-49 years away?
correct. about as long as a typical academic research career, with an extra margin thrown in for emeritus positions to be on the safe side. get the boffins' grand kids through college etc. anyway, there won't be grids in 50 years. or if for some sentimental reason there still are 95% of us will be off the failure prone things while making, storing and using our own uninterruptible power safely at home. much sooner really. i can't even imagine being on the grid in 10 years let alone 49. no way then to distribute the staggering costs for what will be the planet's most expensive and complex power plants.
- js.